The Victorian paint job
Going down the rabbit hole of historically accurate paint colors.
When a rehabbed Victorian in my neighborhood recently hit the market, I just about ran to the open house. The pale green house had appeared rough around the edges when it last sold two years ago. I wanted to see its transformation.
Now the 1885 Queen Anne home is all spiffed up with a fresh coat of white. As I approached, I couldn’t shake Dad’s voice in my head. Not historically accurate. Not historically accurate.
My parents found white Victorians atrocious. They favored darker, moodier colors. Our house was light blue only because the previous owner had scored a close-out deal on the paint. My parents had plans for a new historically accurate paint scheme.
In his journal, Dad sang the praises of a book published in 1988 called Victorian Exterior Decoration: How to Paint Your Nineteenth-Century American House Historically. Could the book be a clue into Dad’s intentions? I order a used copy online.
The authors draw from 19th-century essays, trade catalogs, and paint company brochures. They advise homeowners to honor the philosophy of Victorian architects, who advised using colors that naturally occurred in soil, rocks, wood, and tree bark.
I hadn’t realized until I read the book that Dad’s distaste for white Victorians came from one of Riverside’s founding fathers. Calvert Vaux, who was Frederick Law Olmsted’s partner and co-designer, had strong feelings on the subject.
He found white houses vulgar because they drew too much attention to themselves. Vaux, also a landscape architect like Olmsted, felt houses should blend with the natural environment around them.
Calling for designs “adapted to the location, and not the location to the design,” Vaux favored a picturesque blending of the house and the natural landscape; “every attempt to force individual buildings into prominent notice is an evidence either of a vulgar desire for notoriety at any sacrifice, or of an ill-educated eye and taste.
- Calvert Vaux, as quoted in Victorian Exterior Decoration
Flipping through Victorian Exterior Decoration, I find two houses in the same Second Empire architectural style as our home. Both are straw yellow with dark red and green trim. Dad likely used these as inspiration. The main color of our house would be brownish yellow. The trim and windows would be two shades of green, and details like the window sashes would be an earthy burgundy.
All colors in the palette took their cue from nature. Calvert Vaux would have approved.
My parents looked into hiring professional painters, but the quotes for painting a 6,000-square-foot house were astronomical. This would be a job they’d have to do themselves. They completed small portions at a time. The vision spottily came together.
The full paint scheme came to life on the front entrance. First, my parents restored the rotted columns, stripped decades of old paint from the portico and front doors, and installed the stained glass transom window. Then they painted the columns and exterior the Dijon mustardy yellow. They used tiny paintbrushes to apply earthy red and light olive on the finer trim and embellishments.
My parents proudly took pictures of the completed work. These completed sections look beautiful. Like new. The attention to detail is evident in the up-close shots.
When I look at photos of the entire house, sometimes I cup my hands to frame the front entryway. My hands cover the rest where the paint is flaking and the wood siding is exposed, some of it rotting. If I focus my attention on the finished parts, I can imagine all of it painted.
I believed it would happen eventually. My parents seemed always to be working towards that goal. They would be out there all summer long, heat gun in one hand, paint scraper in the other. Now I wonder if all that old paint they were scraping off contained lead. And as a practical matter, how long would it have taken for two people to strip paint off an entire house?
When my parents sold our house, very little of the Victorian-era paint scheme had been realized. Only the front entryway and portions of the side portico had been painted. I helped Dad paint the “for sale” sign. We used cans of paint Victorian Yellow from the basement that were originally intended for the house’s exterior.
The new owners gut-rehabbed the house and gave the entire house a fresh coat of paint. I’ll give you one guess what color the house is today.
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