Are you looking for ways to make your home’s exterior shine? Updating your house numbers is one of those small, manageable tasks that can dramatically enhance your home’s exterior without breaking the bank.
Plus, it’s a fun way to inject a bit of personality and style into your home.
Quickly … if you’re thinking about exterior updates? Don’t miss this FREE live Curb Appeal Clinic hosted by Modern House Numbers and Mid Mod Midwest on September 6th!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Choose (and use) your house numbers well!
Brandy McLain from Modern House Numbers is back again with her wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm for great modern and mcm design!
Of course, we didn’t just talk about aesthetics. As we learned in past conversations with Brandy, functionality is just as important.
Make sure you have good visibility
House numbers need to be visible for practical reasons too—think emergency services or deliveries. It’s important to balance style with functionality, ensuring that your numbers are easy to read from the street, even in low light.
Shine a little light on the situation
Lighting plays a crucial role here and now we have so many lighting options available! There are there are a bunch of directions to take your lighting, from DIY-friendly solar lights that automatically illuminate your numbers at dusk to more creative solutions like backlit numbers that add a sleek, modern touch.
Choose easy to ready numbers
Size, font, and color contrast are all critical factors in visibility. You want your numbers to be large enough to be seen from the street, and the font should be clear and legible. As for color, it’s all about contrast—your numbers should stand out against the background of your home.
But don’t be afraid to play
Brandy also brought some great examples of the latest trends and creative ideas in house numbers. For instance, the use of mixed materials, such as metal and wood, can create a striking, modern look. Vertical orientations are becoming increasingly popular, especially for homes with limited space near the front door. And for those who want to go the extra mile, combining numbers with letters and symbols can create a unique and personalized display.
Updating your house numbers is a great first project to enhance your home’s curb appeal. Whether you’re sticking with the classic mid-century look or trying something new and modern, there endless ways to make your house numbers shine!
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why you might want to light your house numbers.
- How to choose colors and materials for maximum house number visibility and style.
- Where to get playful with your house numbers and other exterior details.
Listen Now On
Resources to choose the right House Numbers
- Mid Mod Midwest and Modern House Numbers collab alert…it’s a Curb Appeal Clinic! Reserve your spot for our lunch and learn clinic on Friday, September 6th at 12 PM (central).
- In the meantime, find great exterior inspo from the Modern House Numbers idea gallery.
- Grab my Front Door Facelift checklist!
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
Sometimes you’re planning a big upgrade to your mid-century home a huge project, and that’s why you’ve tuned into this podcast. But sometimes you might just want to know how to tweak your house for best effect. Something as simple as a solar light or two pointed at your house. Numbers can change the way your house reads at night, you know, more than half the time in the winter months, even though it’s summer right now.
Della Hansmann
Plus, there are so many fun ways to get creative with house numbers. Do you write them out or use numerals? How do you orient them? Where do they go? Should they stand alone or overlap with other elements? A few simple choices made thoughtfully at the start of your project can set you up for a standout detail that’s very easy to install. Then you can just sit back and feel great about it.
Della Hansmann
Today I’m checking in again with Brandy McLain of modern house numbers. This is the second half of our conversation on how to use house numbers to really improve the mid-century style of your house and we’re going to talk about the best, the classiest, the easiest, the most long, lasting and more ways to light your house numbers so they can be seen from the street.
Della Hansmann
And then Brandy is going to share her seven favorite creative ways to make your house number display unique. Are you ready?
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1808.
Della Hansmann
Okay, I have two really fun things to check on this week before Brandy and I get started. The first is Monday will be the first Monday of the month, and that means I’ll be holding my architect Office Hours call at 6pm central for all ready to remodel students. So if that’s you, if you are a ready to remodel student, then this is your friendly reminder. Send in your questions so that I can give you my best and most thorough answers on Monday, last time, we had a great call that went deep into how to work with and really, if you should work at all with an original material in your house that you don’t love.
