Building with brick offers a simple way to create a hearty, tough home that can withstand rough weather. Try these ideas for building with brick.
Decorating your home takes more than simply placing furniture inside. The exterior and its curb appeal contribute to the home’s ambiance and welcoming nature. Whether you favor dark or light brick exterior color schemes, your partner may disagree or want to explore unique ideas.
Long-lasting brick offers a hearty exterior material that you won’t need to paint unless you want to do so. This tough exterior home material keeps the interior warmer and stands up well to most weather. It naturally comes in shades from cream to near black with many shades of red.
The versatility of brick means you can use all one color of brick, mix the brick colors, or paint the brick using any exterior paint color you like. Read on to learn more about exterior brick color schemes and view 22 inspiring ideas to use on your home.
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Beyond Red Brick: Brick Color Scheme Ideas for You
1. While many variations of brick exist, many homeowners stick with a single color of brick when creating the façade of their home. Most US cities include homes in every color of brick imaginable. Brick costs more to build with and using a single color and brick size costs less.
2. The traditional peach and red brick color scheme and brick arrangement on this traditional home complements most types of architecture. Experienced masons can create any design desired with bricks. You can also have masons install brick façade to your existing home using veneer sheets. These sheets of brick only appear to be brick from the outside. They use about quarter-inch thick brick material that sticks out from a building sheet that provides the exterior version of wall board.
3. This single-family home in red traditional brick offers one of the least costly ways to use brick as your home’s exterior material. A home that uses a single brick color, such as this one, costs less since you only purchase one color of bricks and the masonry experts do not have to create a pattern in the brick.
4. This dark red traditional cottage in Charlotte’s historic fourth ward, offers an example of how to create interest with a single color of brick. Notice the raised areas of brick that form decorative architectural features.
5. The peach-ish tan brick used on this Canadian luxury home shows the breadth of choices available among beige brick house color schemes. This home may use veneer to achieve this look or beige stone. If the homeowner later decides to build an addition, beige paint offers a complementary color to brick exteriors of peach or tan.
6. Mixing brick façade with other exterior treatments can create an exciting exterior. You do have to carefully mix brick and other materials though, or you risk creating a disjointed exterior. This home mixes a gray brick façade with mauve and cream siding in a unique paint color combination that works.
7. Using one color works, too. This rambling gray brick modern three-story single-family home proves that. This shade of gray offers the newer home a sedate atmosphere. Bricks of this color come hewn from stone, mixed, and baked like typical bricks, or they receive a coat of paint to make them appear a unified color. When painting brick, you also paint the mortar that holds them together. This can provide the appearance of a single-colored home and may mask from the curb that the home uses brick as its exterior material.
8. No need for pink paint when you can use pink brick for the home exterior. These bricks take on natural coloring from the firing process. Finding bricks in reds and browns proves easy. Pink falls into the category of shades of red. Shades of peach and cream also prove popular.
9. Make any home seem regal using white and gray bricks and stone mixed for a fabulous façade. This custom-built luxury home in Toronto, Canada offers a regal, Old World appearance by using this brick and stone combination, but it recently underwent construction. Quartz with peach bricks also blends well together for a similar look.
10. Stand out on your block in a good way by using red brick with white and gray stone to create a mixed materials home exterior. It’s a bit like mixed media art, but you can live in it. This offers an option for those constructing a home who want to use brick but need to save money while doing it. As long as the materials look good together and meet building code requirements, you can use them together.
11. The light brown brick used on this Chicago, Illinois, USA home commonly appears throughout that city and New York City. Referred to simply as brownstone design, these brownstones proliferate the skyline of both cities. Homeowners wanting to update their home or build a new one in either city can’t go wrong using a brownstone design since it automatically matches the existing architecture.
12. Many homes in the northeastern USA use paint to enliven their brick homes with an updated look. Painting brick white or whitewashing it has become a common way to update a brick home in that area. If you don’t want to have to paint (and re-paint) the brick, look for white materials. While white bricks aren’t common, you can find stones shaped the size of bricks in that color. Granite offers another option.
13. Many homes in the US use this mixture of colors if they underwent construction during the Mid-Century period. Typical of the 1950s, this smoky gray brick with tan and reddish-orange bricks interspersed became a go-to of architects and masons. It creates interest by using the occasional tan and reddish-orange bricks as accents. You could create a similar look using other materials such as agate, granite, or locally sourced stones as the accents.
14. This light tan brick offers a look at brownstones in other countries. The brick color and use didn’t only appeal to US cities as this home in Riga, Latvia illustrates. You could find this same color and style of bricks used in US architecture.
15. Sometimes, the homeowner just wants a different look altogether. That’s when painting the brick makes sense. Update to modern looks by painting your home this shade of dark gray. It makes the brick appear nearly black, but sunlight proves otherwise, which keeps the home from seeming like an homage to Stephen King’s “Bleak House.”
16. In cities, many homeowners work from home. Some live above or behind their shop, a common occurrence in many US and European metropolises. Painting these combinations, or mixed-use, brick structures a fun color such as this turquoise draws attention to the business and offers a cozy brick abode.
