Stone, the color foundation

Today I think I finally picked the stone for our house.  This may not seem like a big deal, but we have been driving around Charlotte, stalking houses for weeks taking pictures and trying to find something that matched the vision of what I have for our future home. Below are the inspiration pictures from my Pinterest board that I was working off of in my search.

Here is the link to the inspiration house: http://www.houzz.com/photos/984705/Hume-mediterranean-landscape-dc-metro

These next two are from http://newsouthclassicsblog.com.

The first photo is the color scheme I was aiming for, but I had the other photos as Plan B's.  Although it's difficult to see the stone clearly in the first photo, gold tones tend to predominate, with just enough reds, browns, and grays to offer contrast and also tie in the blue-gray shutters.  In the second and third pictures, the slightly darker stone is a nice complement to the brick arches.  Our plan has brick quoins as well as arches and it's important for me to find a stone that will help integrate the brick accents.

The first supplier of stone our builder sent us to actually manufacture cultured stone.  Our current house is a craftsman style home and we have cultured stone and brick on the exterior and family room fireplace.  I always thought our "stone" looked attractive and didn't have an issue with it being cultured as it's a popular building choice around here. But the color palette is mostly grays and we wanted to emulate the warmer tones in the inspiration photo.  Sadly, the other color offerings from this particular manufacturer looked artificial in my opinion, especially the reds.  It's probably because I had my heart set on a natural stone and was unfairly biased, but I was disappointed by the choices.

I spoke to our builder who said that while we likely could find a natural stone close in price point to the cultured stone we had looked at, the labor would cost considerably more because the mason would need to shape the stones.  However, since the amount of stone we would need is minimal (relatively speaking) because the home is predominantly stucco, he encouraged me to check out the showroom at Charles Luck in Pineville, NC. We played phone tag with one of the salesmen, but today I was finally able get in for an appointment. I dragged my three-year-old with me. She was surprisingly well behaved.  She told me she wants to be a builder and an architect one day. :)

These are the choices we narrowed it down to, listed in order of preference.  These pictures really don't do the stone colors justice as they are so much richer in person.

The first is Oak Ridge, which is used frequently in our new community because it is so versatile as it has a pretty broad color palette.

This one is called Foggy Hollow and tends to be lighter with more golds.

This last one is called Timber Ridge.  I saw a palette of the material and the colors were similar to this picture.

However, this particular stone can also be as vivid as this picture:

It's a bit much for my taste, so Timber Ridge might be a gamble.

On Friday, my husband will go to see the samples in person before we make our final decision.  Then on to the brick, stucco, trim, door, and garage colors.