Hi everyone, I am in the final stages of a whole-home renovation that includes an addition above the garage. I really need help deciding colour of the exterior cladding of the addition. We will be using smooth hardie panel, which I hope will nicely contrast the existing red vinyl siding that covers the rest of the house. The home is in a suburban neighbourhood of 1950's post-war homes. New windows for the addition will be black; existing windows are still white but we plan to paint them black in the next few years. We also plan to paint over the red vinyl siding in the next few years, so whatever we choose for the addition will need to work with both red (though less important) and a deep grey/blue in the future (this colour is flexible; it just needs to match with the stone at the bottom of the house which reads pink against the current red).

Architect renderings depict a deep charcoal with black windows, including some black detail under the windows, which we really like the look of. Problem is, off-the-shelf Hardie colours don't seem to work. Night gray reads blue and Iron gray reads green. (see pics) Custom Hardie colours are only viewable online so it's super daunting to choose without first being able to see/touch a sample in person, and we also don't want to wait too long (I assume getting a custom colour from dream collection will take much longer than if we get one of the classic colours).

Another option is to go light grey for addition and paint the red siding charcoal.

So, options for addition include:

1. dark charcoal (paired with red siding that will ultimately be painted deep blue/gray)

2. light gray (paired with red siding that will ultimately be painted dark charcoal)

3. other?

Help! Thank you so much in advance for any advice!