Which Paver Colors Look Best on a Coastal Georgia Home? (And How to Test Them First)

You already made the big decision that you’re getting a paver patio. But then you were given a book with at least a few hundred different colors to choose from and the whole project stopped because of a decision that you didn’t expect to be difficult: which one goes on my house? This is the part people lose sleep over, and that’s because pavers are not like paint. You don’t get to change your mind in three years and just paint over it.

My name is Randy Thompson. I left an aerospace career to start All Out Hardscapes & Lighting Solutions. The company is veteran-owned, and we are a Techo-Bloc Pro certified installer. I’m also going to tell you exactly where the corners get cut in this trade, and that includes the ones that make my quote seem expensive compared to the other bid. Over the last 10-plus years my crews and I have built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Lowcountry, from Wilmington Island to Savannah Quarters. As part of my experience I’ve also looked at lots of paver colors out in the sunlight next to real houses.

So here is what my experience has taught me and it isn’t what a catalog wants me to say. I’m not going to give you a list of five colors that look good on a coastal Georgia home because I’d be guessing at your house. The colors that look best on your home are already on your home. My job is to find them, and then let you see them before you commit to anything.

Which Paver Colors Actually Look Best on My Coastal Georgia Home?

There isn’t a universal top five, and if someone who hasn’t looked at your house gives you a list then it’s just a sales tool. The paver colors that will look best on your home are already on your home. They are in the roof, the trim, the brick or siding, and the green in the yard. We color-code the hardscape to the house, every time.

Coastal Georgia gives you two ideas for choosing a color in every backyard before you even pick anything. The first is green that stays most of the year. Live oaks, pines, and palms don’t turn brown here in January the way a northern yard does, so a Lowcountry patio will sit on green almost year round. The second is the sun. Most backyards here take direct afternoon light for most of the summer, and direct light changes how a color looks compared to how it looks on a page indoors.

That is why the question isn’t which paver looks the prettiest in the book. It’s which one will make everything else you have in your yard look good in the light against your house. Those are two different questions, and so they have two different answers.

How Do I Pull the Right Colors Off My Own House?

First, walk around the front yard and then the back yard, and write down the colors you didn’t choose and can’t change cheaply. Those are the ones you need to pay attention to.

• The roof, because it’s the biggest single block of color on the property
• The trim, because it’s the color repeated the most across the house
• The brick, siding, or stucco, because it’s the part that physically touches the patio
• The masonry already there, like a chimney, a foundation, or a front step, because it’s showing you what tone works
• The green in the yard, because in the Lowcountry it is there almost every month of the year

On a backyard we color coded, the trim on the house was all tan colors. So we took those tans and browns into the backyard, into the hardscape, and let the landscape do the bright part. We put in fresh dark green sod, the same green as the trees behind the property, and with all that brown it looked exactly the way it was supposed to.

Here’s the part most people get backward. They pick the paver they like best in the book and then hope that the yard will look good around it. The hardscape is the field, not just a feature. When the patio is in the tan and brown range, the green around it looks brighter: the dark green of the trees behind the fence, the fresh green of new sod, the plants you put in. If you put very green-cast pavers into a Lowcountry yard that has that much green to start with, the two cancel each other out and you lose the landscape and the patio both. That’s why we check colors against the house instead of just picking one off a page. And it’s why two houses on the same street can need two different patios.

How Do I See a Paver Color on My House Before I Commit?

When we go to the initial meeting with a client, the first thing we give them is the Techo-Bloc book. It shows every paver and every color they make, the same ones that are on our site. Techo-Bloc is the only company we use, so that book isn’t a sampler with forty different brands. It’s a menu and what’s not in it isn’t an option.

If you’ve sent photos or a Pinterest board ahead of time, we’ve already put tabs on three or four pages of pavers that are very close to the ones that you sent. That saves you from having to flip through a few hundred random choices.

