Drive from Old Palm City across the Palm City Bridge into downtown Stuart, then keep going south on US 1 to Hobe Sound, and inside twenty minutes you have crossed three regulatory realities. Two of those places have no local government at all. One has a building division, a historic survey, and a redevelopment agency. All three are Martin County, all three sit under the same statutes, and all three will happily fine you for the wrong shade of beige — just not through the same office.
Our general HOA paint color approval guide covers the mechanics that apply anywhere in Florida: pull the guidelines, submit exact codes, wait for written approval. This post is the Martin County companion. It maps which body actually reviews your exterior in 34990 and 34997, what Florida law gives you when a board says no, and where the substrate under the approved color decides whether the approval was worth anything.
Two gates, and only one of them is the government
Every exterior repaint in Martin County passes through at most two gates.
The public gate is your building authority — county or municipal. For painting, it is almost always wide open. Martin County’s published guidance on what needs a building permit puts “Painting, papering, flooring, and similar finishing work” in the exempt column, alongside cabinetry work and minor plumbing repairs. That covers every unincorporated address in the county.
The private gate is your association, and it is the one that has teeth. A recorded declaration of covenants is a contract that runs with your land. Board approval is not a courtesy step you can skip because the county doesn’t care.
Where you live determines which gate
| Where the house is | Building authority | Permit to repaint | Other public layer that can apply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palm City (34990) | Martin County — unincorporated | No | Old Palm City CRA, plan adopted April 2002 |
| South Stuart / Port Salerno (34997, unincorporated) | Martin County | No | Port Salerno CRA |
| Inside Stuart city limits | City of Stuart Building Division | Confirm with the city | Historic survey under LDC 5.09.00; CRA design review in some areas |
| Sewall’s Point | Town of Sewall’s Point | Confirm with the town | Town building department review |
| Hobe Sound (33455) | Martin County — unincorporated | No | Hobe Sound CRA, created 2000 |
| Jupiter Island | Town of Jupiter Island | Confirm with the town | Town permits office |
One caution on that table: 34997 is not all one jurisdiction. Part of it lies inside Stuart’s city limits and part is unincorporated county. A mailing address that says “Stuart” tells you nothing about which building department has your file. Martin County also runs six community redevelopment areas — Golden Gate, Hobe Sound, Jensen Beach, Old Palm City, Port Salerno and Rio — created between the late 1990s and 2002. Those carry land-development standards rather than residential paint rules, and the county’s CRA property-improvement reimbursement is a commercial program — not a homeowner grant.
Palm City: the village is the authority, not the community
Palm City’s gated communities are not single approval bodies, and treating them that way is the most common reason a submission bounces.
Harbour Ridge Yacht & Country Club is organized into 28 villages along the St. Lucie River. That means village documents layered under the club’s own, and a range of build vintages rather than one. On the garden-condominium and attached-villa villages, the wall you want repainted is a common element under Chapter 718, and the application isn’t yours to file at all. Piper’s Landing is 302 homes in a community established in the early 1980s, so expect several accumulated coats on most walls. That matters at the approval stage in a way nobody expects: the board approves a color chip, but the color you get depends on how much of the old stack has to come off and what primer goes over the bare stucco underneath. Where widespread hairline cracking has opened in four-decade-old stucco and an elastomeric system is the honest answer, that’s a product change the submission needs to name.
The Meadows at Martin Downs — 832 homes built by DiVosta, with development beginning in 1988 — is the clearest case of substrate driving paperwork. DiVosta marketed its walls as “built solid,” and accounts of the system differ — solid poured concrete exterior walls in some descriptions, block cores filled with poured grout in others. Either way you are painting dense structural masonry, not framing: low-porosity, so a topcoat applied straight to exposed areas doesn’t key in, and a primer rated for dense masonry is mandatory. The board approving your color has no opinion about primer, which is exactly why we put the product data sheets in the submission package. When the approval letter names the full system and not just a color number, you have documentation that the approved appearance was actually achievable.