Della Hansmann
My student has just moved into a mid-century ranch with great bones, but a lot of white paint splashed around by the previous owner, and one of the few original remaining surfaces is some terrazzo tile in the entry. The entry itself has cool spatial features, big glass wall filled in planter that he’s going to be restoring, and it flows right out through the glass to an outdoor planter.
Della Hansmann
On the outside, it’s going to be really amazing. There are also high ceilings with exposed beams, and there’s this terrazzo floor, which unfortunately is just kind of dingy and yellow looking. So we brainstormed some ways to think about this. Start by trying to clean it. What’s the worst that can happen if you already don’t like it? How could you change the way the color feels by changing the colors and materials around it?
Della Hansmann
For example, right now, there’s a lot of very paper cool white in the house. So if we try to warmer accent tone around the rest of the space, it might change the way that sort of yellowy terrazzo tile feels. It might make it feel more like it’s the neutral color of the space.
Della Hansmann
And in the end, we talked about how your house is for you. It’s yours, and it doesn’t it doesn’t hold any weight over you. It doesn’t hold any responsibility over you. I always advocate for preserving a mid-century feature if you can. But at the end of the day, if he ends up just not liking the color and the tone of that terrazzo tile, it can be replaced. So they’re going to try to pull a few other levers and see what happens.
Della Hansmann
We also had another great permission slip chat about when you do and don’t need to listen to your friends who are telling you what you should do to your new home. So this one came up on another just purchased house. There’s a lovely window from the eat in kitchen out to the pool deck, but no direct walking access from one space to the other. A lot of people, friends and family who had seen this, had suggested the owner that she should quotes here, bust out that window and put in a slider, but she wasn’t feeling it, so we brainstormed her priorities, focused on her dream lifestyle scenarios, looked at other options and realized that she doesn’t want to take food straight out to that part of the patio anyway.
Della Hansmann
And instead, that area can be better used with a built in banquette that wraps the outer wall, looks out that window and will also bridge The transition from her kitchen to the nearby office. It serves as a social space with a view bonus points. Not changing up exterior walls will save her budget for areas she’s more interested in improving. So that’s a win-win.
Della Hansmann
I’m always so tickled on these office hours calls to really deep, dive into issues and move people past an impasse or something that’s been stressing them out, the best outcome from these calls, something that happens all the time, is the feeling of relief you get when you realize you don’t have to worry about that question that’s been holding you up anymore and every month, offers different design challenges, even though each one is specific to the homeowner that asks it.
Della Hansmann
It’s also surprising how often other people find them to be jumping off points for applicable questions they could ask in their own home. So if you’ve been looking for someone to join your remodel planning team, someone you could bounce ideas off, share your struggles with, ask your questions to, maybe you would also like to join ready to remodel. And now is, I mean, always, it’s the perfect time, but now is the perfect time because. As you enroll, you get access to our evergreen resources, master planning lessons, guides, workbooks, plus workshops on topics like kitchens, baths, additions and more, design guides and example resources.
Della Hansmann
Plus, right now, you get your invitation to ask a question and show up for this month’s and every month’s architect Office Hours call. The next one is Monday. We’ve got a handful of new members that have just signed up since last month so we’ll welcome new friends. You likely won’t be alone in introducing yourself and your house to the group.
Della Hansmann
Okay, maybe I got carried away there, but sorry. No, you know what. I’m not. I just love ready to remodel. Our regular calls are so great, and everyone that’s involved in the program is making such great choices for their home. You might be one of them. Think about it. The other thing to announce before we dive into our interview, is a really fun collaboration with modern house numbers.
Della Hansmann
And this one is more of a bite sized design boost. I am teaming up with modern house numbers to give a 30 minute mid-century curb appeal clinic on September 6. You can sign up right now at mid mod midwest.com/cac, you know, for curb appeal clinic, and we’ll get you connected. Brandy is going to be hosting it, and I’ll be sharing a rundown of my top tips for tuning up the timeless style on your mid-century home.
