Bergen-Lafayette House Painting: Color Ideas for Brick Rowhouses

Walk Communipaw Avenue on a Saturday and you'll see what Bergen-Lafayette is made of. Brick rowhouse after brick rowhouse, some of them standing since the 1800s, shoulder to shoulder with newer brick townhouses and the odd converted industrial building. The neighborhood sits between downtown and Liberty State Park, and its housing stock runs the gamut — brownstones, row houses, pre-war apartment buildings, Victorian homes — but brick is the thread that ties most of these blocks together.

We paint a lot of brick down here, from Bergen Avenue side streets to the blocks around Berry Lane Park. And the first conversation with a Bergen-Lafayette homeowner is almost never about color. It's about a decision that comes before color: paint the brick, stain it, or leave it alone.

First, figure out what your brick actually is

Not all Bergen-Lafayette brick is the same animal. The Bergen Hill Historic District, which covers Summit Avenue and its side streets, mixes late-19th and early-20th-century brick rowhouses with brownstones and Queen Anne apartment buildings. Some of that brick is hard-fired and dense. Some of it — especially on the oldest houses — is softer, more porous stuff that soaks up water like a sponge.

That matters because brick breathes. Water gets in, and it has to get out. A coating that seals the surface shut traps moisture behind it, and trapped moisture is what causes paint to crack and flake, mineral deposits to bloom on the surface, and eventually the face of the brick itself to crumble. That's the core risk with painting brick, and it's why the product choice matters more here than on wood siding.

So before anyone opens a can, we look at three things: the condition of the mortar joints, whether the brick has been painted before, and whether there's efflorescence — that white, chalky mineral bloom — or spalling anywhere on the facade. Soft or damaged brick with failing mortar gets repaired first, always. Paint over crumbling mortar and you've just hidden the problem for a season while it gets worse underneath.

If your brick is in good shape and has never been painted, you have the full range of options. If it's already been painted, you're mostly deciding between repainting and stripping — and stripping brick back to bare is expensive, messy work that rarely gets it all the way back. Painted brick is, for practical purposes, a one-way door.

Paint, stain, or leave it alone

Here's how we talk homeowners through it.

Leave it alone when the brick is handsome and sound. A lot of Bergen-Lafayette brick has real character — deep reds, warm browns, the kind of variation you can't fake with a paint color. If the brick itself looks good, the highest-impact move is often everything around it: trim, cornice, window frames, front door, stoop, and ironwork. Fresh white trim against unpainted red brick does more for a facade than most full repaints we see. It costs less, it risks nothing, and the brick keeps breathing exactly the way it always has.

Stain it when you want a color change without sealing the brick. Masonry stain soaks into the brick and tints it rather than forming a film on top, so the surface keeps its texture and its ability to breathe. The trade-offs: fewer color choices than paint, it works best on brick that's never been painted, and it won't hide patched or mismatched sections the way an opaque coat will. For a homeowner who loves their brick's texture but hates its faded orange-red tone, stain is often the sweet spot.

Paint it when you want a full transformation, or when the brick is already painted, patched in five different shades from decades of repairs, or just plain ugly. Paint gives you the full color range and hides everything uniformly. The catch is the commitment: plan on a breathable masonry paint, a masonry primer, and a maintenance cycle. Painted brick needs attention over the years — a wash now and then, and a fresh coat down the road. Done right, with products actually formulated for masonry, painted brick holds up well in New Jersey weather. Done with ordinary exterior wall paint, it fails, and it can damage the brick on its way out.

One more thing worth saying plainly: if your house sits in a historic district, check the rules before you commit. Bergen Hill's historic district status means exterior changes can draw scrutiny, and a painted facade that's wrong for the block is hard to undo. A quick check with the city's historic preservation office beats a do-over.

Colors that work on Bergen-Lafayette brick

Now the fun part. These are combinations we keep coming back to on these blocks, grouped by what the brick itself is doing.

If you're keeping the brick natural, let the trim and door do the talking. Crisp white or soft off-white trim is the classic move against red brick — it sharpens every window line and makes the whole facade read cleaner from the sidewalk. For the front door, deep green reads beautifully against red brick (it's the color complement, and it shows), and so does a near-black navy or a rich, dark bronze. On Garfield Avenue and the side streets off Monticello, we've seen dark green doors with brass hardware turn an otherwise tired facade into the best-looking house on the block without touching a single brick.

If you're painting the brick white or off-white, go warm, not stark. A bright, blue-white on a whole brick facade can look harsh under New Jersey summer sun and flat in winter light. Warmer whites — the kind with a touch of cream in them — sit better against the neighborhood's older streetscape and play nicer with stone stoops and slate roofs. Pair it with trim in a slightly brighter white so the windows don't disappear, and give the door a real color: black, deep green, or a dusty navy. The door is the one place on a white house where a bold choice pays off instead of backfiring.

