Passers-by on business usually assess buildings by looking at the walls, as the rooftops are well above their eye level. But one of the favorite entertainments of tourists is to climb somewhere higher (up a hill, up a bell tower) and look at the city from above. The lookouts offer a completely different perspective. From this perspective, it turns out that some cities have their own corporate color, which is given to them by the roofs.
The shade of the roof can tell a lot about the city, its style and features. The first thing we see from the airplane window is the roofs of the houses and their color. The warm south of Italy and Spain can be easily distinguished by terracotta and rose-brown roofs, England and Scotland greet us with dark gray.
And anyone who has ever been to Tallinn must have climbed Toompea Hill, where there are four observation decks. An iconic view of the city opens from the one on Kokhtu street. There are always crowds of people with cameras wanting to capture the panorama of the red rooftops. Houses and towers, the fortress wall surrounding them, are covered with real clay tiles. However, if you take a closer look, you will notice that on some buildings, the old roofing material has been replaced with artificial composite tiles or even red-coated sheet metal. But this does not spoil the general appearance.
Roofs in neighboring Sweden have their own "corporate" color. Even ordinary tourists, and not only Astrid Lindgren's fans scrutinizing every roof in search of Carlson's house, immediately notice the abundance of black while walking around Stockholm. It is clear that such a color could be chosen as the main one for the roof only in a northern country, where the number of cold days significantly exceeds the number of warm ones.
There is a lot of wood and oil in Russia. Only a fortune can be built from oil, therefore houses have been built from ancient times from wood, that is, from wood. The roof, like the whole hut, was made without a single nail. Each next detail held tight to the previous one. Soaking wet in the rain and drying out in the sun, the wooden roof took on a gray-brown color. In the more southerly areas, the roof was often thatched. For a time, shingles were popular as a roofing material. Then came the period when slate and galvanized steel ruled the show. This continued until they found a worthy alternative in the form of metal tiles, which made it possible to paint the roofs of our country in all colors.
In essence, a metal tile is a galvanized steel sheet with a protective and decorative polymer coating, in shape repeating a natural tile. The first prototype of such a solution can be considered the profiled roofing pictures (blanks) for standing seam roofing made at the beginning of the 19th century by the English engineer and architect Henry Palmer. The solution quickly gained popularity. At first, the profiled sheet was made of iron and only after almost 80 years did they completely switch to steel. In its present form, metal tiles appeared in Finland in the 1980s, and in the 1990s they came to Russia, where in 20 years it won about 70% of the roofing market in cottage construction.
The new material bribed consumers with its performance, coupled with external variability. “The designers have no longer needed to select the type of roofing material depending on what color they want the roof to be. Homeowners no longer have to make a difficult choice between practicality, beauty and price,”says Andrey Maltsev, Head of the Roofing Systems Department of the Metal Profile Group of Companies.
Metal Profile is the number 1 company in Russia in terms of the volume of coated steel processing, the leader in the production of roofing and facade systems in Russia, the exclusive supplier of coated steel with Colorcoat Prisma (Great Britain).
Now the gray roof does not have to be made of slate, the red one is made of baked clay, the long-lasting one is made of copper, and the inexpensive one is made of bituminous sheets. The answer to any question was metal. It does not melt in the sun, does not crack in the cold, does not deform from temperature extremes and is quite easy to install, since it fits in sheets of a large area. This significantly speeds up the work and reduces its cost.
The emergence of this roofing material largely contributed to the widespread popularization of architectural styles such as Country, Provence or Fachwerk in cottage construction. For example, to imitate natural tiles, we recommend Granite CLOUDY, the appearance of which almost perfectly reproduces the pattern of fired ceramics. The "cloudy" effect is achieved with a two-pass paint layer.
There is a special solution for those who choose the Art Nouveau style or want to make their home look like a noble estate. In this case, AGNETA can come to the rescue - premium coated steel that imitates not only the color, but also the luster of natural copper. But unlike natural copper, AGNETA does not turn green over time and does not lose its luster.
It will be interesting for those who like to experiment to find out that metal tiles made it possible to make roofs even in such colors that it was previously impossible to imagine in the absence of such among natural materials. In this regard, the color palette of steel roofs with Colorcoat Prisma coating is very indicative. This line includes, for example, dark blue and pale blue metallic, copper patina and sky blue. In addition to the steel base, this tile has seven protective layers that provide rich color, high corrosion resistance, resistance to external influences and ultraviolet radiation, and therefore no fading. This is especially noticeable when there is a roof next to it, covered with metal tiles with a polyester coating, which loses color and shine every year due to exposure to sunlight.
But what color of roofs do Russians prefer? This largely depends on the region. For example, the preferences of Siberians, based on research carried out by Metal Profile Group in 2010, were distributed as follows: brown - 31%, green - 25%, cherry - 20%, red - 11%, blue - 9%. In the European part of the country, brown-red shades are losing ground, while green ones, on the contrary, are strengthening them. However, nothing lasts forever, and as new materials and colors become available, homeowners' tastes also change.
Finally, we will give you some useful advice. If you decide to get a new, eye-catching metal roof, then take it responsibly. In the market, you can easily get caught for an understated price. It is usually called small semi-handicraft producers who live exclusively on dumping and manufacture products with gross violations of technology. Galvanized steel sheet is first profiled and then powder coated. As a result, such a pseudo-metal tile begins to peel off after a couple of years, and the owners curse the day they bought it. To avoid such stories, you should only deal with trusted manufacturers with a solid history and reputation in the market.