Della Hansmann
One thing you know we’ll discuss is how to get an instant lift with the right house numbers in the right size and spot. But we’ll also talk about mailboxes, light fixtures, pink colors and placement and how to make the most of any original mid-century features you’ve got to show off. If that sounds familiar, yes, you’ve been paying attention.
Della Hansmann
This is going to be a fast sort of Lunch and Learn style event happening on Friday, September 6, about a half an hour of presentation, and then time for questions afterwards. So mark your calendar. That is a week from today. If you’re listening live, get signed up, and I will see you there. If you’ve got questions about your house, you know, I’ll stick around to answer them after the clinic.
Della Hansmann
Okay, don’t miss that. Now on to our chat.
Della Hansmann
So you’ve picked out some gorgeous, modern house numbers for your home update, and now the question is, will anyone be able to see them after dark? And today we want to talk about how to keep appropriate visibility, how to light your house numbers at night. And I bet there are several successful approaches to take, what would you think of as sort of the default choice, and then, what are some out of the box solutions people might want to think about
Brandy McLain
absolutely Well, I think this is a great and vital question. I think when you know, first off, when selecting house numbers, I think we all go out during the day and we’re like, oh, we could put them here by the front door. We could put them by garage. We could put them on this landscape fence. And then we’re like, boom, we’re going to do that idea.
Brandy McLain
But I think the thing I would recommend and suggest is not only looking at a day, but like going out at your home from the street and looking at night, because it’s really important to consider late being at night, and they might have the perfect position for the daytime, but at night, things change. So, you know, I think first you want to look where your existing lights are, and then maybe, you know, bounce around that idea. If you’re willing to select a location where you might have to add some lighting.
Brandy McLain
So, you know, some existing calming lighting sources that you might have on your home is like up facing landscape lighting, or a light sconce on your garage or next to your front door, where you could put the house numbers below, maybe vertically. And then, you know, you might have some landscape lighting that you could face to the house numbers if they’re on a boulder yellow fence.
Brandy McLain
But another smart, affordable and easy option is some solar landscape lightings that you can direct. The great thing with technology is that solar lighting, you know, you can place wherever you want. You don’t have to be dependent on, like an existing lighting source. And we have an old 1950s mid-century modern home, and we had not an outlet outside, like so I think in older homes, you know, electricity wasn’t thought as much as outside. So it becomes quite difficult and expensive to add, you know, trenching and do these things. But you know, with this new technology of solar lighting, it makes it much more approachable to add lighting.
Della Hansmann
No trip wires, no digging, no need for an outside outlet. Yeah.
Brandy McLain
And you know, you know, lighting is really important, but never, never. You know, degrade like visibility in terms of like also like visibility from the street in terms of selecting the right size or font. And consider contrast of color so that the color contrast is probably even more important at night than it is during the day, and things that you know someone might overlook,
Della Hansmann
yeah, and I think also I’ve mentioned it before, but I love that some of your numbers come with standoffs, which can really work when you’ve got a raking angle, light an angle, light coming from a steep angle, that makes that shadow line kind of get out of a lot. Alignment with the actual shape of the number, which does a really nice little background effect that makes them feel more visible.
Della Hansmann
I was going to say too. It depends on your level of creativity. But if you’re looking at numbers right on the house and you have a light fixture, say, on a garage, face, that works, but it doesn’t point at where you’d like the house numbers to be. It’s often a very simple job to hire an electrician for, or a careful, DIY able job if you’re going to turn your breakers off and watch a couple YouTube videos, you can replace one light with another fairly easily and get a light that both esthetically complements the house and points at the house numbers in a really practical, useful visibility way.
Brandy McLain
Yes, that’s quite an easy and inexpensive way to change your lighting as well
Della Hansmann
and to match the style of your house. I feel like one of the most obvious things we see in our master plans when we’re looking at exteriors is that the style of the exterior lights isn’t speaking the same language as the style of the house, or even it is like it’s just a mid-century traditional but the owners are looking for something more mid-century modern. So we’ll take out an old broad iron carriage lamp and put in a globe lamp instead.
