Replacing your home’s siding is about protecting your home’s exterior—and interior—from the harsh elements of mountain living. Fiber cement siding is the ideal shell to safeguard your home from moisture damage from snow and ice, high winds, animal intrusions, and even risk of wildfire damage. But beyond durability and protection, the aesthetic flexibility of siding color also plays a crucial role in the renovation process.
Renovating your home’s exterior is also about style and design. At Bellwether, we believe that function goes hand-in-hand with style, and choosing a durable siding product doesn’t mean sacrificing the design of your dream home. James Hardie fiber cement siding has a performance guarantee regardless of siding profile, which means you get the same great protection with lap siding as you do with board and batten siding. Additionally, with ColorPlus Technology, James Hardie can offer virtually any shade to be mixed and pressed right into the fiber cement siding boards.
Their color collections offer more than 700 options, so the trick really is choosing. We are siding installation experts, but we also have a complete design team and love to offer style consultations and integrate design elements into our proposals. Choosing a siding color can feel overwhelming, especially when your siding is guaranteed to last a lifetime, so we have a few tips for choosing the best siding color for your home.
First things first, we ask, what do you like? Trends come and go, and certainly there are external factors that might impact your decisions. But our goal with every customer is that they love pulling into their driveway at the end of a work day and taking in the house they call a home. Your tastes and ideas matter, and we ask that you share them with us when we build a proposal.
From there, our Project Guides can talk through your tastes and how they might fit with your surroundings. The next two questions we ask are about the environment. It’s worth considering your neighborhood. There may be an HOA with rules about color choices, for starters. Even without neighborhood restrictions, taking your neighbors into consideration is worthwhile. How your home looks next to your immediate neighbor does impact the look of your home. Additionally, natural surroundings and landscape are important—especially in mountain homes. Working with nature-inspired shades creates a cohesive aesthetic and makes your home a part of the beautiful scenery rather than a distraction from it.
If you’ve chosen a color family based on what’s around you, the next decision is whether to take that color to the light or dark end of the spectrum. Currently, dark, richer colors are trending and make a bold, vibrant statement. Perhaps you’d rather something more timeless, however. Warm but neutral shades tend to stand the test of time, and with James Hardie ColorPlus technology, they never look worn nor lose their luster.
Even with these clarifying ideas, it can be hard to narrow down to one color. Our design team often recommends an accent color and can pick out two shades that complement each other. The benefit is a contrasting effect that adds depth and high style—not to mention not having to decide on only one choice! An accent color is a great way to bring a richer shade into the mix without committing it to the entire exterior or to highlight a particular architectural element of your home.
It can also be handy to factor in the mountain weather. While James Hardie fiber cement siding will never fade, crack, or peel, certain colors can look different in different light. In the mountains, where sun is intense and snow reflects it, there can be tricks of light that affect siding. Talk to your team representative about how your favorite colors might be altered in different light and weather conditions.
Ultimately, we are here to guide your decision-making process so that you love your home when the work is done. We guarantee 100% customer satisfaction on every project—and not just installation, but the design as well. These questions and considerations are part of our expert sales and installation experience so that you fall in love with your home from the outside-in and find the peace of mind that comes from superior exterior protection with a design that will last a lifetime.