If you're going dark, commit to it. Charcoal or deep slate on brick looks sharp on the newer townhouses and on rowhouses with strong architectural detail, because the dark field makes white trim and window frames pop hard. What doesn't work is a halfway gray that reads as dirty white from across the street. If you're going dark, go dark — and make sure the trim contrast is strong enough to carry it. Dark facades also show dust and pollen more, so budget for an annual wash.

If you're staining, think in terms of shifting the brick's tone, not replacing it. A warm brown stain can pull an orange-red brick toward a richer, more uniform brown. A gray wash can cool down a brick that's reading too red for the rest of the block. Because stain keeps the texture visible, the result still looks like brick — just brick on its best day.

A word on the rest of the facade: on most Bergen-Lafayette rowhouses, the cornice, window lintels, and stoop are doing as much visual work as the brick field. If the cornice is peeling, no brick color will save the look. Get the trim right first, then judge the brick.

The prep nobody should skip

Every brick job that fails in this neighborhood fails for a boring reason. Here's the sequence we follow, and it's worth asking any painter bidding your job whether they follow it too:

• Wash the brick thoroughly and let it dry completely. Dirt, mildew, and chalky residue kill adhesion.
• Repoint failing mortar joints before painting, not after. Fresh mortar needs curing time — don't let anyone paint over week-old pointing.
• Treat efflorescence at its source. Scrubbing the white bloom off without fixing where the water is coming from just guarantees a repeat performance.
• Prime with a masonry primer, then topcoat with a breathable masonry paint — not standard exterior latex. Manufacturer data for Benjamin Moore's Element Guard line, for example, lists brick among its recommended surfaces, with application temperatures from 35°F to 100°F.
• Use a thick-nap roller or sprayer that can push paint into the mortar joints. A thin coat that skips the joints looks fine from the curb for about a month.

That last point matters more than people think. Brick's texture is the whole job. A coat that only hits the faces of the bricks and leaves the joints thin will fail at the joints first, every time.

New Jersey's weather window — and the lead paint question

Exterior painting in Hudson County runs on a seasonal clock. Paint needs the air and the wall surface to stay above the product's minimum temperature while it cures, and it needs a dry stretch after application. Spring through early fall is the comfortable window; late fall jobs can work with low-temperature products, but the margin for error shrinks fast once overnight temperatures start dipping. If a painter wants to paint your brick facade in December, ask what product they're using and what its temperature floor is — and get it in writing.

The other New Jersey-specific item: lead paint. Bergen-Lafayette's housing stock is old, and any house built before 1978 may have lead paint somewhere in its layers — often on the trim, windows, and porch elements even when the brick itself was never painted. New Jersey's lead-safe law requires lead-based paint inspections for rental dwellings built before 1978, with lead-safe certifications valid for two years, and the state's Department of Community Affairs publishes the details for owners and landlords. If you're repainting a pre-1978 rental, sort out the lead question before the job starts, not during it. For an owner-occupied rowhouse, the law's rental-inspection rules don't apply the same way, but safe work practices around old paint — containment, no dry scraping or sanding, proper cleanup — still apply to everyone on the crew.

Inside the brick rowhouse

The topic here is the outside, but one interior note, since we see it on nearly every Bergen-Lafayette job: exposed brick interior walls. A lot of these rowhouses have a brick party wall or a brick fireplace wall inside, and the question comes up constantly — paint it, limewash it, or leave it?

Our answer tracks the exterior logic. If the interior brick is in good shape, cleaning it and leaving it alone usually looks best. If it's stained, patched, or just not your style, limewash gives you that soft, textured finish without the heavy, flat look of regular paint, and it suits the plaster-and-brick bones of these houses. Painting interior brick white is the most popular request we get, and it can look great — just know it's as permanent inside as it is outside.

What this costs to think about — and when to call us

We're not putting a price on your house in a blog post, because brick jobs vary too much: facade size, condition, height, how much repointing, whether there's a stoop and ironwork in the scope. Any painter who quotes your brick facade sight unseen is guessing. What we can say is that the prep — washing, repointing, priming — is where a big share of a good brick job's cost lives, and it's also where a cheap bid cuts corners. When you're comparing quotes, compare the prep line by line, not just the bottom number.

Call us in when the facade is more than one story of easy ladder work, when there's failing mortar or spalling brick, when the house is already painted and you're weighing a color change, or when you're in a historic district and want a second opinion before committing. Those are the jobs where experience with old brick pays for itself.

Bergen-Lafayette's brick has lasted a century or more on most of these blocks. The goal of any paint job here isn't to reinvent the house — it's to give that brick another few decades of looking like it belongs on the street. Get the paint-vs-stain call right, get the trim right, and the color almost picks itself.