Articles and Advice

How To Choose Your Garage Door Color

Your garage door makes up a large portion of your home's facade, but homeowners rarely give it much thought. Here's how you can choose the perfect color for your garage door.

Whether it's time to list your home or you just want to brighten up the exterior, your garage door could probably use a new coat of paint. Sure, you can go to everyone's default favorite, white, and you'd probably be safe to do so, but maybe you'd like to jazz things up. But before you run out and buy Raving Red or Habanera Orange, it's probably best to give your color scheme some serious thought.

These pointers will help steer you in the right direction with your color scheme.

Complementary Coloring

The principal tenet to remember about your garage door is that the color should complement your home's appearance but shouldn't dominate. That means, as much as you love Habanera Orange, it just really won't do for the garage door of your sedate Craftsman-style home.

To be sure, there aren't necessarily hard and fast rules about exterior color schemes, but there are general rules, and the one that predominates is the three-color rule: a primary or field color; a trim color for awnings, door and window frames; and an accent color for shutters and door. You'll have to decide if the garage should match the field or primary color or the trim color. Sometimes the placement of the garage door can determine which color requires balance. For instance, pairing a light field color with a darker trim color or vice versa is often a pleasing combination. In general, an accent color on the garage door might tend to overwhelm.

Color Scheming

Another helpful rule is that the garage door should be white or the dominant color. It's usually recommended that the white be off-white or ivory. Painting the garage door a variant of white or the dominant color will help make your home look bigger, and it will help draw eyes to other aspects of the house.

Other garage door colors to consider:

black - elegant and mysterious
gray - calming and soothing, and easy to pair with other colors
chocolate brown - less severe than black

Blue and green are soothing colors but might not be the right choice unless the house is already one of these colors.

Studying the color wheel and the basic color schemes — monochromatic, analogous, and complementary — can help you understand better how colors go together. For instance, monochromatic, as the name implies, uses different shadings of the same color. For instance, the front door and trim might be a medium gray, while the door color is darker and the accents lighter. This type of cohesive color scheme is visually pleasing but lacks contrast, and sacrifices vibrancy.

You may have noticed a trend to paint houses in various shades of gray, but to spark things up by going boldly red on the front door. It can be an arresting and attractive scheme, but you probably wouldn't want to paint your garage door red. If you want to make a bold statement with the garage door, you may be more likely to choose some shade of purple to pair with the gray. Purple matches gray, but it also can be a standout.

Have a brick or stone home? Avoid contrast with brick or stone, choosing cream instead of stark white, and use neutral colors on the garage door. Allow accent colors to magnify the natural beauty of the brick or stone. Some pleasing accent color combos include: yellow/cream; charcoal/light gray; or cool green/cool gray.

For best results, drive around and study color combinations on other homes that might work for your own exterior. Above all, have fun with it.

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How To Choose Your Garage Door Color

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