Brandy McLain
If you’re unsure what finish you should select, you can never go wrong with matching you know the hardware of your light fixture or your door. If you just can’t decide, those are great reference points to possibly what house numbers would look good on your own?
Della Hansmann
Absolutely the style guide approach looking at either if you’re going to start from scratch, making a consistent choice over all the new things, or if you’re keeping any existing elements intact, particularly if they’re original to the mid-century.
Della Hansmann
House pull from the metals and the color finish colors they already have, and then just build off of them. You don’t have to match everything. It doesn’t have to be 100% matchy, matchy, but it does have to coordinate, and matching is never the wrong choice. So it definitely makes decisions easier. If you, I’m sure you experience people saying, I don’t know what to I don’t know which one to pick.
Della Hansmann
How can I choose? So that’s yeah, that’s an easy default yes match to something that exists on the house. Great. So yep, most important thing is make sure that if there’s an emergency in the night, someone can buy you, and also that your late night Amazon delivery and pizza delivery things can still get through to as you
Brandy McLain
absolutely great. Well,
Della Hansmann
make it sure it’s visible, not just at night and day. That’s a good thing to think about. Is when you walk out and look at your house, to think about where numbers go after you’ve decided go and look again after dark.
Brandy McLain
Yes, you guys got this.
Della Hansmann
Okay, so you’ve decided to put some new house numbers on your house, but where will they go? This is an interesting one, seven different ways that you could display your house numbers. I wonder which one is going to be the right one for you, or maybe you’ll choose more than one. So brandy hit us with the first one. What’s your favorite? Or in what order are you going to go your least favorite to favorite?
Brandy McLain
Sure. Well, I actually was thinking of doing like most popular that I’m seeing people order, reach out. Love it. Okay, great, least popular. But, you know, I think it’s funny when we’re talking about trends, because I think color or fonts, we see, like in five year trends, and then they change. But with really like creative installs, they can change year to year.
Brandy McLain
So I think this is a super fun topic to talk about, but the most like fun, popular thing that I see a lot more people doing this year is like combining numbers and letters. So say your house numbers were like two, five sex. You might use numeral two, you know, spell out five and do the numeral sex. Or you might even do a combination where you mix sizes and you have, you know, you know, larger numbers with smaller letters, which is really fun.
Brandy McLain
And you know, in terms of sizes, it’s, it’s becoming more popular with people not just having house numbers, but including letters that might be the name of your home, your family name that you include, or even your street name, where they might choose, like, eight inch house numbers for a first line, and then maybe right aligning, so it’s a little bit more modern, your street address or your family name underneath.
Brandy McLain
So those are a couple of the fun things that I’m seeing. And, you know, I think there’s an opportunity with orientation that’s maybe overlooked. You know, most people install horizontal, but it’s been huge for us the last couple years, where people are going vertical, which I love it.
Brandy McLain
And when you’re thinking vertical, yes, your house numbers can go boom, boom, boom, but you can also go vertical by rotating the horizontal numbers so they’re still legible, but that they’re actually rotated as well. And a vertical orientation, which I think super, super fun next to your garage or next to your front door.
Della Hansmann
Yeah. And spine sort of effect. Uh huh. Oh, that is fun. And, you know, I don’t think I have put that into a sketch for a client yet, and now I’m gonna look for a chance to do it
Brandy McLain
absolutely and I will send you a photo. There’s this, another client that decided to do offset house numbers and then do you flat? So installed on the wall surface, letters underneath. They a little bit overlapped, which was that I hadn’t have ever, ever thought about. So that was a really creative install we saw lately as well.
Della Hansmann
I like that. So you really get people playing with this sort of graphic design nature of what they can do with house numbers installation Absolutely.
Brandy McLain
And I think for like, the mid-century modernist, like, it was a really big trend to use scripted fonts to spell out their whole address, or to install at a diagonal. And, you know, I rarely see anyone install at a diagonal. I think that is like a trend that we should bring back in the mid-century modern era.