Then comes the part that decides it. There’s a QR code that opens Techo-Bloc’s view-in-my-space tool, an augmented-reality preview. What that means is that the camera on your phone shows your actual yard with the paver laid on it on your screen. It works the same way furniture apps do when they put a couch into a photo of your living room, except what you are placing is your patio in a picture with your actual siding, trim, and roof.

• Scan the code on the page you are looking at
• Select the color you are considering
• Point the phone at the area where the patio is going
• Walk the phone up to the house and hold the color against the siding, the trim, and the roof line

Be sure and check two things while you have the picture on your phone. Look at the color in the light you will actually live in, not just at noon, because a color that you choose under indoor light isn’t the same color you will get at six in the evening in July. And picture it wet as well as dry. Concrete and stone surfaces look darker when they’re wet so if this patio is going next to a pool or under a downspout, the wet version is one you will see a lot.

There’s one place where we change color after the fact, and it’s worth knowing so you don’t expect it on your pavers. On poured concrete, but not on pavers, we sometimes put on a color enhancer, an oil-based product that dries to a wet look that stays all the time and makes the surface a darker brown. That same concrete dry can look a little pink. That’s with a concrete finish, but with pavers, the color you approve on the screen is the color you will actually get.

The Color You Pick Decides How Often You Clean

Nobody in a showroom talks about this, and it’s the part we want you to hear. When you pick a color you are deciding about maintenance as well as design. A darker color that doesn’t show dirt cuts down the pressure washing and the brushing and brooming. In a wide-open backyard, a dark color that hides dirt can go three to five years between pressure washings. A light color in that same yard will collect the same dirt and it will show, so it needs more frequent cleaning.

The tradeoff works the other way on heat. Dark surfaces absorb more heat in direct sun, and coastal Georgia summers are long. If this is a pool deck people will walk barefoot across in the middle of the afternoon, that matters more than how often it needs cleaning. If it’s a seating area shaded by live oaks, heat matters less, but you have a different problem: leaves falling on your patio year round, which means cleaning more often no matter which color you picked.

So answer one question before you decide on the lightest color in the book. Are you the person who is going to wash this patio, or hire it washed, and how often are you willing to do either? That answer narrows the decision down faster than anything on the page.

Does the Color I Want Lock Me Into a Certain Paver?

Sometimes, and it’s better to know now. Color goes with a product line and those are built for different jobs. In the patio industry, the wider, more vibrant colors are in the higher product range and that is true for what we install.

Blue 60 in the HD2 line is our most common install. HD2 is Techo-Bloc’s high-definition color process, and it’s where the vibrant colors come from. If a color is one you can’t get in a standard paver, that’s the line it came from.

Villagio is what we normally use for walkways and paths. It can be laid in any design and any radius without cutting, so curves come out clean instead of chopped.

Eva is the budget line. When the cost is more important than the color range, that’s what we choose, and it still makes a patio we will put our name on.

If what you want is fully custom, a logo, an inlay, or a pattern that changes across the patio, we handle that one personally and sit down with you one on one. We are the ones on this crew who know the paver lines front to back, and custom color work deserves a conversation, not a quick look through the book.

Moving up from a lesser paver to Blue 60 in HD2 changes the paver, but not the base under it or the crew that builds it. On a typical job that step up costs about $1,000. Considering that’s the surface you will see every day for as long as you own the house, it’s the cheapest part of the project to get right.

When You Can Skip All of This and Just Pick From the Book

We will talk ourselves out of our own process here, because not every project needs it. If you’re just putting in a short walkway down the side of the house that nobody sees from the street or from a window, then pick something that goes with your brick and move on. Color matching pays off on the things you look at every day, off the back of the house, out the kitchen window, and around the pool.

Some houses also make it easy. A white or light gray house with a dark roof and white trim will work with most of the samples in the book without a problem. If that is your house, you have fewer wrong answers than most people do, and you should enjoy it and not overthink it.

And if you’ve already stood in your backyard and known exactly what you want, we are not going to come up with a process to prove we did something. Bring us the color and we’ll put it up against the house, and if it works, it works.