Your Official Guide to Choosing Exterior Materials for Your Custom Home
Building your custom home is an exciting experience—especially when it comes to choosing your exterior materials.
The selections are a huge part of the homeowner’s process and responsibilities, however, you don’t have to work through it alone. If you work with Springhouse, for example, you’re working with a full-service architect-led design/build firm. First, we work through preliminary design, then we move into design development. During design development, we select all materials with our clients. We like being involved in the selection process, because we know how long it takes and what your budget is.
This is such a fun process, but there are some rules to consider:
Rule #1: Always Start with Natural Materials
Here at Springhouse, our number-one rule for selecting exterior materials is to always start with natural materials. First, you want to choose your stone—even if you’re using faux stone—because of the many color variations. If you’re using local, natural stone, we will go to the actual stone quarry and choose your stone. There are other options from all over the country. That will entail selecting from a catalog and getting samples shipped. From there, we’ll choose all of the other materials in relation to the stone. The reason we do this is because the natural materials come from the earth, and we can’t change the color to match the other materials. However, we can change the other materials to match the natural material.
Another natural exterior material would be a wood product. We especially love eco-friendly, thermally treated wood products because they’re long-lasting, low-maintenance, and you don’t need to stain them.
What can you do as a homeowner when lumber prices are too high?
Quick confession: I’m not an expert in lumber. I don’t know the markets very well, how things move, or any price wars going on. What I do know is how lumber prices are affecting my clients, and how they’re currently affecting Springhouse Structures while we’re working on a spec home.
Alternate materials are things like SIPs, which stand for structural insulated panels. The panels consist of an insulating foam core sandwiched between two structural facings. You can use these for all of the walls and roof of your home. It’s a great product, but it typically has a higher cost upfront, plus an additional labor cost, because it’s more of a specialized field of installation. However, this field may become more common as lumber prices continue to skyrocket. ICF is another option we are working through. Insulated Concrete Forms has no wood in the product and can be used for all exterior walls.
Rule #2: Choose Prefinished Materials with Color
After choosing the natural materials, we move into any materials where the color is integral to the product—whether prefinished siding, windows or any prefinished cement sidings with paint color embedded. During this process, you’ll want to obtain any physical samples with standard colors, which will be shipped to you.
Rule #3: Select Your Roof
Choosing your roof is a fairly easy process. All in all, you’re either choosing black, green, brown, or weathered wood. Unless the roof is a major design element for you, don’t worry too much about the details of this selection. That being said, we like to prioritize the decision early on.
Rule #4: Paint, Stain, Accent Colors & Gutters
The last choice for exterior materials involves the selection of paint color, stain color, accent colors, and gutters. This will apply to your trim, soffit, facia, and garage doors (garage doors often come in prefinished colors, but they can also be painted). Since gutters come in prefinished colors, the choice should be easy once you land on a trim color. You choose all of these together in accordance with the other exterior choices you’ve made thus far—your natural materials, windows, prefinished siding, etc.
Dark and moody exteriors have been really popular lately. At Springhouse, we’re currently designing a spec home with black brick. If you’re thinking of doing the same, here are a few things to consider…
Black Brick & Mortar Color
When we initially chose black brick, we knew there would be a lot of details to take into consideration—the most important one being the mortar color. Traditionally, mortar color looks more like concrete. As you can imagine, combining black brick with the color of concrete would make your home look very segmented; you’d be able to see every single brick on your house! For our spec home, we knew we wanted to do more of a mass of black color to act as a base. So, we chose black mortar, which has been perfect.
Black Brick & Exterior Materials
The next element to consider when using black brick is how to combine it with the other exterior material selections you’re using for your custom home. For example, wood and stone are excellent contrasts to black. But when it comes to accent trim colors, things get a little tricky. Before you choose a trim color, make sure you’ve chosen the color of your black brick first. Keep in mind, there are many different shades and tones of black paint to choose from. Since we chose a warm palette for the black brick of our spec home, we decided on something warm and rich as our accent trim color—something to stand out against the brick.
Black Brick & Base Color
Speaking of paint colors, you need to know the base color of your brick, especially when you’re going with black brick—be it red, pink, cream, gray, brown, or tan. Black brick can often reveal small imperfections where you can see the body color of the brick coming through. The truth? You’re not going to be able to get around this. You won’t be able to fix it or touch it up. It’s imperative to understand that when you commit to black brick, plan for the natural materials to read through and give it character. If you know this going into it, you’re going to love it!
Rule #5: Consider Energy Efficiency
Lastly, I want to talk about energy efficiency and how it relates to your custom home. It should be a priority for you, whether high or low, because once your house gets designed—and especially once you detail all the specifications—it’s difficult to go backwards and catch up.
Most of our clients want to be very energy efficient and to produce some energy so they can replace what they're using. If you identify with this, not only do you need to hit your code minimum, you have to consider different impacts: energy impact and financial impact.
One element to take into account is your exterior envelope—especially an exterior insulation finish system, or EIFS. You'll see it when you go past construction sites, where it looks like they put sheets of rigid insulation up on the side of your house, and then they stucco over it. This is a great system because it's a continuous barrier. If you think of your stud walls, you have studs every 16 inches. That stud is a bridge for thermal transmission, and that means your heat is going from inside your house to outside of your house. Walls are not a huge heat loss place, but if you've already addressed sealing the attic space, then the walls are a good place for additional insulation.
You’ll also want to research your windows thoroughly. Windows are a big number for energy efficiency, so it’s worth every penny. But it's also a balancing act: Do you save money now and sacrifice the R value over the long term? Or do you put the money in now? Take your time to decide. It's not just what the windows look like or what color they are, but what their insulation value is—which is readily available on Google!
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