Colour choice and what roof colour is “right” for your home is totally subjective. You can get two people together and one will love a colour and the other will hate it. Therefore, there is no “right” colour for your roof. Ultimately it’s going to come down to personal taste. There are, however, some tips that can help with your colour choice and save you from ending up with a colour that you’ll dislike.

Firstly, you need to consider the other colours around your home (or your proposed colours if you are re-painting the exterior of the house). You want to bring in one of the other colours from the home when choosing your roof colour. For example, if yours is a brick home and you have a particular fleck in the brick, then choose a roof colour similar to the fleck colour. Or choose one similar to your window frames. Or your driveway if it’s coated in a colour.

Try to follow colour themes wherever possible. The traditional red, green and cream, for example. Or greys (dark grey against white grey or vice versa). Or beiges and browns. Drive around a new estate for ideas if you are looking to “modernise” the appearance of your home. Go through older areas with a lot of renovation activity for ideas if you have an older home and you are looking to preserve the home’s “vintage”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A word of warning is to be careful of the difference between how colours appear on the colour chart and how they look on the roof. The most common area where people get “tripped up” in their colour choice and end up disappointed is in not understanding that it is often significantly lighter.

There are several reasons for this:

On the colour chart, the colour is likely against a white background which makes the colour appear darker than it is.
The angle of the roof (15 – 30 degrees, typically) makes the surface pick up a lot of glare. this makes the colour appear lighter on the roof.
When on a wide area (such as on a roof), colours always appear lighter.
It’s very common for people to choose a roof colour and comment that they wanted it to be much darker. The colour is most often accurate, and if you take the colour chart on the roof you see that close up the colour is correct, but the illusion that the above three factors create makes it look vastly lighter from the ground.

So a handy tip is to choose a colour that’s darker (on the colour chart) than what you’d like. This will likely turn out, on the roof, something close to what you wanted.

Another helpful hint is to choose your roof colour by seeing the colour on a roof. Ask the company who you are considering using for your roof restoration to provide you with an address of a roof that they’ve done in a colour that you’re considering.

If you follow these tips and remember that the colour appears lighter on the roof than on the colour chart, you’ll end up with a colour that you are happy with nearly every time.

In 2012 Reliance Roof Restoration completed over 1,200 roofing jobs of which 828 were roof restorations. We thought that since choosing the right coating colour for your new roof is often an important part of the decision making process we’d share the most popular colours our customers selected in that with you. It’s important to note trends to change over time and please talk to your roofing consultant for more information on trends and suggests they may have if you are stuck on colour choice.

Roof Coat Charcoal (approximately 9% of customers chose this)
Roof Coat Roof Red (approximately 6.2% of customers chose this)
Roof Coat Tuscan Red (4.2 % of customers chose this)
Roof Coat Heritage Red (approximately 3.9% of customers chose this)
Roof Coat Valencia *approximately 3.8% of customers chose this)
Overwhelming Red was popular in 2012 with other popular colours including ebony, battleship grey, Afghan, Glaze, Charcoal, Mid Terracotta, Tile Terracotta also being homeowner favourites. We hope this helps you make up your mind!

* Note this data was gathered from Brisbane and Sydney only.