Charlotte’s white-hot house trend
As many brick and stucco houses are painted white, some see style, while others see a loss of character
The following article appeared in the May 9, 2025, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
More homeowners are painting their houses white. But some architects and consultants say the ‘farmhouse’ vibe glosses over worries about character and structural problems.
SNOW PLACE LIKE HOME: White homes, with their bright esthetic and clean lines, are the hot design trend in many areas of Charlotte. But how long will the trend last?
by Cristina Bolling
Douglas Welton is no clairvoyant, but he has an uncanny sense for when a house in his Charlotte neighborhood of brick ranch homes is about to change hands.
He just looks for it to turn white.
“My neighbor across the street is going to put his house up for sale soon. … He’s doing his bathrooms, and amazingly, all of a sudden, one day his house is white,” said Welton, chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. [Edited on 5/9 to correct that Welton is still the chair of the planning commission]
“Up at the corner, the neighbors moved in, they did renovations, magically their house was white,” Welton said. “Across the street from them, they wanted to sell their house. Magically, it was white.”
What’s happening on Welton’s street in the Madison Park neighborhood of brick homes from the 1950s and ’60s off Park Road is playing out across Charlotte and even in the city’s outskirts, where brick homes are being painted white at a rapid-fire pace, and new-construction single-family homes and townhouses are springing up the color of snow (many with dark windows and gutters for contrast).
It’s a white-hot trend that experts say has been heavily ramping up for the last five or so years, as homeowners seek a fresh, clean look for new or aging homes. But there are concerns that communities lack character when so many houses look alike, and some worry that painting brick erases history and can cause structural issues — and is even prohibited in some of the city’s historic neighborhoods.
In the Union County town of Marvin, the Broadmoor neighborhood of 5,000 s.f. homes that start at $1.7M are almost entirely blistering white. On Carmel Road, the Blanchard at Carmel townhomes went up three years ago, fitting the milky esthetic.
Drive down some of south Charlotte’s most trafficked corridors such as Selwyn Avenue and Carmel and Providence roads, and you’ll see the white house parade, where both old and new brick and stucco homes gleam in shades of white. Inside the neighborhoods that spider off of these roads, boatloads of brick ranches are flipping over to white or are being torn down and being replaced with huge, new white homes.
Welton says he’s seen a particularly large outbreak in the Ashbrook neighborhood near Park Road Shopping Center.
“The giant white houses are erupting over there like the measles,” he said.
‘Little teeth’ all over Charlotte: Many point to HGTV superstar duo Chip and Joanna Gaines as the originators of the white-house trend, after their show “Fixer Upper” helped popularize the modern-farmhouse style whose hallmark is a white exterior.
Shades of gray for interiors and exteriors had been de rigueur since about 2008, “and then Joanna Gaines came along, and the planet shifted” to white starting around 2012, said Lisa Jenkins, a certified architectural color consultant based in Charlotte who works both locally and nationally.
Jenkins said about one out of every three exterior paint consultations she’s called in on these days are for help choosing a shade of white. It’s a tougher task than it may seem.
White shades can vary from cold to warm, and many elements determine how they’ll look on any one home. Many factors come into play, she said, from the color of the existing windows and roof to how much sun the home gets. (Benjamin Moore’s “white dove,” for example, might be too stark and bright in some lights, while “Swiss coffee” might give off a warmer, cozier vibe because of its subtle yellow and beige undertones.)
Clients say, “I just want a nice cream or off-white that goes with my house. And I say, ‘OK, you want what everybody wants,’” Jenkins said. “If God could look down on Charlotte, it’s like we keep adding little teeth.”
During a consultation, Jenkins said she says she must “ask the house what it wants” and evaluate the components of the house that won’t be changing anytime soon: windows, gutters and roofs.
Sometimes, the white modern farmhouse vibe the homeowners crave simply won’t work for the house they live in.
“If you have one of those brick 1980s … traditional homes, paint alone is not going to turn that into a farmhouse, OK? And why would you want to?” she said.
“It's like taking Grandma shopping at Forever 21. Keep her at Talbots where she belongs,” she laughed.
Paint color trends are cyclical, Jenkins said, and they oscillate from warm to cool tones. These days, there’s a switch happening from cool to warm, which means stark whites are on their way out, and warmer tones are finding their way back.
“I feel in my bones, I'm gonna give it another year, and I'm going to have people saying, ‘I do not want white. No more white,’” she said. “As an overall trend, I’m going to say that maybe it’s waning.”
Worries about ‘sterilization’ of culture: To see the trend wane would be a welcome relief to some in the architecture and historic preservation worlds.
“Everything starts to become uniform” when trends like the white-house look take hold, said architect Chris Barth, a partner at Meyer Greeson Paullin Benson Architecture.
“You can get lost really easily because there’s nothing to identify what street you’re on, what you’re looking at, or where you are,” Barth said.
“The materials we use, the landscaping, all of this stuff starts to tell the story of how people live, how you move through these spaces,” he said. “And when you start doing things like this trend that’s becoming more prevalent, all of that gets lost. And then it’s sort of like the sterilization of our culture.”
Barth said he believes social media plays a role. When people see posts boasting that home sellers got more for their home after “refreshing their dusty old house with a fresh coat of paint, someone else gets that idea and takes it and runs with it, and it spreads like wildfire.”
In some of Charlotte’s historic neighborhoods that ban painted brick, the white-house trend is creating problems. Painted brick is outlawed in the city’s eight historic districts that are governed by the city’s Historic Districts Commission.
In 2024, the commission had four cases of homeowners who had painted their brick homes without permission — an increase from the usual one or two. Some had to have the paint removed, said Candice Leite, a preservation masonry expert and a project manager for the city’s Historic Districts.
Painting brick creates the potential for maintenance problems that range from flaking on the outside to moisture issues inside the house. Bricks are porous, and they suck up water from the ground, Leite said. If you paint the exterior of the brick, “that water has nowhere to go,” she said, which means it can seep out of the interior side of the brick, potentially damaging insulation and drywall.
And then there’s the history and architectural detail that’s lost when brick is painted over, Leite said.
“You're covering up interesting facts about your building that you may not know about or see because a homeowner may not know how to read the building the way a professional would,” she said.
“I think if people spent the time looking at their structures and the brick, and didn't really buy into a fad,” she said, “they would see the timelessness of and beauty of their structure, and all the details that are lost when you paint brick.”
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of The Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com
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➡️ Go deeper: The Washington Post published an article this spring called “The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying” about data they uncovered showing that shades of gray permeate Washington, D.C., neighborhoods where the Black population is decreasing and the White population is increasing.
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