Fashionable Facade

THE HOUSE CHRONICLES LOOKS AT HOW TO CHOOSE MATERIALS AND COLORS THAT OFFER GREAT CURB APPEAL

If you think of the exterior sheath of your house as its haircut, suit, jewelry and shoes, you’ll recognize its importance.

The front elevation, the window style, trim, siding, paint colors, brick, stone or cedar shingles you choose will present your house as a cool Armani or a flashy Versace.

Beyond your personal taste, it’s smart to dress for your neighborhood. Dearborn neighborhoods look different from Shelby Township or Novi; Canton looks different from Troy.

The house sheathing choices are the major ones you’ll make after location, builder and floor plan.

First, these choices have impact. “Curb appeal is very high on a customer’s wish list,” says Greg Kime, sales manager for RDK Homes, which is building the house the Free Press is following in the House Chronicles.

Second, you need to lock your exterior choices in early to make sure you get them. Most subdivisions won’t let clients repeat their next-door neighbor’s exterior colors. Locking in fast saves the popular colors for you.

As you lock in your choices, remember this advice: If resale value is important to you, lean toward styles popular in your area.

That’s not a vote for Stepford styling. By all means follow your muse. But it’s not smart to have a house wildly different in style from its neighbors just as it’s not smart to have one extremely different in size.

Whatever the style, a house looks more appealing in a neighborhood with the same mood.

Making a splash

In Van Buren Township — where RDK Homes is building this two-story home for the House Chronicles — the mood is less Armani and more Versace. New house buyers here favor flash.

That’s true in much of metro Detroit’s hot-building areas, including the townships that sweep across western Wayne and eastern Washtenaw counties — Van Buren, Canton, Plymouth, Brownstown and Ypsilanti townships. It’s true also in middle Macomb County — Sterling Heights and Macomb and Shelby townships — where light beige is popular, along with red brick.

House shoppers in Van Buren Township will value the splashy details we’ve added — the two story arch over the front door, the round-topped Palladian window, the sparkling leaded-glass door.

And because RDK Homes will sell this house after the 12 episodes of the House Chronicles, we’re treating it as you would if you were building a house but knew you’d move soon. We’re gearing this house for resale.

With that in mind, the Free Press team had Kime — who has been marketing houses in western Wayne County for about 10 years — guide our exterior choices. He wanted them light and bright. Here’s how it went:

ELEVATION AND FACADE: On March 31 in the Free Press Sunday Real Estate section, we described spending an extra $8,700 for the flashy front that has a two story brick arch and a large rounded window over the door. That was strictly a resale decision. It’s a very popular look here, and Kime strongly recommended it.

If you are new-house shopping, don’t stop at the front; look critically at the back and sides. Some new houses’ back sides look like backsides — an unattractive jumble of unrelated windows.

But on this house from RDK Homes, as well as others you can find in the market, designers took the trouble to create a back view with clean, pleasant lines.

BRICK: Nearly every buyer starts by choosing brick, says Kime.

In typical metro Detroit subdivisions, houses are some combination of brick with siding. Local prejudice says the amount of brick on your house signals your status, like the size of a diamond.

If you agree with this thinking — and not everyone does — shop for a builder who includes more brick in a house’s base price. Here are some possibilities:

• All brick.

• All-brick front, first-floor brick on three sides.

• First-floor brick on all sides.

• First-floor brick on front, brick along foundation on three sides.

• First-floor brick on front only.

• Brick detail, like around a bay window, on front only.

• Brick only as an option. 

Most builders who include some brick also offer more as an option. It’s often part of an exterior package with changes like a larger porch, more roof gables or a bay window.

According to RDK engineer and designer Brian Kime, brick ends up being 4½ to 5 times as expensive as vinyl siding.

Finally, some builders offer decorative brick work — outlining doors and windows in a way that adds a rich texture. This is especially popular in Macomb County, which has a tradition of good brick work, and in high-priced houses anywhere.

At Walden Woods, RDK Homes includes four sides of first floor brick in the base price — a good amount for a house in the $200,000s.

“As a company, we like brick,” says Greg Kime. “We think the market likes brick.” The two other builders here — Walden Woods Homes and Winnick Homes — do the same.

As part of the upgrade with the two-story arch, our brick got extended to two stories on the front.

Van Buren residents may like brick, but not the traditional red brick, says Greg Kime, who urged the Free Press team not to choose it for this house.

Light colors sell here, as in much of metro Detroit. But you will see red brick in areas that favor traditional house styles — Birmingham, the Bloomfields, Troy, for example, close to Ann Arbor or in the rare new home in the Grosse Pointes.

Some house styles are not enhanced by brick. The simple neoclassic styles gaining ground today look best as an all-clapboard house. East-Coast-style shingle houses look better with just shingles or an accent of stone.

FRONT ENTRY: After brick, most buyers choose a front door, says Greg Kime. This is a good place to splurge.

The standard front door for RDK’s homes in Walden Woods is a six-panel steel door with a half length glass panel on each side called a sidelight.

At $925, the first upgrade is a door with a half-moon window in it, with the half-sidelights upgraded to leaded glass.

