Power of colourful exterior finishes on buildings, property

A long time ago, before the advent of colour television, the real estate landscape was just as displeasing. The visual texture of buildings was bland, with limited shades of colours mostly oscillating between grey and white.

It took courageous souls to start painting their iron-sheet roofs maroon or green, but as a way to ward off rust.

Then gradually, over the years, the colours started streaming down the walls, and the bland concrete finishes became vibrant, bursting with shades of orange and red.

The white and off-whites type of paint synonymous with government houses is today red or yellow, as seen in the new affordable housing projects. A stroll or drive through the city, and its nodes, shows how courageous developers and some homeowners have become and embraced the once shunned bold and shouting colours, that was not the norm decades ago.

While technology in paint manufacturing has had a role to play, President Architectural Association of Kenya (AAK) George Ngege points out how precedents in other markets such as Europe are influencing this trend. For example, in 2022, Kisumu County Government ordered property owners to paint their buildings white and blue.

These are the same colours that property owners in Mombasa County were ordered to paint their buildings back in 2018 to make them blend with the blue oceanic sight of the Indian Ocean.

This was to mimic Santorini, a Greek Island adjacent to the Aegean Sea. Like Mombasa, Santorini is also a tourist attraction site receiving more than three million visitors annually. 

“Those kinds of regulations are there in other countries. In fact, there are places in Europe where streets have assigned colours. You can’t just leave open stones,” says Mr Ngege. He explains the correlation between the colour and the ambience or emotion it elicits in people.

“If you find a street that is vibrant and colourful, people tend to be happy and there is less crime. If you go to a street that is dull or grey and not well maintained, people perceive misfits,” he says.

There is also the aspect of costs. Decades ago, painting your house externally increased the cost of construction.

And to minimise these costs, homeowners would choose to leave the stones bare or just paint the beams and columns for contrast purposes.

However, due to improved technology in paint manufacturing, there are options. This is unlike before when paint colours were being tinted by hard-to-find ‘experts’ with Rain Man-type of memory who could recall the pre-primary 8-4-4 syllabus on what colour is begotten from mixing green and red.

“Now, we have a situation where you can walk into any dealership of a paint company and get a mix of paint there. There are thousands of colours (shades), and it can be mixed right there. You choose on the chart, they feed into the computer and you get your colour,” says Mr Ngege.

Basco Paints Managing Director Kamlesh Shah recalls back in the day, more than 30 years ago, when the available shades were barely 200. “At that time, paint was sold on shade colours of 180 or so on one fan chart – not even a fan deck – and you had to select paint from there,” he says.

He says products were simple, such as vinyl silk, super gloss and some vanishes. However, as technology advanced, so did the paint manufacturing process and available options. 

Mr Shah says the latest product from Basco Paints, Aqua Tech Rainshield, can be tinted into 1,800 different shades. And this can be done on-site in the 800 hardware outlets stocking their products.

This advancement, he says, has been made possible through Artificial Intelligence (AI), which gives developers more options when it comes to painting exteriors.

Key to this development is that the product is waterproof.

“With AI consumer insight that we have applied to this product, we came up with a futuristic kind of a prediction model where we asked: what kind of colours will be most suitable or most selected on a need basis by the consumers,” explains the MD.

It is this query that developed the solution, which also works as paint.

“Normally, people do not like the kind of waterproofing that they would have to do now and then, and there is chiselling and breaking of stones and laying the atactic polypropylene membrane and again replastering,” he says. “So, we came up with this solution, which also works as a paint.” Mr Shah says they inquired from AI on what kind of colour it would recommend for the future, based on the current trends, and it came up with 1,800 shades.

“A lot of them are, of course are pastel because many times you may not want the very loud reds, greens and blues. I don’t think the Kenyan people are made for that, but they do want vibrant colours like tango, Tibet yellow, pink pastel shade, where you can do all those kinds of shades on these products, yet if it’s for external use,” says Mr Shah.

Light green, light cream, light blue, and brown are some of the most sought-after options for exterior paint jobs. Colours, as the Chairperson Board of Registration of Architects and Quantity Surveyors Silvester Muli explains, are the first recognisable aspect of any structure.