Color Me Colonial (February 4, 2012)

After shopping for appliances three weekends in a row (snore), we took a break on Saturday afternoon to check out house colors in the oldest part of Newburyport. Since fall 2011, I haven’t left home without two Farrow & Ball color charts in my purse, so if I spot a house color I like, I can check to see if F&B has a close match, go back to the house, and hold up the colors under the light on our front lawn to see how they work on our sunny green patch of the planet. After all this obsessing, the closest I’ve come to a final color choice is “the perfect gray.” Why chase rainbows?

Before we moved to Massachusetts, we envisioned white clapboards with dark green shutters and a bright olive or pea green door, so the house blended in with the state park where it lives—along the lines of this house down the street from us in Ipswich, which is just like ours except that we have two chimneys. 

Now we have other ideas after studying 18th- and early 19th-century houses like ours in Ipswich, Salem, Newburyport, and a half dozen other old towns on the upper North Shore, where well-preserved colonials are the norm. My favorite house is this simple gray one that sits across the street from our apartment in Ipswich. 

It’s undated but looks 18th-century to us. Photos betray how beautiful it is, with its old unpainted pine doors and silvery cedar shake roof that shimmers in the sun and blends with the warm gray matte clapboards. It puts the b in subtle and almost looks as though it’s been growing there for centuries. But would the colors translate to our south-facing house on a hill? Probably not. So I’m documenting other color combos til the weather warms up and we can paint the exterior. Recent favorites include this off-white row house with bright white trim and a red door in Newburyport.

The sunny glow of First Church in Beverly, from 1652, compelled us to double back, snap a photo, and call the pastor, who said the color is called Knightly Straw, by Roda Paints. We weren’t considering yellow til this rich, mellow number with a creamy pale yellow trim turned our heads. 

This colonial classic, on the banks of the Ipswich River, is painted red down to the door jambs and window frames and muntins. Nathaniel Philbrick says all the houses in Nantucket were painted this way, before weathered cedar shakes became the norm.

Another nice traditional paint treatment that doesn’t translate in photographs is colonial red window muntins, dating to when red lead primer was one of the few commonly available (and therefore cheap) paint colors in the colonies.

This particular house is on Nantucket, but you see windows painted this way on the North Shore against a variety of color combos; it’s also very subtle—more easily detectable at street level than in photographs. We may try it if we go with something like the off-white house with red door in Newburyport.