Sorry nobody answered this question. I'll take a shot, answering as if your house were a painting:

Light brown is in the orange family. Maroon, depending on the shade, can be anything from dark warm red to dark violet. With an orange-derived house color, red geraniums, and red to violet derived shutters, my recommendation would be to stick to one side of the color wheel and include a range from yellow through to orange and red to violet. Since you will already have red from your geraniums, you could cut that out of the equation and go with yellow, orange and violet.

There are two ways to approach this: You could go with all subdued versions of those colors (soft yellow, peach, warm pink, orchid), or the bright, primary (crayon-color) versions. The bright ones might stand up better to your red geraniums. The latter would suit my personal taste, but not everyone would want to go with such a strong scheme.

Having said that, there are a couple other ways to do this:

1. "Bracket" the red with equal amounts of strong yellow and strong blue-purple. So ... red geraniums on the porch and strong yellow and cool (bluish) purple plantings, where the yellow and purples are planted in large swaths of their own color type, but all planting areas have both yellow and purple in them.

2. Green and blue-green foliage plants with mostly blue-flowered plants and a soft yellow here and there to warm things up. (Is there such a thing as blue impatiens?)

3. Do a range from red to purple, with the occasional soft yellow to warm things up (similar to the first advice, but softening the yellow and skipping the orange tones to create a less intense scheme).

4. All shades of red (pinks, burgundies, more strong red just like the geraniums) with white to break it up.

I whipped up a quick graphic with the schemes in order from left to right like this:

1. yellow to violet scheme in primary
2. yellow to violet scheme in pastel
3. bracketed by yellow and bluish purple
4. green and blue-green foliage plants with shades-of-blue flowers and yellow accents
5. shades of red to purple with soft yellow accents
6. shades of warm red with white accents

{{gwi:55396}}

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Wow Juliaw - you are amazing! Thank you so much for your great response! You really helped me alot. I'm sorry it took me so long to respond - I have not looked at this website for a very long time. Best wishes in your garden this spring.