Learn the top 28 home exterior trends 2023 brings and how to easily add them to your home.
When you build your first home or your fifth you can feel the excitement grow as you choose your design elements and decide on features. Perhaps you add columns, maybe a porch. You might talk with your architect to brainstorm ideas to create a unique home that doesn’t look cookie-cutter.
Your architect might suggest some home exterior trends. If you already own a home and decide to remodel it, your options might include some of these same trends. Adding a portico, balcony, deck, or stair shelves for plants offers an exciting way to update the appearance of your home without too great an expense.
Where can you get ideas before you meet with your architect? Right here, of course. Scroll down for 28 hot design trends in home exteriors.
Home Exterior Trends to Enhance Curb Appeal
1. Contrasting, colorful doors offer one trend that swept the nation. This black front door matches the shutters of this classic brick home in Oregon. While many think of black as the uncolor, many brightly colored doors also abound. You won’t need a new door unless you want one. For this look, just purchase dark paint and change your existing door color.
2. The starkness of white offers the new “it” color for homes, but with color pops. Typically, the front entry door and garage doors contrast with the white exterior, but you can also use matching doors to create a panorama of white, as this modern home does.
3. Tropical homes afford homeowners the latest trend in modern housing. Of course, building a tropical-inspired home far outside of a tropical setting has also become a popular trend. Use landscaping to provide tropical foliage, even if you have to use potted plants. A swimming pool can offer an ocean feel. The wood plank facade on the home looks like bamboo from a distance.
4. This home gives living on the water new meaning. It also shows off the new trend in metal roof designs and metal houses. The tiny house juts out over the water of the lake from its sandy shoreline, proving you can build an exciting home in any size and location, including a coniferous forest.
5. As this suburban home in Vancouver, Canada, shows, landscaping and trimming the yard completes the luxury home. The path from the driveway to the garage entrance on the side of the home helps this home exude curb appeal.
6. Other building elements shaping the current look of homes across the nation include window frames and shutters. Take, for example, these two windows with white wood frames, blue shutters, and other wood elements like decorative flower boxes. This timeless image of comfort, seemingly from another time, tops the trends in the US.
7. Balconies aren’t just for five-star hotels now. Today’s home trends include big balconies on rambling homes. This balcony uses a wooden floor and brick walls to extend the modern loft design from the interior to the exterior in one of the top brick trends 2023 will use.
8. Fun and fantastical colors brighten many country homes now. This summer house features a bright orange exterior that offers an exciting contrast to the green of its garden. Although the homeowner closed the wood shutters for this photo, opening them floods the rooms with light.
9. Try an emerging trend – the mobile tiny house. This style of vacation home offers a great option for outdoor experiences and observing wildlife. By choosing a mobile tiny house, lovers of outdoor living earn the best of both worlds – easy access to the outdoors and a sturdy, traditionally constructed home. Unlike RVs, which share aluminum and metal construction elements with mobile homes, tiny houses use traditional materials. This makes them safer in dangerous weather such as tornadoes.
10. Black and gray began trending in 2022 on the interior and the exterior. Here, a gray marble exterior offers a unique appearance for this high-tech contemporary home. A black brick staircase finishes off the look. The home offers an organic appeal that complements the green trees surrounding it.
11. Some trends emerged from home designers exploring modern home options and construction. This country home offers a spacious terrace that shows one option in the outdoor spaces trend to which balconies and porticos also belong. Designers created a sub-trend of this by offering a private outdoor space off of a bedroom, such as a patio or a balcony.
12. Instead of simply traveling to Europe, many architects began borrowing elements of Nordic-style architecture and building them in US housing, such as this stunning two-story house. This white modern-style home with a gray roof offers one rendition of this growing trend.
13. High-tech houses aren’t just for tech barons like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. This luxury home offers high tech in an emerald forest with a sapphire-colored pool. In addition to its large terrace, the homeowner can install an outdoor or indoor staircase to enjoy its flat roof as a roof porch.
14. Designers made space itself a trend by offering large rooms and unencumbered spaces as shown in this country house. The wood terrace offers an outdoor space defined from the yard. Its concrete stairs provide the look of stone, and their organic material complements the landscaping. Its large windows offer the outdoors from within.
15. A boxy, rectangular design and lots of glass define this home’s unique architectural features. The futuristic design of this country house uses energy-efficient material for its exterior siding and cladding indicative of the continuation of the green building movement. This shows in the siding trends 2023 introduces. The swimming pool creates a living water body feel by locating it flush with the ground.
16. Here’s a trend that began in 2021 and still pervades. The color pop belongs to the exterior paint job, in this case, a bright yellow wall. The door and window trim use a stark white for their uncolor. Gray brick finishes out the look.
17. Verandas made a comeback and now they’re trending throughout modern home exteriors. This design creates a ceiling of hearty wood beams with a cobblestone floor. These natural materials offer an organic complement to the home’s green garden.
18. Here’s another example of the breathtaking front entry door on a classic brick home. Its dark varnish offers a natural tone that blends with the stately brick.
19. Lighter wood also affords the homeowner an elegant front door look on a brick home. This design features stone steps and light-colored stone accents. Surrounded by flowers this home ties the stone in with the brick using small front columns. Brick and stone offer two of the most durable building materials and one of the most popular building materials trends.
20. Another of the popular exterior house trends, this stone wall in front defines the path to the front door ensuring the grounds don’t get trampled as people visit. Stone and pavers walkways complement the wall and offer a cohesive appearance.
