Color Your World

Limitless options for interior and exterior hues

- Dale Mulfinger

What color should your cabin be, inside and out? Will you try to blend with the natural environment around your cabin? Do you want to set your cabin apart from all the beige vinyl-sided cabins along your beach? There are so many options: the color of birch bark for the trees outside your cabin, moss green as found on boulders near your lakeshore, hazel like your spouse’s eyes, or International Harvester red for your favorite toy tractor collection.

In most locations, you’ll have unlimited choices as to the exterior color you select, whether it be pumpkin orange or lime green. You may receive the wrath of neighbors, but most likely they won’t have legal recourse. However, some cabin development sites come with covenants that may dictate the exterior look of your retreat. In these instances, your homeowners, lake or land association has the final say regarding the look of your exterior. They may not agree that although the Lady Slipper, Minnesota’s state flower, is found to be pink in nature, that it should be the color of your cabin.

I have a predilection for suggesting colors found at the sites of my clients’ cabins, and after a visit to the site, I often bring back to my office various natural colored elements, such as creamy or silver white birch tree bark, deep red sumac twigs, soft green lichen or the accent color of blueberries (A & F).

Or, I sometimes draw from the historic exterior cabin colors of white, barn red or creosote brown (B). The latter is one of my favorites, as it was a popular wood preservative on log structures and lodges a century ago, and this color subdues the cabin into its natural setting, which can make the cabin appear smaller in its surroundings.