How to Choose Exterior Home Finishing: 7 Expert Recommendations

The facade is called the 'face' of a house for good reason: exterior finishing highlights architectural style, and its color palette can hide certain flaws and even visually increase the object's area. What should you pay attention to when choosing materials? What pros and cons are important to consider? What are the specifics of finishing modular homes? Experts will help us find answers to these and other questions.

Eugene Shamin, Expert
Director of Dekostroi (renovation and construction work)

The facade is responsible not only for the visual aspect. It protects the building from freezing, dampness and mold. People prefer different materials — wood, ventilated facade, stone, tiles or siding. All depends on the person's budget who is building their home.

Consider the material of load-bearing walls

If your house is built from wood, it needs more protection against temperature fluctuations and bad weather. It's also important to take care of waterproofing and fire safety. The best solution for such a structure would be vinyl or metal siding — non-combustible materials that can be used together with insulation and soundproofing.

Brick is a strong material, so in this case your house doesn't need serious additional protection. You can rely on aesthetic preferences, focusing more on decoration: for example, make plastering, lay tiles or stone.

For fast-build homes mounted on a light foundation, it's recommended to avoid heavy materials (stone, plaster). For finishing, siding and shiplap are suitable, secured by the ventilated facade technology.

Another option for fast-build homes is planken. This new building material is an improved version of familiar shiplap. For example, larch boards are eco-friendly, strong and durable, as well as resistant to moisture and temperature fluctuations.

Design: Aida Beglova

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Natural sandstone

Face brick

Siding

Façade thermal panels with clinker tiles

If economy is a priority...

The simplest and least expensive material — shiplap. Insulation is installed, for example 5 or 10 centimeters depending on the region. Then we glue it with facade mesh to avoid cracks. After that, a colored or uncolored shiplap is applied (all again depends on cost).

Shiplap is easy to apply, but often needs repainting during use. It may crack due to house settling. These drawbacks should be considered, but if you're looking for a simple and cheap option, shiplap perfectly fits the description. Moreover, such a facade can last years — you only need to refresh the color.

Design: Studio 'Mr. Design'

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If durability is a priority...

If you're betting on longevity, look at clinker brick and natural stone. The service life of these materials is up to 50 years, such cladding looks aesthetically pleasing and even prestigious. But there are also specific features. First, making a facade from clinker or stone is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Installation can take a lot of time.

Second, you may need to reinforce the foundation — stone is quite heavy. Thirdly, both clinker brick and stone are not budget options. But when it comes to durability, one big investment will definitely pay off.

Design: Architecture Bureau ab2.0

If beauty is a priority...

We recommend paying attention to combining several materials at once. For example, plaster can be combined with stone, and brick — with siding. Playing with textures always looks impressive.

For large houses, ventilated facades are often used. Some lay it out of natural marble, others — from Daghestan stone. It's expensive, very beautiful and prestigious. But you always have the option to save money by choosing the simplest variant.

Build walls from 400 mm gas block, plaster them and apply decorative stone 'pleat'. The cost of this material ranges from 6000 to 12000 rubles depending on the region. As a result, you get an economically efficient facade.

Design: Chado

Pros and Cons of Facing Materials

To have your full understanding about exterior finishing, we'll reveal the pros and cons of the most popular facing materials.

Natural Stone

Pros: suitable for different styles, eco-friendly, high resistance to external environment, durability, visual appeal.
Cons: high cost, weight (heavy), complexity of installation.

Facing Brick

Pros: wear-resistant, reinforces load-bearing walls, impact resistant, allows creating a beautiful texture and design.

Cons: mounted with adhesive (dirty and time-consuming process), expensive, not suitable for all foundations (increases building weight), heavy.

Design: Lidia Ivanova

Façade Tiles

Pros: fire, moisture and UV resistance, durability.

Cons: for concrete tiles — large weight and complexity of installation, instability to temperature fluctuations.

Facing Panels (Siding)

Pros: able to imitate other materials (stone, brick etc.), easy installation, non-combustible, moisture-resistant, variety of designs, do not fade, mask uneven walls.

Cons: must be installed only according to the ventilated facade principle — requires a frame.

Design: Olesya Berezovskaya

Decorative Plaster

Pros: moisture-resistant, variety of design solutions, additional sound insulation.

Cons: for decorative plaster — cost, for acrylic — easily gets dirty.

Specifics of Exterior Finishing Modular Homes

Maxim Maslov, Expert
Founder and Director of DomFrame

4 types of finishing exterior walls for modular homes:

• Finishing with vertical, horizontal or mixed arrangement of wooden elements of various widths, colors and quality;
  
• Finishing with metal profiles of different types, colors, including decorative elements for niches (windows, doors);
  
• Combined finishing with wood and metal in various combinations and ratios, according to a designer's project;
  
• Finishing with other panel and synthetic materials, according to individual designer projects.

The main criterion when choosing a modular house is price and appearance. Often, combined finishing with wood and metal in combination with panoramic windows are used.

Factors affecting material choice:

• The size of modules is limited by transport conditions, so it's important to save every useful centimeter of internal area. This directly depends on the material choice and its arrangement both inside and outside the building. A clear example is wall boards (shiplap, imitation timber, planken, 'American' style). Vertical board placement often requires additional lathing (20-25 mm from each side of the wall or house, or other underlayment material).
• If a building consists of several modules, there are joints between the finishing materials of the modules which must be properly processed at the design stage. Non-standard solutions are needed to give the facade a proper look directly on site during module installation, if main finishing is done in factory conditions.
• A module made in a factory is significantly better, but it's delivered by transport which can be a limitation for heavy finishing materials (clinker, ceramic tile etc.) due to road quality, as well as soft facade and roofing materials (click-falz, metal profile etc.) which can be damaged during loading/unloading of modules.

However, all these limitations can be overcome by separate engineering solutions, using special slings and trusses during loading operations, or transferring part of the finishing directly to the site for module installation.

If you want panoramic windows in a modular home...

To make the front facade of modular homes attractive, large panoramic windows are often used. Together with undeniable aesthetics they add important features in production and operation of modular homes:

• It's necessary to consider the manufacturing time for panoramic windows, which are made from regular or tempered glass, single or double-chambered, with aluminum or plastic profiles, laminated or not;
  
• Additional requirements arise for the strength of foundation and module frame if it's manufactured in factory conditions and transported with installed panoramic glass;
  
• It's necessary to consider the change in thermal comfort inside the module due to large areas of panoramic windows;
  
• Installing panoramic windows requires specific qualifications for personnel during installation.

Cover photo: Dina Salahova's project

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