Stuart: the one place a city can weigh in
Stuart is incorporated, and that changes the calculus. The city runs its own Building Division out of 121 SW Flagler Avenue, and the city’s own materials flag that in some CRA areas, exterior changes to a building may trigger design review. The Old Downtown District is working toward National Register of Historic Places designation, and a 2022–2023 survey updated the original 1991 historic property inventory to identify structures at least fifty years old; buildings on that inventory fall under Land Development Code Section 5.09.00.
We won’t tell you whether a Certificate of Appropriateness applies to your color change — that determination belongs to the city. What we will tell you is that downtown Stuart’s older stock is wood-frame with original trim and detailing, not the CBS you find west of the bridge — and that a fifty-year-old wood window casing needs hand scraping, spot priming with a stain-blocking primer where old oil-based coatings have bled, and a full sealant reset before any color goes on. That’s a two-week prep sequence on a house where the review may take longer than the painting. Call the Development Department at 772-600-1245 first. In Sewall’s Point and on Jupiter Island, both incorporated towns with their own building departments, the same rule applies: ask the town, then ask the association.
Hobe Sound: no city hall, but plenty of architectural review
Hobe Sound is an unincorporated census-designated place of 13,163 residents as of the 2020 census, so no municipal layer applies — the association is the whole story. But the associations here are not one generation. Heritage Ridge is not a single HOA — separate homeowner and condominium associations were recorded there between 1979 and 1984, so two houses a few streets apart can answer to different boards and different documents. Lost Lake is a later golf community whose association was recorded in 1990. Ask which entity holds your covenants before you assume a neighbor’s approval tells you anything.
Where a community publishes an approved palette, that’s good news for a submission and a trap for a repaint. The trap is sheen. A palette will list a body color and often say nothing about gloss level, and on the 1970s and 1980s stock through this part of the county, the components that betray a mismatch are the ones nobody submits: aluminum soffit and fascia that has chalked to a dull powder and will reject a topcoat without a bonding primer, and the sun-facing elevations where the same pigment in satin reads noticeably darker than in flat. A darker approved accent on a west wall in Hobe Sound also runs hotter and fails sooner than the same color on the north side. Where the palette gives you latitude, we push toward higher-LRV body colors on west exposures — and we say so during color consultation rather than after.
What the approval is worth, and what it costs to skip
A full exterior repaint with us runs $3,500–$6,500 with real prep, the correct primer for the substrate, and two full coats. Multi-structure and acreage properties — a Palm City estate with a detached garage and outbuildings — scope above that range, and we quote those from a walkthrough. Our exterior painting cost breakdown goes line by line.
Painting an unapproved color in a covenanted community means paying for that range twice. That is the entire economics of the approval step: a few weeks of patience against the cost of a second full job. So we don’t schedule a start date until you hold written approval — not a neighbor’s assurance, not a management-company phone call.
Our Treasure Coast exterior painting city guide covers regional differences in substrate and exposure across six markets, and our guide to Palm City’s gated golf communities goes community by community on what’s actually behind the wall — poured concrete, stucco, or a 1980s coating stack that needs adhesion testing. This post’s job is narrower: know which gate applies to your address before you fall in love with a color.
A Martin County crew that handles the paperwork
KB Painting & Refinishing is family-owned by Braiden and Kaylee Smith, founded in 2019, and the crew that shows up carries 25+ years of combined experience — our own W-2 employees, never subcontractors, using Sherwin-Williams systems. We are fully insured, hold a 4.9-star rating across 350+ Google reviews, and were named Winner, 2026 Treasure Coast Community’s Choice Awards. Exterior work carries a 5-year workmanship warranty.
We assemble the submission package as part of every estimate: exact color codes for body, trim and accents, the specified sheen for each, and manufacturer data sheets for the full system. Same approach on every Palm City exterior painting, Stuart exterior painting and Hobe Sound exterior painting job.
Call (772) 222-3227 or request a free estimate and we’ll look at your elevations, your coating history, and your association’s paperwork in a single visit.
KB Painting & Refinishing — family-owned, founded in 2019, serving Palm City, Stuart, Hobe Sound and the Treasure Coast with our own crew and no subcontractors. Insured. [email protected].
