House Beautiful Colors for Your Home: 300 Designer Favorites Paperback – September 2, 2008

I am a failed graphic designer but I still think I'm good at picking colors and pretty confident about my choices. I've designed three rooms in my house, two with fairly bold but not wild colors. My point is that I'm a fairly advanced user and I find this book inspiring. The best feature is that there are about 60 pictures of interiors showing the colors in action. This is especially helpful for the most daring colors. I can visualize how a gray or pink would look in real life, but it's really useful to see how the near-blacks, for example, work in real rooms (much better than I would have imagined). It's also very helpful to see how the colors react to different light levels and how a wall shows a gradient as the brightness of light changes across a surface. I would prefer a book with fewer colors and more pictures of interiors.Another good feature is that most of the colors aren't shown as just blobs of ink. They are photographs of the paint applied very thick so you see some of the gradations of color in the shadows.Every color that's shown as just a sample/swatch has a paragraph by the designer. Some of these are too flowery for me. For example, a strong yellow that I don't like because it has too much green in it is described like this: "It's the color of afternoon light - that end-of-the-day moment when it feels warm and mellow and everything has a glow. I'm thinking some beautiful house on the Mediterranean, and we're sitting outside and eating figs with a bottle of white wine." The more down-to-earth comments have useful info like whether they use the paint flat, high gloss, or in between, other colors that work well with the paint, the color combination that makes the paint work for them, etc. It's disappointing to me that some of the interior photos don't have designer comments but instead are written by magazine staff, who mostly belabor the obvious.A very similar book that I like even more because it is bigger and has bigger color samples is House Beautiful 500+ Favorite Paint Colors Magazine (the ultimate paint guide, spring/ summer 2010). Unfortunately this book is currently out of stock.My quibbles are minor compared to the inspiration this book provides. The lessons in color should be useful not just for designing rooms but any design work involving color, such as fashion design, quilt design, packaging design and so on.

This little book is simply wonderful. The room photographs are beautiful and give some realistic ideas for making color choices. I don't like every choice, but that's to be expected. The point is to give you ideas. The colors are unusual and subtle - not your typical off-the-shelf colors. Yet many of the colors are made by the major brands that are easily found in a local paint or hardware store. It's been helping me to conceive of new color schemes I wouldn't have tried in the past.The swatches are very true to color and are clearly labeled with the paint manufacturer and color name so that you can track down the actual colors. Moreover, the swatches are large enough for the paint store to "shoot" for color-matching purposes in case you don't want to use that manufacturer or can't find the brand.In short, this book is a terrific resource. I'm so excited to have found it.

One of my favorite features in HOUSE BEAUTIFUL magazine is its monthly column on paint colors. Granted, the interior designers wax so eloquent about some of these colors that you can't help but be disappointed when you see the actual paint chip and think, that's blue? But it looks gray!The point is, of course, that paint is totally subjective and relative to where you're trying to put it. Everything depends on the light that comes into the room and how it changes during the day. I've read some of the other reviews that complained about how a few of the real paint chips don't match the colors in the book. So what? There are limits to photography, and one of the first things to know about choosing a paint color is that you must test it in your own house, in the room you intend to paint. A photo may or may not be true to color hue. And light varies from region to region and from house to house.Recently a friend of mine added on a new, upstairs room to her house. She painted it the most luscious, buttery yellow tint -- Sherwin-Williams "Gardenia." Inspired, I went to the store where she bought the paint and picked up a chip. To my astonishment, "Gardenia" turned out to be peach, not soft, creamy yellow. And in my house it looked horrid, nothing at all like the result she'd achieved.Although I've been living with my builder-grade beige walls for the past six years in complete dislike, I'm still too chicken to choose color schemes for the house. So instead, I explore my inner decorator through this book's enchanting little essays on color. The small format makes the book easy to carry about. The organization is loose enough that you can dive into it anywhere, in no particular order. I don't think it's intended to be strict decorating advice for what to do with your own rooms; instead, it's simply fun and inspiring. It makes me consider color combinations that I might never otherwise examine on my own. And one day, I hope I'll be brave enough to make a decision and actually paint my walls.My only disappointments with the book are these: too short, because I'm always greedy for more essays, and not enough photos of rooms painted in some of the color schemes.

Designers work with paint colors and know which shades and brands work well. This small book lists 300 paint recommendations by designers for their favorite paint colors. Finding a great paint color, which designers have already sampled and liked, saves you a lot of time and money. I remember there was a particular luscious shade of yellow I liked and a designer mentioned it was a Benjamin Moore yellow that she used all of the time. That kind of advice is invaluable.Designer Jeffrey Bilhuber recommends buying poster board and painting four big pieces of it and putting it on your walls to see what the color looks like in your room at different times of day and night with the varied lighting. If you like to use color on your walls, this book can be an invaluable resource for 300 designer favorites in paint brands and color.