New Design Project: Fairmont Mable Campus

This summer, Fairmont Private Schools is renovating its Mable campus and I'm helping out with some of the design choices. First up is the exterior paint color. Above is an old photo of the main school building which is a 1910 American Foursquare from what I can tell. It leans heavy towards the craftsman side of the foursquare era, and doesn't fit either description perfectly. (If you happen to be an early century architecture expert, I'm all ears.)

The building was the old Carroll Residence in Anaheim (they were beet farmers)--the building was purchased by Fairmont in 1955 and has been home to the 1st-8th grades ever since (for the most part). Anyways, I'm a big believer in maintaining the integrity of an old building as much as possible in a modernization. In this case, my goals are to find an exterior paint scheme that updates the look of the school without being a complete departure from the foursquare era, somehow incorporates the school's colors (blue/red), looks good painted on the rest of the campus buildings, and feels like a school as much as possible. Oh, and I'm kind of starting off with a bias not to bring the red in--thinking of just sticking with the blue for now.

Today's research took me to a great website called Antique Homes, and its sister flickr pool Daily Bungalow, where I dug up a ton of pictures including the above advertisement. Fascinating, but not very helpful. So, I created the below collages and could really use some opinions:

• Is tan too boring? How about the slightly green-ish tan in the Craftsman at top right?
• Is navy and white (like the Tyler Florence - Mill Valley storefront) too East coast?
• How about this light gray color (in the Bernardo Urqiueta - San Francisco home) with a red door?
• Is this white/dark blue/light blue detail on this Austin Gingerbread too hokey or just right?
• Is gray (below) too dark for a school?

(Photos from Daily Bungalow, Remodelista, Antique Homes, Desire to Inspire & Google Images)