Drive through almost any new development built in the last decade and you’ll see the same house repeated with minor variations: white board siding, black framed windows, a gabled roof, maybe a barn door detail over the garage. It worked because it was safe, photogenic, and easy for builders to replicate at scale. That’s also exactly why it’s losing steam now. When a look becomes the default instead of a choice, it stops signaling taste and starts signaling templates.
Why the farmhouse look spread so fast in the first place
The style of the modern farmhouse did not emerge from farm life. It emerged from a few very popular television shows about house renovations and catalogs of builders who sought a design style flexible enough to be applied to any lot and any budget. White siding is great at hiding construction tricks, black trim costs very little to install, and the combination photographs well in the listings of real estate agents despite the actual quality of the construction.
This is where it is starting to catch up with itself. Style designed for universality does not age in the same way as a style that is designed to suit a particular home, climate, and location. Ten years of identical white farmhouses everywhere have caused people to recognize it as such.
What’s actually replacing it
In light of the problem being generic itself, then the solution can not be something new to mimic but a series of options that will demonstrate a house has been thought through – and this is happening in three dimensions at the same time: color, material, and orientation.
The color option is obvious and most pronounced. Charcoal, dark green, and brown facades replace the bright white color that dominated for the previous decades; partly because they looked more purposeful, but mostly because they do not show weathering as badly as the bright white color.
Material choice is another example of solving this issue from a different perspective. Instead of using one siding all around the exterior of a building, the design choice is now moving to using combinations of siding materials: either the bottom part of the facade is made of stone or bricks, and the top part is made of something lighter, or two types of siding are used alternately, in order to break down the mass of a house facade.
Direction is the least obvious of the three, and arguably doing the most. Vertical metal siding has become one of the more common choices here, especially on modern and transitional builds, because the vertical lines create a sense of height and a cleaner, more architectural silhouette than the horizontal board look that farmhouse style was built on. It also reads as more current without requiring a homeowner to commit to a fully modern or industrial style throughout the rest of the house. Color, material, and direction all end up doing the same job from different angles: making the exterior look like a decision instead of a default.
Regional and site specific design is coming back
Color, materials, and direction tell us what’s changing on each home’s exterior. They don’t give us any reason for the change being so broad and widespread, and so consistent, at this point in time. The real change underpinning everything is that exteriors are beginning to react to the location of the house again. It used to be that a house built on a forested lot in the Pacific Northwest and another on a dry lot in Texas would often end up looking exactly alike in terms of color scheme and materials regardless of the differences in environment and climate between the two places. This is changing. Designers and builders are now favoring the use of materials and colors that make sense for the actual lot: darker colors that fit in with the tree line, lighter reflective materials in hotter climates, architectural shapes that evoke regional rather than national architecture.
This isn’t just about looks. Site sensitive exterior materials tend to last longer because they are different from generic materials in terms of durability in the particular climate.
How to update without chasing the next trend
What homeowners will be making right from the get go is the same mistake that people made about the farmhouse look – approaching it as a new formula to follow. This completely misses the point of this adjustment. What made those buildings interesting isn’t that white got traded for charcoal but that those options were selected specifically for that building and not just as a formula to repeat.
When renovating rather than building new, this means that you need to start with the ideas your building and plot actually offer rather than those which are popular at a certain design account right now. It’s clear that a steep roofed building in a colder environment is going to be wearing a dark, textured exterior in a very different way than a low slung ranch in a flat location. Consider proportion and material rather than color first. While an ugly massing won’t be corrected by a trendy choice of paint, the right material change might actually fix the problem.
Farmhouse aesthetics aren’t dying off because they were unattractive. Rather, their downfall came about because they ceased to be a choice and instead became a default style. Whatever replaces it on a large scale will soon fall prey to the same fate. And this is really what the whole point of the matter has been all along: The aim is not to come up with some new aesthetic that everyone will follow, but rather one that feels deliberate and intentional for your own home.