21. You don’t have to use massive design elements to make a visual impact. Look at how this red door enhances the visual interest when paired with this cream-colored home with shaker siding.
22. Borrowing from Europe again, this home in Soest, Germany uses a design called half-timbered. Its door offers the emerging trend in design with its white painted insets on dark wood varnish.
23. Traveling to the islands of Europe, we find this contemporary home in Athens, Greece that also exemplifies the natural wood entry door trend. Whether simple or carved and ornate, these doors offer an Old World look that began trending in the past two years.
24. Combining potted plants and stands with white-trimmed windows shows how adding something organic can create the design element that differentiates a home from others. Using natural materials, such as pine or oak wood, constructing these stair-shaped homes for pots and planters creates a garden where there would normally be no room for one.
25. In the US, architects recently revived the Arts and Crafts style porches used in England at the turn of the 20th century. Just as with fashion, home designers also look to history, such as this Great Bradley, Suffolk, home to draw inspiration from its outdoor spaces. This porch served as inspiration for the porches now under construction in accordance with people’s desire for more outdoor time post-COVID-19 sequestration.
26. Try this take on the modern home with a balcony and veranda. Done in white timber, this Hampton timber-style home features the airy space outdoors that has become a leading trend in US home design. The windows of the home afford a view of the sweeping veranda and emit natural light that saves the homeowner from needing to turn on the interior lights until sunset.
27. Going one further than the tropical-themed buildings, the coastal beach designs of the US have permeated the rest of the country. Travel to interior areas of the country and you’ll still see locations with beach houses but on green grass instead of sand.
28. The trend of seclusion and privacy tops the list in the US. This luxury mountain home exterior showcases the cedar wood of its natural building materials. Although rambling and spacious, the home seems to blend with the snowy mountain due to its organic materials.
What Home Exterior Trends Went Bye-Bye?
Home fashions change just as clothing fashions change. A few years ago, a different set of home exterior trends prevailed but they’re now outdated trends. What went the wayside for this new look in home exteriors? What will get replaced with the home building trends 2023 brings?
Forget plain front doors.
People started replacing basic entry doors with old hardware and flat surfaces with those with character. Whether you choose a vividly painted door or a carved wood door or a door with bold trim, your front door should stand out from the others in the neighborhood.
The Vinyl Siding Rage Ended
You’ll still see vinyl siding, but designers stopped covering the whole house in it. Using vinyl that looks sort of like wood saved many people from painting their homes. Today, though, other siding and cladding options exist, so you can use one that resembles brick, natural wood, or shou sugi ban wood. Plus, stone made a comeback. This low-maintenance, natural material has been a favorite of Europeans for centuries. Make your home your castle, they say.
No More Homes with All One Siding Material
Say goodbye to the saltbox look and those tiny tract houses covered from eaves to the foundation in beige vinyl siding. That predictability went out of style. Mixed materials replaced it. Whether the homeowner remodels or builds new, mix the cladding and siding materials. Many homes still use some vinyl siding for the look of clapboard but blend it with stone veneer, light stone siding, brick, or wood composite. Cement, fiber cement panels, and wood composite also feature strongly, especially in futuristic and new modern designs.
Forget Cookie-Cutter Outdoor Spaces
Your deck shouldn’t look like every deck in the neighborhood. Build an outdoor space that connects the interior of your home to its exterior. Rather than decorating it with a set of patio furniture using the matchy-matchy look, decorate it with the same methodology you would an interior room. Choose an outdoor table you like, then pair it with a white or brown wicker loveseat. Add outdoor chairs of metal or wood and comfortable cushions. Potted trees and plants around the patio or deck round out the look.
Forget About Single Color Exteriors
Even those with old New England homes now eschew the single exterior paint color idea. Designers only place all white works now on an ultra-modern, also called contemporary, design. Those rectangular designs can handle the solid color of monochrome, but traditional homes need trim. The exterior house color trends 2023 brings replaces single-color homes with eye-catching combinations like brown and eggshell blue or yellow and blue-green.
How Do Trends Develop?
While fashion does change seasonally, housing trends don’t. That means you can go trendy with your design and know it will last. Don’t buy it? Your child probably plays The Sims 4 and uses a design called CosmoLux. That refers to Mid-Century Modern design – the design trend that prevailed in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. It made a comeback, too. In interior and exterior home design, a trend lasts decades and resurges, sometimes before a century even passes.
So, how the heck do trends happen?
Expert exterior designers don’t envision designs that become trends. People’s ideals and culture change. If you’ve ever flipped through an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, you’ve seen the page that shows what women wear “on the street.” Those street fashions represent culture and they’re where designers find their ideas. When social mood and culture change, so do fashion and home fashion.
That’s why outdoor spaces took on a new look in the past three years. When COVID-19 hit, most of the world stopped. Suddenly shut inside to save humanity, we spent time outdoors on our porches, balconies, and porticos. In cities, balconies on apartment complexes naturally socially distanced people so they could safely spend time outside and, at least, long-distance with others.
After a couple of years of round after round of sequestration, we got tired of it. Our porches and balconies saved us and offered a respite. Now, we all earned a new appreciation for outdoor time.
That cultural shift showed up in the home designs almost immediately. When our balconies became the only way to have fresh air, people ordered furniture, lights, cushions, and more. They turned their tiny slab jutting out from a window into a paradise. Now, home designers and architects consider a deck, porch, portico, or balcony a must-have in a home.
Pick a home trend and try it out. You’re safe doing so because it will probably last at least a decade.