Choosing Colors: An Expert Choice of the Best Colors to Use in Your Home

I bought this book while trying to plan a color palette for our new house. I've always liked houses with some color on the walls and different colors in different rooms. The challenge is finding colors that match the furnishings of each room and yet still coordinate with the other room colors.The book provides broader and more versatile palettes than I was able to find in any other book. Better yet, it provided some scattered advice about what colors to use in particular situations (i.e. exterior vs. interior, main color vs. accent, cloudy climate vs. sunny climate). It also offered advice about how to put together color combinations that work. For example, I found it's advice about the surprising utility of purple colors in bringing a complex palette together was quite useful.I would have liked to have found a book that offered more systematic advice or a palette that was precisely what I needed, but using the principles and some of the examples in this book I was able to put a household palette together that I am reasonably pleased with.

This was exactly the book I was hoping it would be. It truly helps you choose colors from the popular brands of paint available. I was most interested in colors for a room with only a northern exposure. Every color I tried seemed to turn green on the walls. This book was extremely helpful in this regard. The only reason I gave it only 4 stars instead of 5 is the same reason others have commented on. The paint colors used in palette 28 and 29 were omitted from the reference guide in the rear of the book. It covers blue which is most people's favorite color so the omission is significant. Fortunately, for me, blue is my least favorite color.

I love this book. I started with the Color Scheme Bible by Anna Starma, but felt I needed more help extrapolating the color schemes into actual rooms. Kevin McCloud's Choosing Colors has detailed descriptions of Color Schemes and where they have been used in the past as well as exact shades from various paint colors that can be used (such as Sherman Williams). There are a lot more photos of actual rooms for each color palette than in the Color Scheme Bible, which only showed one room for each of the seven or so colors on the spectrum from Red to Green to Purple. I was more interested to see a 1950s room with a '50s color palette in McCloud's book than a "purple" scheme room as in Starmer's book. However I do intend to use both books. I am not knocking the CSB, if I have a main color picked out and am struggling with accent colors, I might turn to that for an exact shade, but this seems to be for someone who already has a direction that they are heading for. McCloud's book not only offers schemes as a launching point, but connects them to history and culture and gives his reasonings as to why they work so well together. It's truly refreshing. I am really excited to learn more about the history of color in American design and to use it in the future. This book is about 8 x 11' or bigger, much bigger than the Color Scheme Bible, and with much more details about each and every shade. Also there are three ways to view each palette - with a white, grey or black background. This is done with two "viewers" that one can clip out from the back flap of the book. McCloud explains when and why it is beneficial to view them in each of the three different backgrounds provided. I am a home owner and not a professional interior designer. I am sure the experience will be different from both perspectives, but I can't say anything bad about this book.

I have used this book to select paint for three homes and give it as a gift to new homeowners whenever possible. It's also a bit of a dream boo and has historical color schemes as well (want an Art Deco palette? One based on VW Combis from the 60s?). All colors are matched to well known paint manufacturers in both the U.S. and U.K (not sure about the EU). In addition to the palettes, there's photographs of the color combinations "in the field" - whether of a bedroom in Iceland, a living room in South Africa, a kitchen in Yorkshire, or a beautiful atrium in Morocco.

I was hoping to buy a book that would teach me how colors charts work, etc. This book did not fulfill my hopes in that is was confusing as to what the author was trying to impart to his readers. I also felt the various pallets were outdated. Next time I will look for a book that had more up to date color concepts.

Great layouts for color palettes. Good to see the true colors in print, not just on a computer screen or printed off a crappyPrinter.. As a result of this book, my entire house is now based on one color scheme. The rooms flow together and items can easily be moved from room to room and not clash. This book has been so valuable to me that I've bought it twice. The first time, I removed the aforementioned color scheme page and lost it after much use. Ibought the book again and will not remove the essential page this time!

Not quite what I expected, but I did find some unexpected tools and designing ideas that I reference and use on a daily basis. It was definitely worth buying.

The book has lots of information about choosing colors and combining colors. I know much more now than I did before and there are lots of photo examples.

é stato acquistato per un regalo, perciò non posso dare un giudizio preciso. Posso solo dire che è stato molto apprezzato e a detta della persona un libro molto utile.