Historic Color Consultation

A Scheme, Written Down

A color consultation here produces a document, not an opinion. At the end of it you hold a sheet naming every color in the scheme, its manufacturer and product code, and the exact element it goes on. That is a deliberate output, because on a district street the scheme often has to be legible to somebody who is not standing in front of your house.

The work runs in four steps and takes longer than people expect, mostly because of the waiting in step three.

One: Read the House

Before any color is discussed we look at the building. A Craftsman bungalow with deep overhangs, exposed rafter tails and a broad porch has a different set of surfaces to a Spanish Revival stucco box, and the number of colors a scheme can carry is set by how many distinct elements the elevation actually has. Three colors on a house with two elements looks busy. Two colors on a house with brackets, sash, corbels and a porch ceiling looks unfinished.

We also go looking for evidence. Under a porch eave, on the sheltered face of a rafter tail, behind a downspout, there is often original or early coating that never got fully scraped. Sanding a small window back through the layers is an hour of work and it is the most honest reference anybody is going to hand you. It does not oblige you to reuse it. It just tells you what the house was designed to look like.

Two: Read the Guidelines

Then we find out what applies to your address. Whether a street sits inside a designated district, inside an overlay, or in neither, changes whether exterior color is something the city expects to hear about. Where guidelines do exist they tend to talk about compatibility with the building and the surrounding street rather than handing you a fixed list of approved colors, but the specifics genuinely differ from city to city and district to district, so we check yours rather than assuming.

We do not guess at process. If there is a question about what your particular address requires, the answer comes from the city’s planning counter, and we would rather you spend five minutes there at the start than find out at the end.

Three: Sample on the House

This is the step nobody wants to wait for and everybody is glad they did.

Each candidate scheme goes onto rigid board, two coats, properly dry. The boards then go up on the house: the north elevation, the south or west elevation, and up under the overhang where the wall sits in shade all day. They stay there for several days and you look at them in the morning, at midday and late in the afternoon.

Pasadena punishes colors chosen indoors. The inland sun is hard and warm, and it lifts every yellow in a color while flattening the softer greys out of existence. Meanwhile the deep eave on a bungalow keeps a wide band of wall permanently shaded, so the same body color reads two shades darker and noticeably colder up there. A scheme that only works in one of those conditions is not a scheme.

Sheen gets decided at the same time. Flat hides a wavy old wall and holds dirt. Eggshell and satin give you something washable and are where most body coats land. Semi-gloss and gloss are for trim, sash and doors, where you want the edge to read and the surface to shed water, and they will show every ripple in the substrate underneath, which is a reason to be honest about the condition of your siding before choosing one.

Four: Document It

The sheet lists body, trim, sash, accent, porch ceiling and front door, each with its color name and code. If a submission is needed, that is most of it. If it is not, you still have a record for the next time a piece of trim gets replaced and needs matching.

What It Costs and What It Does Not Include

A consultation runs roughly $450 to $900 depending on how many elevations there are and how many rounds of sampling you want. It is a standalone service. We are happy to paint the scheme afterwards and equally happy for you to take the sheet to another painter, which is worth saying plainly, because a consultation that only exists to sell a repaint is not really a consultation.

What it does not include is any claim about what a reviewer will decide. We can make a scheme defensible, well documented and suited to the house. Nobody can promise you an outcome, and you should not believe a painter who does.

Call (626) 554-4516 with the address and we will tell you whether the color question is a big one on your street or a small one.