Our Sherwin Williams Whole House Color Palette

In this blog post, I’ll be sharing our Sherwin Williams whole house color palette.

These are the exact colors we used when picking selections and elevating our builder-grade home.

Choosing A Sherwin Williams Whole House Color Palette

We didn’t intentionally choose Sherwin-Williams as the one & only paint brand for the house.

It was actually our builder who let us know we’d need to pick from the Sherwin-Williams line of colors for new construction home.

We also had to take various materials and finishes into consideration when planning our paint color scheme.

On the exterior we would have board and batten siding.

Inside, we’d have blonde LVP flooring through the main living areas and white porcelain tiling in the bathrooms.

Fortunately, there were plenty of great colors to choose from that would suit our new home well.

We were coming from a house that we had just spend 5 years renovating. That was the time of ‘modern farmhouse gray’ and I was OVER IT.

No more dreary gray walls, please. I wanted our home to feel bright and airy with soft contrasting neutrals and moody moments.

Our exterior color palette

Since we knew the overall aesthetic we wanted, we needed to stick to the classics with our choice of exterior paint colors: white with black accents.

I personally love homes that stand out with bold contrast.

Our white and black exterior presented two extremes in terms of LRV (Light Reflectance Value = percentage of light a paint color reflects, aka how ‘bright’ a color looks).

Main Exterior Color: Extra White – We chose this bright white for the board and batten that comprises most of our exterior. This white paint color has an LRV of 86, which makes it a soft bright white that looks crisp and fresh when contrasted against our secondary exterior color…

Secondary Exterior Color: Tricorn Black – With an LRV of 3, this is one of the deepest and truest black colors you can find. Our shutters are painted in Tricorn Black. This POPS against the Extra White board and batten, and it matches our black gutters beautifully.

Accent: Riverwood Cedar Wood Stain – This isn’t a paint color, but it plays a major part in the exterior look of our home. Instead of painting the cedar beams around our front porch and back patio, we opted to have these stained a rich, dark cedar color. This look is replicated inside our home, too, with the ceiling beam in the great room.

Exterior color palette: Tricorn Black shutters contrast Extra White with Riverwood stained cedar wood

Our interior color palette

I wanted to have a sense of lightness and calm throughout our house. So I kept our color palette pretty minimal with just 4 colors: 1 main color, 1 secondary color, and 2 accent colors.

We used the main color on walls and trim throughout the house.

The secondary color was used to create contrast and visual interest in different areas. And the 2 accent colors are used to create certain moods in the areas they’re used.

Kitchen paint colors: SW Pure White and SW Iron Ore

Main Interior Color: Pure White – I will forever declare that Pure White is THE best paint color for whole house interior! Nearly all the walls are painted in this soft white. It looks beautiful in every room, no matter which direction the room faces or if there’s a lot of natural light or not. It’s also a perfect backdrop against our other accent colors…

Secondary Interior Color: Iron Ore – Our kitchen island, mudroom lockers and bathroom cabinetry is painted in this soft black. Iron Ore’s LRV is a 6 (compared to Tricorn Black’s 3 LRV), so even though it looks black when put up next to a Pure White white, it’s a much gentler contrast for an interior space.

Accent: Jasper – This deep, saturated green is one of the best moody paint colors. We’re using this color in our moody powder room. In the windowless room, the dark forest green could almost come across as black – but the Iron Ore vanity provides the contrast to show that the walls really are a deep green.

Accent: Taupe Of The Morning – If there’s anything harder than finding the right white color, it’s finding the right taupe color! This is a subtle mushroom color that is just about as neutral as a taupe can get – not too much grey, not too much beige. My home office built-ins will be painted in this color. It provides just enough contrast against the Pure White walls to add some visual interest, but the softness of this taupe will still keep my office bright & light.

Iron Ore coat & shoe storage provides a moody modern contrast beside Pure White walls

The best tip for planning a Sherwin Williams whole house color palette

Before you even start looking at paint samples, do this one thing: decide on a word or phrase that will describe how you want your home to feel.

Do you want your home to feel bright, modern, clean? Do you want it to feel warm and rustic?

I wanted our new home to feel light and calming with moody moments. This vision helped lead me to the colors we selected.

Defining how you want your home to feel will keep you focused when it comes to putting together a whole color scheme.

How to choose paint color schemes for the whole house

It can feel daunting to create a whole house color palette, but planning ahead actually helps ensure that all the paint colors in a home feel cohesive.

For the interiors, avoid the trap of thinking of each room as a different theme. Instead, imagine how it would feel to walk from room to room.

The exterior colors of a home should be a sort of preview of the interior colors.

You don’t have to use the exact same paint colors as you do on the interior of your home (and most of the time you probably shouldn’t), but the colors should correspond to the overall look and feel of your entire home.

Use the same color families on the exterior as you do on the interior.

For example, if you’re going to be using blues as an accent color inside, consider using a blue as the main exterior color.