Our Favorite Farmhouse Paint Colors

A farmhouse is made out of earth. The driveway is dirt, the siding is cedar, the corners are worn, and the mudroom is the kitchen.

If we’re being honest about it, a real farmhouse’s exterior doesn’t even necessarily have to be painted. Of course the owners will want to at least finish, treat and seal it, but if any type of home looks good in its natural, wooden colors–even over time–it’s the American farmhouse.

That being said, a farmhouse–whether it’s on an actual farm or not–can be made to look downright inspiring with the right paint job. According to Connecticut in Style , farmhouses are meant to be white. But we think red and blue are just as appropriate, if not more.

Classically, barns are red. Nobody’s forgotten that.

But when the family home on a farm is also red , it comes across like an all-out embrace of the farming life. Like the same spirit that built the barn returned to the earth and manifested again as just the right space for raising two, three, maybe six prodigious children.

When one drives by a farm and looks out over all those acres, trying to imagine what it was supposed to mean to be an American, nothing catches the eye in the middle of all that green grass and amber grain better than a red farmhouse.

On the other hand, after a 35-hour day in the fields, some Americans would like to just go home, thank you–sit down, get clean, eat a whole chicken.

For these entirely reasonable folk, the spirit that built the barn isn’t welcome in the bedroom or at the dinner table. These are human places to be and they deserve to feel different. Quieter. More subdued.

For the family that wants the feeling of their home to contrast with the feeling of working–whether at the office or outside in their fields–a blue farmhouse paint color lends a calming, dignified identity to the barn.

Of course, a farmhouse can be painted any color–but there are a (very) few colors that can make a home genuinely scream “Farmhouse!” in a really great way.

While white is never a bad option as a farmhouse’s paint color, we happen to think there are some more interesting options. Red farmhouses, for example, are perfect gems against the background that 500 acres of wheat, corn and grazing area tend to cast.

Alternatively, a bright, blue sky overlooking as many brown and green acres of barley and soybeans somehow seems to make blue farmhouse paint colors pop out of the earth like geysers.

Wherever your dream house is going to be and whatever it will look like, the color you choose to paint it will be a major determiner of how your home makes you feel. For professional input on the particular home you have in mind, give Fitzpatrick Painting a call.