Color Style: How to Identify the Colors That Are Right for Your Home

Decorating a home is a major investment and we all want to be sure that our choice of paints, wallpapers, and fabrics is the right one. This practical, informative illustrated guide to understanding and using color enables you to create a stylish home that reflects your individual taste and is a pleasure to live in. Based on a pioneering color system called "Living with Color," this approach will both simplify and refine all of your decorating and furnishing decisions. The "Living with Color" system divides the color spectrum into six clearly defined palettes - Air, Wind, Water, Fire, Earth, and Mineral - in addition to a range of Naturals. Each palette is then subdivided into warm and cool shades. Inspiring color photographs show how these palettes can be combined beautifully in interior decoration. The book then addresses the entire home, room by room, offering practical, straightforward, and economical advice on using different color palettes to achieve particular styles and effects. A superb selection of color photographs illustrates color schemes for both contemporary and traditional kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, halls, bedrooms, bathrooms, children's rooms, and home offices. Carolyn Warrender demonstrates the practical use of color with step-by-step advice on how to make your own sample board, and with easy-to-follow decorating projects, each showing the use of special paint effects or other color-based techniques. These projects are brought to life by specially commissioned artworks and by the author's own tips for personal finishing touches. Finally, a questionnaire and a series of checklists enable you to create a personalized portfolio of colors. Once you've identified the colors that you most enjoy, you will be able to create a home that is a true reflection of your personal taste and lifestyle.

Publishers Weekly

Using her trademark "Living with Color" system, British designer Warrender assists home decorators in selecting interior colors that are at once harmonious and a reflection of their own personal tastes. She arranges the color spectrum into following palettes: Natural, Wind, Water, Fire, Earth and Mineral. Each palette is subdivided into warm and cool colors, and Warrender rotely asks readers to take a simple test to distinguish their preference between these two groupings before briefly noting each palette's characteristics. Aspiring decorators learn, for example, that the Earth Palette (shades of spruce, terracotta, olive and bayleaf) works well in rooms with dark wood furnishings. Because the accompanying color charts use British paint names, e.g. Evensong, Vespers, Swansdown, U.S. readers may need to do some research to find American equivalents. Chapters in Section II, "Living with Color," treat individual rooms ("The Kitchen"; "The Bedroom"), supplying detailed instructions for adding unique accents, such as constructing a dado railing for a narrow hallway or brightening up a home office with striped walls. This is a worthwhile color primer, despite the predominantly British cast of the illustrative interiors which reflect different conventions, e.g., multi-hued tiles in an entryway, from those more readily found in American homes. (Oct.)