Picking new siding for your home is one of the most impactful exterior decisions you’ll make. It changes how your home looks from the street, how it holds up to the elements, and how much maintenance it demands over time. And with so many products, colors, and profiles available — it can feel overwhelming before you even get started.
At IES Construction & Roofing, we walk St. Louis homeowners through this decision regularly. The process is simpler than most people expect when you follow it in the right order. There are three steps — and the order matters.
Step 1 — Start With Your Style
Before you pick a product, before you look at a color chip, before you talk to a contractor — start with your home’s architecture and what you’re trying to achieve with it. This is the step most homeowners skip, and it’s the most important one.
Ask yourself a few questions:
What style is my home? Is it a Ranch? A Craftsman? A Victorian? A Colonial? A modern farmhouse? Each architectural style has proportions, details, and character that certain siding profiles and colors will honor — and others will fight against.
What am I trying to achieve? This is where it gets interesting. A Ranch-style home sitting on a St. Louis street has real potential. You might want to add a modern touch — clean lines, darker tones, board and batten accents that push the home toward contemporary without abandoning what it is. Or you might want to lean into the farmhouse direction — mixing lap siding with shingle shake in the gables, adding depth and texture that gives a simple home a lot more character.
Maybe you have a historic home — a Victorian or a Craftsman that’s been in the neighborhood for a hundred years. In that case the goal isn’t reinvention. It’s renewal. Honoring the profile, the trim details, the proportions that make that home what it is — while replacing the products with something that will perform for the next hundred years.
Every one of those goals is achievable. But you have to know which one you’re working toward before anything else makes sense.
Step 2 — Pick Your Product
Once you know your style and your goal, you pick the product that gets you there. This is where a knowledgeable contractor becomes invaluable.
A good siding contractor isn’t just someone who installs one product. They have a working knowledge of the full range of what’s available — fiber cement, engineered wood, vinyl, poly-ash composite, real wood — and they understand what each product does well and where it has limitations. That knowledge base is what translates your vision into a real specification.
James Hardie fiber cement is what IES installs most frequently on St. Louis homes — and for good reason. It’s climate-engineered for our specific market, it holds paint longer than wood, and it doesn’t rot or attract insects. But James Hardie isn’t the only answer to every question. A home that calls for a very natural wood grain might point toward a different product. A project with complex custom trim profiles might call for TruExterior poly-ash composite that can be routed and milled on site. A budget-conscious project might spec a quality vinyl in a profile that fits the architecture.
The right contractor helps you match the product to the goal — not just sell you whatever they install most.
Step 3 — Pick Your Colors
This is where the fun starts. Once you have your style direction and your product locked in, color is where you get to be creative — and where a few principles from exterior designers make a real difference.
The 60/30/10 Rule
Exterior designers rely on the 60/30/10 color rule to create balanced, intentional exterior palettes. The idea is simple — your dominant color covers about 60% of the exterior (typically the siding field), your secondary color covers about 30% (trim, fascia, soffit), and your accent color covers the remaining 10% (front door, shutters, specific architectural details). This ratio creates visual balance without making the exterior feel flat or chaotic.
Match Color to Architecture
Designers consistently point to architectural style as the starting point for color selection — which is exactly why we started with style in Step 1. Here’s what generally works by home type:
- Ranch and Farmhouse — earthy tones, warm whites, soft greens, and muted grays all work well. Board and batten in a dark color with light trim adds a modern farmhouse feel without overcomplicating the palette.
- Craftsman — earthy tones like olive, sage, tan, rust, and warm brown complement the natural wood and stone accents typical of Craftsman architecture.
- Colonial and Traditional — timeless neutrals. White, cream, navy, and slate gray with crisp white trim are classic for a reason. They honor the symmetry and proportion of traditional architecture.
- Victorian and Historic — this is where you can layer colors. Designers recommend using bold, complementary tones — deep greens, burgundies, warm golds — to highlight the intricate trim work and varied textures that define Victorian character.
- Modern and Contemporary — dark palettes perform well here. Charcoal, black, and deep navy with minimal trim and clean transitions create the sleek contrast that modern architecture calls for.
Consider What’s Already There
Your siding color doesn’t exist in isolation. It has to work with the elements you’re not changing — your roof color, any brick or stone on the foundation, your windows, your driveway. Designers recommend starting with those fixed elements and building your color palette around them rather than picking siding color first and hoping everything else cooperates.
If you have a dark roof, lighter siding creates contrast and makes the home feel open. If you have warm-toned brick at the foundation, pulling warm undertones into your siding color creates cohesion. If your windows are black or dark bronze, a darker siding palette can tie the whole exterior together.
Watch the Light
One thing designers emphasize that most homeowners don’t think about — sunlight changes how color reads on a home throughout the day. A color that looks like a warm gray on a paint chip can read almost beige in direct afternoon sun, and two to three shades darker in shade. Before you commit to a color, look at samples on the actual wall of your home at different times of day. What you see at 10am and what you see at 4pm can be meaningfully different.
Don’t Be Afraid of Bold
A well-executed bold color choice — a deep navy, a rich green, a warm charcoal — reads as confident and intentional on the right home. The mistake isn’t going bold. The mistake is going bold without a clear understanding of the architecture and the rest of the palette. When all three elements work together — style, product, and color — even a strong color choice feels exactly right.
Bring It All Together
Style first. Product second. Color third. Follow that order and the decision gets significantly easier at every step — because each choice narrows and informs the next one.
If you’re planning a siding project on a St. Louis or Metro East Illinois home and want to walk through this process with someone who installs all of these products every day — IES Construction & Roofing offers free on-site estimates. We’ll look at your home, talk through your goals, and help you build a specification that gets you where you want to go.