But we took a full leaded glass door with full-length leaded glass sidelights. At $1,900 it’s one of the most notable upgrades, says Greg Kime.

“Every single friend or family member is going to walk through it,” he says. “It really dresses up the front of the home.”

For a more traditional house, a good upgrade might be a very handsome wood door — oak or walnut. In a truly contemporary house you might like a glass door in a plain steel frame. You can always start with the standard door and replace it later.

SHINGLES: For this house in Van Buren Township, we chose standard asphalt shingles, called 3-tab shingles, but another good choice would have been dimensional shingles. Their irregular texture adds a rich look to the roof. On this house they would have cost $850 extra.

“I personally absolutely love dimensional shingles,” says Greg Kime. “Less than 50 percent of our buyers upgrade to them, but I think they add a lot.

The shingles for the House Chronicles home are warranted for 25 years and winds up to 60 miles per hour — a fairly typical good warranty. The body is three layers — two kinds of asphalt strips with a layer of microfiber in between.

As for colors, the advice is to stay quiet. Shades of brown and black are all you’ll see in the Van Buren market, Greg Kime says, plus an occasional slate color that’s gray with a few muted colors added.

One trend you’ll see more in a few years is imitation tile or slate roofs made from a concrete blend or fiberglass. “It looks real sharp,” says Brian Kime. “You can hardly tell the difference.”

PAINT AND TRIM: There’s very little paint on the exterior of most houses built today. What looks like wood is often vinyl. The main place you’ll see paint is the trim around the windows, doors, porch, pillars and roof edges.

RDK and most other builders use rough-sawn lumber for this trim. RDK buys a form that’s sealed, primed and dried at the factory. If rain falls before painters arrive, there’s no damage to the wood.

“Since we switched to that, we don’t have a problem with knots bleeding through or cupping or splitting of the wood,” says Brian Kime.

Some builders do trim these areas with lumber grades that can split and crack. While you’re choosing your builder, look at the trim work on existing houses to see if it’s high quality.

Nine of 10 clients choose to paint trim the same color as the siding, Greg Kime says. A few choose a contrasting color. If you’re thinking of this, try to see an example first, because it could make the house looked chopped up.

SIDING: The bulk of house siding today is vinyl, which doesn’t dent like aluminum and doesn’t need paint like wood. Work crews like it because it’s lightweight and doesn’t cut their hands like aluminum. It costs less than wood.

But some upscale subdivisions do require real wood, which has a richer look. Most wood siding today is not conventional boards, according to Brian Kime, but oriented strand board or OSB, formed to look like boards.

One fine newer product is fiber- cement siding, which has become a top choice for high-end and historic-style houses, because it looks so much like real wood. (Come back to the Free Press Sunday Real Estate section next week for more on siding products). Fiber cement siding does have to be painted at 10- to 15-year intervals.

Wood siding and fiber-cement siding both cost about 11/2 times as much as vinyl siding, says Brian Kime.

Common vinyl siding has many variations. A fairly standard siding, says Brian Kime, is called a double-four. Each strip is formed like two rows of siding, with simulated boards each 4 inches deep.

Another type is triple-three — three rows of simulated boards, each 3 inches deep. This smaller board is appropriate for some Victorian- style houses.

On the other hand, if you like the neoclassic houses gaining ground today, those most often use siding or boards 6 or 8 inches deep.

Vinyl siding can look cheap or very good, depending on the aesthetics and trim with which it’s installed. Take a good look at any builder’s previous work.

The House Chronicles home has double-four vinyl siding. The color is a very light beige, matching the paint on the trim. All these are popular choices today and should be good for resale.

WINDOWS: Windows deserve a whole article of their own, but Greg Kime says most buyers don’t question them. “People invest money in whirlpool tubs, but they rarely request an upgraded window.”

On one hand, ample windows promote a pleasant mood inside the house. On the other hand, they lose a great deal of heat. The Rvalue of an ordinary two-pane vinyl window is about R-2, compared to R-13 in the adjacent wall.

Our personal preference is for a good wood-frame window, like those made by Andersen, Pella, Marvin and others, but they’re not often included in a midpriced house. (If they were, we would certainly grab that deal.)

Brian Kime says substituting a mid-quality Pella window in this house would cost 2-2½ times the cost of the good vinyl windows that are standard.

What many buyers do want is a window that makes an impressive statement — for example a big arched window in a two-story foyer.

But architectural purists are cold to today’s odd-shaped windows. If you vote with this group, spend some time with high-quality architecture or building magazines to see how windows enhance a good house design when they’re appropriate to the architecture.

Whatever window you get, these things should be on your wish list: two sealed panes with a vacuum between them — better yet, an inert gas like argon; reflective coating that will help keep heat where it is — inside in winter, outside in summer; screens, if you would like them; tilt-in washing ability if you want it.

Picking the outside sheath is easy, Greg Kime says. It’s the interior that gets complicated. Watch for that installment in July in the House Chronicles. Meanwhile, come back June 9 to the Free Press Sunday Real Estate section, when we’ll walk through the insulation in this house and tell you about exciting new choices.

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