Exterior Color Consultation in Franklin Hills

Before:
Franklin Hills Los Angeles home before exterior architectural color consultation

Exterior color consultation and color selection by Nathalie Tierce, Custom Color and Art — Franklin Hills, Los Angeles.

Using Color to Rebalance a Top-Heavy Façade Before Going to Market

When my clients in Franklin Hills, Los Angeles decided it was time to put their longtime home on the market, they knew the exterior needed attention.

Over the years, most of their renovation efforts had quite reasonably been directed toward the interior. The exterior, however, had largely been left alone. By the time they contacted me for an architectural color consultation, the house was beginning to feel disconnected from the improvements they had made inside.

The architecture itself was interesting: a tall, narrow hillside home with a substantial dark mansard-style roof, three upper dormers, long bands of windows and a garage level directly on the street. Nothing fundamentally needed to be changed. What the house needed was a stronger sense of balance.

That became the starting point for our color consultation.

The problem wasn’t simply that the paint was faded

One of the first things I noticed was the relationship between the roof and the body of the house.

The dark roof occupies a considerable amount of the visible elevation. Against the existing pale exterior, it visually dominated the house, making the building feel top-heavy. At street level, meanwhile, the faded garage doors and surrounding façade lacked enough visual weight to anchor the structure.

Because this is a hillside property, that relationship becomes particularly important. You encounter the house from below, so your eye naturally travels upward. The goal was to give the lower and middle portions of the building enough presence to hold their own against the roof.

Rather than trying to fight the roof color, I wanted to work with it.

Finding the color already present in the architecture

I recommended Benjamin Moore Randolph Stone CW-75, a complex, earthy neutral with enough depth to ground the façade while picking up some of the warmer undertones already present in the existing roof.

That distinction matters.

For exterior work, I rarely think of a color in isolation. I am looking at the permanent elements of the building—the roof, masonry, windows, paving and surrounding landscape—and asking which undertones are already there and which ones are worth emphasizing.

Randolph Stone allowed the roof to become part of the overall palette rather than an element sitting heavily on top of it.

The deeper body color also strengthened the central portion of the house, while the lighter trim preserved definition around the windows, doors and architectural edges. At street level, addressing the garage doors was particularly important. Because they occupy so much of what someone sees when approaching the property, leaving them faded would have undermined the rest of the exterior work.

A relatively simple change with a substantial effect

The finished house feels more settled into the hillside.

The roof is still dark. The architecture is still exactly what it was. But the relationship between the different parts of the building has changed.

Instead of your eye being pulled immediately toward the roof, the darker façade creates a visual bridge between the upper story and the garage level below. The windows feel more intentional, the black ironwork makes sense within the palette, and the landscaping appears richer against the deeper neutral background.

This is one of the things I enjoy most about architectural color consulting: color can alter how we perceive the proportions of a building without changing its architecture at all.

For homeowners preparing a property for sale, that can be especially valuable. Exterior color is one of the first things a potential buyer experiences, long before they see the renovated kitchen, the flooring or the carefully considered interior.

In this case, the house didn’t need to become something different.

It simply needed the exterior to finally catch up with everything my clients had already done inside.