The work on
our historic restoration project has begun and one of the first pressing problems we faced was selecting the exterior paint colors. Simple, right? The Hell, you say!
First off, as one can see from the image, right, the only clear answer to the question of exterior paint for this project is NOT WHITE. Also, I've never been able to separate thinking about paint and thinking about the story of my mother's family, which was closely tied to the paint manufacturing industry over a hundred years ago, at the very time our historic building was first constructed. I've got lots of reasons to want to get this seemingly simple choice just right.
Jump out into the tall grass to see some of that history, some of that family story and to consider some of the choices considered.
Then there will be a poll allowing readers to pick their favorite paint scheme. After a while, downstream in the comments, I will post which one we picked.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for playing.
The very reason we fell so in love with this facade was the unusual proliferation and elaboration of neoclassical motifs decorating the front facade, executed in glazed white terra cotta, brick and limestone. Especially in the front, the colors chosen needed to draw attention to the architectural detail rather than throw those details into the visual background.
That's not the only reason that white paint is wrong for the trim and accents on this building. When this house was first built in 1908, there is little likelihood the exterior woodwork was painted white. We could have paid to have the surfaces microscopically analyzed so we would know for sure the colors used previously. But we selected colors that were authentic to the paints in use during the relevant historical, pre-1940 era of the 20th Century. Because many of our interior design choices and furnishing preferences reflect the style of the Arts and Crafts movement, popular during the historic period for this house, we feel good about using the muted tones and shades of earth, stone and nature, popular during that design epoch.
This is where my family history and the history of our house ride along together for a little while. The reason we even thought of looking to do this project in St. Louis is that I grew up there and used to have family there. My grandfather moved to St. Louis, just after World War I to take a white collar job in St. Louis's prospering paint manufacturing industry. He spent his whole life moving from one big city to another, from one paint company to another, from Philadelphia to Cleveland to Detroit and, finally, to St. Louis, as he drank himself out of one good job and, by moving to where he wasn't known, finding another.
Because of the decentralized nature of the industry, the enterprising drunkard could always find good pay somewhere else when he wore out his welcome somewhere. According to the American Coatings Association:
The first recorded paint mill in America was reportedly established in Boston in 1700 by Thomas Child. A century and a half later, in 1867, D.R. Averill of Ohio patented the first prepared or "ready mixed" paints in the United States.
In the mid-1880s, paint factories began springing up in population and industrial centers across the nation. Mechanization was making the manufacturing process accessible to a larger and less specialized group of entrepreneurs. The weight of prepared paint makes it expensive to transport, so a decentralized structure of small manufacturers in discrete markets dominated the industry until the mid-1900s.
In the modern world, the process for making decisions like this paint color choice can be maddening. Every manufacturer today has its own palette, nomenclature and sales package for historic paint colors. Of course, these days spectography allows any color by any paint maker to be matched.
Because of our builder's relationships, we settled on the Sherwin Williams historic palette. After that, we passed by the hot end of the spectrum, leaving out the reds, yellows and oranges and looked at blues, greens and in betweens. The accent colors are chosen from the manufacturer's suggested colors compatible with the main, trim color. In evaluating our final selection, I produced a number of images, which follow. PIck your favorite and vote in the poll. Later in this comment thread I will discuss the poll results, as well as in the next post on this project, next weekend, with photos, after my first onsite visit since work began. There has already been a lot of demolition and its looking very, as the builder said, roomy.
Until then.