It’s so dark

Our house on the hill has a new coat of paint and we are struggling to like it.  It is really dark!

Originally, the house was creamy yellow-ish color that is traditional for the southwest territorial style, with brick coping (trim) along the top of the house. It was that color originally, well before John bought it. We know it was originally the traditional creamy-beige color because you can still occasionally see bits of that color in little out-of-the-way places. Since I don’t have photos of our actual house when it was that color, here’s examples of the traditional color in local territorial style architecture:

Apparently the previous owners didn’t like the original color, because at some point before John bought it, they painted it a pinkish color, which is common here in the desert. We’ve never liked the pinkish tone, and I admit, I’ve sometimes disparagingly called it “the pink box on the hill.”

I originally wanted to go back to the traditional cream color, but we were afraid it would stand out too much on the hill, so we decided to go with brown. I initially was picturing something like the color on the left, as a compromise instead of the color on the right:

 

Unfortunately, our brown turned out to be REALLY brown. The house is every bit as obvious sitting up there as it always was – the only thing that is now less obvious is the brick coping, which blends into the brown from a distance. Here you can see it, now a  brown box on top of the hill.

What’s become way more obvious is the white windows, ouch! We went with white instead of brown windows, because white trim is traditional for the territorial style. But since we went with a significantly darker stucco color than traditional for the style, the white windows are really glaring. BAH! WHITE WINDOWS STARING AT YOU!

We hope it will be improved once we add more of the traditional white trim. For example, we intend to build 3 white pergolas.

So here’s the question: did we paint it the wrong color, or would any color stick out like a sore thumb up there, simply because it is a boxy, 2-story house stuck on top of a hill with no landscaping or anything to moderate it?

I also intend to plant trees, which will help moderate the exposed feel up there, as well as soften the look of the house from a distance. But trees grow very slowly in the desert.