17. Pursuing that same idea, try this baby blue painted brick for your inner-city home. The serenity of the color blue can offer your customers a calm oasis on the first floor while welcoming you home on the second story. Some brick homes don’t feature trim though, and the monochromatic color scheme can look boring. Consider adding an accent color, such as creamy white to your color palette.
18. Mix brick colors with paint colors to achieve this blue and gray brick-painted wall. It offers an Old-World appeal without requiring stones from Europe. Note though that dark colors fade faster, so you’ll need to repaint more often by choosing a darker paint.
19. Building an addition can prove tough if your original home used a unique material. For example, the original stucco of this home could prove tough to match, but by building on using white brick, the homeowner artfully expanded their space while making the structure appear unified. Brick with stucco just works well.
20. Help your home complement your lovely garden by using white brick with stone intermingled. This cottage in rural Europe mixed the two building materials with aplomb, creating a natural-feeling structure that blends with the surroundings. Its white color blends with natural stone found nearby.
21. You may not find pure green as a brick home color, but the gray-green brick of this stone and brick two-story home in Ala di Stura, Italy offers a structure that blends with its surroundings. The minty green of the brick looks like agate found in a nearby region. Its nubby texture also contributes to how well it blends with nature.
22. What to do with multi-family housing? Take a cue from Russia. The festive painted brick on this two-story colors the second story pink and the first story white. Strange, but true, this building comprises one of the structures from the abandoned Murru/Rummu prison complex in Russia. It doesn’t look much like a prison since it uses colors more common to Mexico and the Mediterranean for its painted brick.
Ways to Get Other Ideas for Exterior Paint Colors
We merely offer our 22 favorites in this article. You can easily find other ideas by driving through your town or city, or by perusing Zillow or Realtor. Drive through any new home developments going into your area. The builders may use unique methods or materials.
Some homes add a porch to the front supported by columns. To pull together the mixture of brick and siding, masons create an accent layer in the column about halfway up using bricks that match the siding color, for example, cream. This small accent on each pillar or column ties together the entire home’s façade similar to how the right belt and scarf tie together an outfit.
Even if you already built your home, surfing the Web can net you ideas if you look at home plans. You only need the photo, not the plans, if you already built your home and only want to show a bricklayer an idea from the home.
Try installing a retaining wall or brick fence around the home in the same color of bricks as the accent addition. This, too, can make it seem to “belong” even if you built it onto the home 50 years after the initial home construction.
Brick Colors for House Exteriors
Bricks come in a variety of colors, but typically their hues fall within red, browns, and dark or burnt oranges. Some dark bricks take on the color of eggplant, a nearly black purple. Others exhibit smoky gray tones or a cream/beige color. Blue bricks tend to come in dark shades of blue, typically navy, blueberry, or cobalt in tone.
Brick Paint Color Palettes
You can also paint brick homes and homeowners sometimes do this. The standard brick paint colors include white, black, or blue, but you can have Behr or Sherwin Williams custom mix any color you want.
What colors do you rarely find a brick home painted? Homeowners tend to avoid green, pink, red, and yellow as paint colors for brick. You may find a freestanding brick wall, or an interior wall painted those colors for effect, but they don’t prevail as exterior paint colors.
Of course, you don’t need red paint for red brick house exterior ideas because brick normally comes in shades of red. It comes in so many shades and hues of red, in fact, that some bricks appear pink, negating the need for paint to achieve that color.
All Brick or Partial Brick?
When building a home, money usually determines style and opulence. While brick provides the toughest material you can buy, like stone, it costs quite a bit more to use than wood or siding.
How much more?
Beware of websites that claim you can build with brick for $2 per square foot. They do not have the proper information. You could potentially find brick veneer for that cost, but actual bricks cost between $11 to $25, according to The Pricer.
You can only use brick veneer on partition walls. Those walls do not comprise your structural walls (the ones that hold your house up).
To build a 2,000-square-foot home with a real brick exterior costs $36,000 for the exterior brick only. That means that if you own a wood house, you could have builders enclose it using real brick for $36K because veneer doesn’t provide a tough enough exterior material.
Conversely, you can purchase vinyl siding for $0.73 per square foot, according to Home Guide. You can use it on any wall of your home.
Both options require added labor costs. The average cost of labor for vinyl installation equals $1.12 per square foot, while bricklayers range from $40 to $100 per hour.
You need to replace the siding when it becomes damaged. That occurs with some frequency depending on where you live. Places that experience lots of snow, droughts, or rainstorms need more frequent siding repairs than those who reside in areas of temperate climate.
If you have the money for it, brick makes a superb home investment since it lasts a long time without needing repair or replacement. Brick homes may make it 150 years before requiring significant repairs. You can stave off the major repairs by taking care of the brickwork all along.
Mixing the two options offers another idea. Some homes construct one section of the home using brick and use vinyl siding on the other section. Using this option also works well for building an addition. If you add a dormer window to the attic, you can use siding on it and siding on the addition. By matching these two areas around the existing brick home, you add on while maintaining the original appearance. The added dormer makes it seem like it functioned as a part of the original brick structure.