Brandy McLain
But another really modern one that we see is stack numbers, whether it be on a square plaque where you have two numbers above two numbers, or individually house numbers next to your door. And so in the end, it kind of creates like a grid. But that is really fun, particularly using, like, our South Beach font, which is very square in proportion. So I think that’s really cool.
Brandy McLain
And if you did want to do that on a plate or with some sort of a background, it would be really nice and blocky that way. Yeah, there’s so there’s a lot you can do.
Della Hansmann
What kind of help can people find if they were on the fence? They can find examples on your website. Do you also have someone I know you make those great mounting printouts of how to do the spacing? Do you have people that help make suggestions about orientation and things like that as well?
Brandy McLain
Yes, we probably answer like a dozen customers a day. So either myself or my co-founder husband, Rick, or our designer Megan, will make at no cost to the customer, pre purchase or after purchase proofs for customers.
Brandy McLain
And we probably send 75 a week, I would say, proofs either pre purchase or after purchase and for those really creative customers, where we can play with mixing sizes or numbers and letters, but in the end, we really have to make sure it fits in the installation area.
Brandy McLain
So the first question, if you ever reach out to us that you’re going to get you know is, what space do we have so that we really can make sure that not only are we considering the visibility from the street, but also to make sure, if we come up with a clever design that really fits your esthetic, that it fits in your installation area.
Brandy McLain
And when you’re coming up with like a location of house numbers, one thing we haven’t talked about too is, you know, if you have an eight inch column, let’s say at your front end. You don’t want the width of the numbers to be eight inch or to extend past the column. You really want to go with a much smaller size, maybe a four, six inch, so that there is, you know, space around the house numbers, and that increases your visibility. And also, it’s just a better design esthetic.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, give it a little breathing room. That’s absolutely true. And also, an eight inch column might actually be an eight by eight, which is seven and a half inches wide.
Brandy McLain
Yes, yes,
Della Hansmann
Measure out and check is the is the rule of thumb there. Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, too. And something that I can get away with when we’re doing designs for clients, we are sketching. So we sketch it with the space we want, but you’re pulling from a set of fixed house numbers. What are the what are the size options people have? There’s some jobs, right? You’ve got four and six and eight and what?
Brandy McLain
Yeah, 468, 12 and 15 and the least height, that is the height, yes, and we have all of our fonts, numbers and letter dimensions, even symbols on our website, so you can get like, your exact dimensions, height and width for each product. Because one thing that some people forget to consider is, you know, a width of a five might be very different than the width of a zero.
Brandy McLain
So you know, you might have 345, that are about the same width, and you’re installing them horizontally, vertically, and then the zero is much wider. So most of our font styles have completely round zeros. We do have a couple Back Bay as well as Austin, that have oval zeros. So particularly when you’re installing on a column or something, make sure you consider the full width of each one of the digits or letters,
Della Hansmann
Particularly the zeros, right? Yeah, this is, I mean, when you’re getting down to it, you need to fit into the space. We’ve talked many times before about how it’s nice for it to be as big as possible, but not too big. That is, there is a line, and too big for the space is what you don’t want to do.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, well, that’s really fun. You know, now I’m feeling like we need to vary the way that we’re sketching, options for people on their front update master plans. But I’m like, I love my house numbers. I don’t want to change them. But now I want, I want more. Well, maybe I need another set somewhere else.
Brandy McLain
You can always add fun things like a hello or welcome on your front door, near your front door, or something like that. Absolutely. Another trend that we’re seeing a lot this year is adding symbols. Sometimes your door might not be right off the street, it might be around the side of your home, or there might be a courtyard that you walk through, and so people are confused of where to actually enter.
