Choosing a shutter colour
Start with the façade
A white render takes anything, and it is where the frank colours — Basque red, cart blue, bottle green — look best. Pale stone or cream render likes grey-greens, greens and burgundies. Grey stone or granite calls for blues, greys and red. Red brick wants dark green, black or night blue, never red. A grey contemporary façade takes anthracite or, to surprise it, a burgundy.
Think of the region
Shutter colours are a local vocabulary: cart blue and olive green in Provence, red and green in the Basque Country, blue and white in Brittany, pearl grey and grey-green around Paris, in Normandy and the Loire. You can depart from it, but you do it better knowing it.
Check with the town hall before buying
Changing the colour of your shutters alters the exterior appearance of the house: in most French communes this requires a déclaration préalable de travaux, and the local plan (PLU) often imposes a palette of permitted shades. Near a listed monument or in a protected heritage site, the Architecte des Bâtiments de France also gives an opinion. One call to the planning office saves painting twice.
Match shutters, door and gate
Three options: all in one colour (most coherent), the door one tone darker than the shutters (most elegant), or neutral shutters and a coloured door (most cheerful). Our front-door colours complete this guide.
Finish and quantity
Multi-Surface Eggshell by default: a light satin (≈ 15% sheen) that resists moisture, washes and does not underline the defects of old timber. Multi-Surface Satin for more lustre and greater resistance to rubbing and washing. Multi-Surface Gloss for the lacquered look of town shutters, the most weather-resistant, but demanding flawless preparation. All three go on wood and metal, after sanding, dusting and Multi-Surface Primer; in dry weather between 8 and 25 °C, out of full sun, in two thin coats, on both faces and the edges. Take the shutters off and paint them flat if you can: runs disappear and so do the hinges — the method is in How to paint exteriors with our Multi-Surface paints.
Quantities: a pair of 1.20 m × 0.50 m shutters is about 2.4 m² over both faces; five windows come to 12 m², so about 2 L of finish for two coats at 12 m² per litre, plus 1 L of primer. And before ordering the litres, test the shade on one shutter: outdoors, the light changes everything.
