Choosing the Right Awning for Your Outdoor Aesthetic

Generally, choosing an awning isn’t a super hard decision. After all, choosing the wrong awning won’t ruin your aesthetic in the majority of cases. An ACP awning won’t look too off on an older-fashioned house. A fabric awning still looks fine on a contemporary home.

Nonetheless, if you want to bring out the full potential of your outdoor space and home’s beauty, you need to find the right awning type, style, and color. Of course, you could just hire a good awning contractor like Uni Shades to find the right awning and install it for you and be done with it. But even then, it’s still better to know what’s going on and be able to judge whether your hired contractor is doing a good job

So if you’re looking to learn how to determine the right awning to complement your home, you’re in the right place.

1. Awning Materials

First up is the awning material. The awning material is actually going to play the biggest part in your home’s aesthetic. Colors are important, but unless it’s a fabric awning, your color choices will be limited by your awning material, which is why the awning material is the first thing to look at.

Fabric

Fabric awnings can be extremely classy or very plain, depending on the style and colors you’re using. They can come in any color you want, and you can put any design or words you wish. Given their versatility, fabric tends to work for most spaces, except for when you’re trying to go for a luxurious look.

Glass

Glass awnings are without a doubt the go-to choice for luxurious, elegant spaces. This can be for your office building, your contemporary home, or even your restaurant if it’s a posh restaurant. As mentioned earlier, besides fabric, the color of your awnings is going to largely depend on the material. For glass, your choices are transparent, translucent, or opaque.

Polycarbonate

Polycarbonate is essentially tougher glass, so your options are the same. Same as for glass, polycarbonate also gives your space a sleek, grand, luxurious look.

Aluminium Composite

Aluminum composite panels (ACP) usually come in a single, greyish tone. They can be customized to other colors, but it’s not a common practice. This is because ACP awnings bring a modern, practical vibe to your space that can be affected by a change in color. If you’re going for a sleek, modern look, but don’t want it to look too grand or luxurious like with glass, ACP is a great choice.

Metal

Metal awnings bring an industrial vibe to your home or business, which is a pretty specific aesthetic, so it’s only for a select group of homes and businesses going for the industrial look.

Awnings are similar to ACP ones–while they can be painted over, they’re usually just left in their natural color to avoid interfering with the industrial vibe.

2. Patterns And Designs

Now for the patterns and designs, assuming you’re going with fabric, metal, or ACP, which can be customized quite flexibly, here are the two main looks you’ll be going with.

Bold Patterns

Bold patterns are characterized by loud, vibrant colors, and usually stripes or geometric shapes. These are the types of awnings you often see used for ice cream stores. These are usually meant to wow customers or your visitors at first glance and catch their attention.

Neutral Designs

Neutral designs are quite the opposite of bold patterns. As the name suggests, neutral designs employ neutral colors that are softer and are meant to subtly fit in with the surroundings without drawing much attention.

Neutral design awnings are used in many homes to fit in with the aesthetic and not stand out. They’re also used for businesses that want to give off more professional vibes, like cafes and restaurants.

While there are other design styles, like minimalist, rustic, industrial, and so on, minimalist and rustic styles are more neutral, and industrial designs are bold, so they usually still fall under those two main design styles.

3. Matching It To Your Home Type

Now that you know which styles and materials are available to you, here’s which ones to choose for your home type.

Traditional Houses

For traditional American homes, they tend to have a timeless aesthetic, so you don’t want to ruin that with bold patterns or bold awnings like glass or polycarbonate. Instead, opt for neutral colors and fabric awnings, as any other awning material tends to be a bit too loud for traditional homes.

Contemporary Houses

For contemporary houses, you’re usually going for a sleek aesthetic. Polycarbonate, ACP, and metal are all great options, while glass should be reserved only for grander, more luxurious homes.

It’s best to avoid fabric awnings unless you’re going with sleek colors like black, and even then, the aforementioned options would still be better. The only time you should be using fabric for a modern home is if you’re doing a retractable awning.

As for the colors, you should go for something slightly bolder but sleek. Just like how sports cars usually have bold but sleek colors, apply that same concept to your space. Avoid neutral and softer colors, as that would be like applying a muted color that doesn’t draw attention to a sports car. It works, but you’re wasting its potential.

Mediterranean Houses

Mediterranean houses are grand, but their design usually isn’t that modern, so the sleeker awnings like glass, polycarbonate, ACP, and metal should be avoided.

Instead, opt for fabric awnings and go for slightly bolder bright colors to fit in with the hearty aesthetic of Mediterranean homes. White tends to work quite well.

Farmhouses

For farmhouses, well, farms aren’t exactly modern or sleek, so again, avoid the sleeker materials. Once again, fabric awnings will work best, and just like how you don’t see black and grey much in farms, go for soft, muted colors.

Conclusion

When you’re choosing your awning, obviously, everyone wants one that perfectly complements their home. However, if budget is an issue, then you can always fall back on fabric awnings. Fabric awnings are the most versatile awning, and you can have pretty much any color and design you want on them.

This means they can fit in just about anywhere. Sure there may be better, more suitable options, but fabric awnings will do a good job at a good price for any home.