Brandy McLain
So we’re getting people more asking for, like, arrows for directional reasons or fun things where, you know, someone wants a bar underneath their numbers or letters, or “No” adding just capital N, lowercase o with a period or a dash is super popular for us this year. So those are some other fun things for a mid-century customer. Just recently, they had in their original install from the 50s, they had some just flat metal, like atomic stars, like around their numbers. And so they wanted us to recreate that look, and they went much larger. So we made some custom atomic stars of different sizes to put around their numbers, which was really cute.
Della Hansmann
Oh, that is fun. That is fun. Well, then from my perspective, I’m like, I think you should put those on your website as a standard option to purchase. Maybe we need to. I could definitely direct a lot of mid-century sort of, the vintage lovers among us love a starburst, and would probably buy them for interior decors as well, exactly, garage updates and things like that. This is maybe an option for the garage door anyway.
Della Hansmann
Now I’m getting distracted for myself. But those are, yeah, those are some really fun possibilities. Anything else people should think about before they start going and just obsessively scrolling your Instagram and your website for photo examples?
Brandy McLain
Well, you can do fun things too. Since we’re talking about fun things, we’ve had people order vinyl that labels all this stuff in their kitchen, like they might have an Airbnb, and they label with vinyl coffee and tea, you know.
Brandy McLain
Or like, it’s very popular for people to order kids bedroom names that or You know, now people might have a Mandan outside, or a pool house that’s a little bit hidden, and we often make kind of like home residential directional signage for those types of structures as well, which I don’t think existed before we were at home as much as we are now.
Della Hansmann
That may want to be one of those physical manifestations of the way that the culture is changing absolutely, you know, also, particularly as people have more and more home office experiences, there might be a way in which there’s, if there’s an exterior access to home office, having a side, some way, finding signage, um, matching it to or coordinating it with your house numbers, just is going to make everything feel more polished and pulled together
Brandy McLain
Absolutely. But yes, the skies are endless,
Della Hansmann
Yeah. And it sounds like the ability to do fun custom things with you is just everywhere these days. You can do a lot of things. You can do a custom shape in all the finishes. Is that right?
Brandy McLain
We can, yeah, so we make everything still custom to order, except our quick ship items, which are most popular products that we have some on shelf. But we make everything so if you want a custom five inch or 10 inch size, we can do it. And we also can do custom font styles or you have a particular symbol of a palm tree or a dog that you want next to your house numbers?
Brandy McLain
I think that’s a friend to a trend as well, with people just trying to express their personal style a little bit more than I think, existed in the past, where house numbers were a much more functional feature of a home. They it is still vitally important for it to be a functional thing for emergency services and important deliveries. But you can express your style too and have fun with it.
Della Hansmann
I love that. I think that’s really fun. And, yeah, this is one more way that our houses are they’re containers, they’re an investment, but they’re also the place that we live and spend our time and how we sort of present ourselves to the world.
Della Hansmann
And it’s so fun to be able to get more individualism, more personality, more playfulness into that with great choices like adding to or just arranging properly your house members. Fun. Well, I’m definitely now going to.
Della Hansmann
So spend some time on the internet just scrolling and looking at examples of playful arrangements and non-traditional arrangements for modern house numbers. Great Brandy. This is so much fun. I think we’re gonna have to do it again soon.
Brandy McLain
I love it. Let’s do it. It’s always fun to talk with you and your clients.
Della Hansmann
Likewise.
Della Hansmann
Per usual, you will find the transcript of this episode and a link to the resources I mentioned at the top, plus throughout in the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com/1808.
Della Hansmann
Next week on the podcast, I’m chatting with Aylin Walters of exactly designs about the details that you don’t want to skip when you’re planning an update to a mid-century home from her perspective and interiors perspective, so don’t miss that call.
Della Hansmann
And also don’t miss the free, live curb appeal clinic happening next Friday. Sign up directly at mid mod midwest.com/cac or get the details on that plus the show notes for today’s episode at mid mod midwest.com/ 1808.
Della Hansmann
We love your house numbers. So if you already got them placed in a way you’re proud of, send me a DM on Instagram. Show me a picture. I’d love to shout out your success. Okay, enjoy thinking about house numbers all week long.