Without color, you have NO real estate investment or construction project!
PHOTO SOURCE: Lauren Battistini | LFB Color Consulting | Custom remodel project
Greetings today especially to my residential and commercial real estate friends! Today’s post is for you.
Without color, you have no project. Period. Do you know that color is your most potent marketer and——done wrongly——it can depreciate your property before you even build or list it? Don’t worry. That’s why architectural color consultants do the work that we do. We are essentially property marketers!
The human eye craves visual order and aesthetic and can almost always discern when something is “off,” and 90% of the time it has to do with improper color specification in paint, materials and/or finishes.
Today I will review how and why color is vital to the success of any real estate or construction project and offer 3 ways to judiciously select color palettes for your properties.
Color must be evaluated in context; that is, with all other surfaces and elements surrounding it.
It’s also key to study and identify undertones in color!
Architectural color consultants do tons of research before curating all colors, materials and finishes on a commercial project.
Let’s hear first from some artists and philosophers about the power of color.
“All colors arouse specific associative ideas…” – Yves Klein
“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.” – Wassily Kandinsky
“Colors speak all languages.” – Joseph Addison
“Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make.” – Roy Lichtenstein
Around 85% of all shoppers cite the color of the product as the main reason for purchasing it when describing their motivation. Why should commercial property be any different? It is indeed a product! The implications are that color and color placement can make or break your business. SOURCE: Kissmetrics
“Color is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it… To work with color is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.” – David Batchelor
STEP 1: Evaluate color in context.
All colors, materials and surfaces on a commercial space must be evaluated in context, or together as a whole, and then you must observe how materials surrounding those colors look adjacent to them. Colors studied in isolation inform you of nothing.
Speaking of surroundings and context, for exteriors you must also evaluate your colors alongside landscaping and surrounding architecture.
Colors surrounding one another will interact and reflect, creating optical effects that need to be evaluated before finalizing color schemes.
STEP 2: It’s mainly about color undertone.
What do I mean by undertone? Undertones result when mixing more than one hue, or color of the rainbow. Almost every color in fact is a blend, so the overtone is the most dominant or obvious color seen. Examples are beige, taupe, red, or gray. The undertone refers to the underlying color(s) that is/are less obvious but important when creating architectural color palettes.
Let’s take the neutral beige as an example. There are beiges with pink, orange, yellow, gold and green undertones. If you’re trying to create a very monochromatic color scheme in a space, then you really wouldn’t want to use more than one of these types of beige, as they may conflict and actually appear as different colors altogether due to the different undertones.
In addition to paint, color undertones will also be present in hard surfaces and finishes such as counter tops, back splash and flooring.
STEP 3: Research, research, research many factors before finalizing color, materials and finishes for your commercial space.
Here is a semi-exhaustive checklist of subjects to research:
industry color trends
client perception of color
geographical and cultural color preferences
competition’s color selections
your own corporate image and positioning in the marketplace
the intended use(s) of the space itself
PHOTO SOURCE:
I cannot overemphasize enough the need to do comprehensive research before finalizing your colors, materials and finishes. There is so much margin for error considering the dozens and dozens of color and material decisions to be made, especially on commercial real estate projects.
This is why we architectural color consultants do what we do. If you are in commercial real estate or construction, then I absolutely welcome your questions here below or via email. Let’s discuss your next project.
Have a colorful day, my friends!
Your color strategist Lauren
