Product Description

Choosing the right colour for your home can be fraught with difficulties, and with literally thousands of shades of paint available in DIY stores the choice can be overwhelming. With this book, Kevin McCloud has taken the hard work out of home decorating by researching, selecting and combining over 750 colours into more than 60 tried-and-tested palettes that will transform your home. Stunningly well produced and printed in six colours on two different paper stocks for astonishing accuracy, each palette provides a blueprint for a decorative scheme that you can transfer to your own home confident in the knowledge that they have been sourced by a renowned authority on colour with a brilliant visual eye. Taken from a wide variety of sources - historical, regional and cultural - each palette is made up of a collection of 3-16 colour swatches and features a photograph demonstrating how the colours can be used in period or contemporary settings. With hints and tips on how best and in what situation to use each colour, the swatches are individually matched to a commercially available paint so that you effortlessly achieve each look.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #263558 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
"'He has managed to make the ubiquitous 'painting and decorating your home' book into a serious can't-live-without-it bible.' The Observer 'Uplifting, eye-catching and just so chic' Harpers & Queen"

About the Author
Kevin McCloud is one of England's foremost authorities on domestic decoration, and in particular paint. He has written numerous titles on decorating from his first title, Kevin McCloud's Decorating Book first published in 1989 and still in print today, to Choosing Colours which has now been published in over ten languages. Kevin runs a shop specialising in his bespoke lighting in London's Chelsea Harbour and has created two paint ranges for Fired Earth and a range of home furnishings for Debenhams. He appears frequently on television and is the writer, producer and presenter of the extremely successful Channel 4 series Grand Designs which features real people designing and building their own homes. A fifth series of Grand Designs will be aired Summer 2005.

Customer Reviews

Erudite but also incredibly accessible
Warning: this book can become addictive. I've just been renovating a whole house and I spent so much time with my head in this book, friends started to tease me. It's beautiful, but it's also thoughtful and brilliantly creative. I can't believe some reviewers on here don't find it useful. McCloud covers so much, from every shade of each colour to period colours (like the 1930s palettes I ended up using) to colours for beach homes or cold climates or loft style apartments. In short, there is a wealth of knowledge in this book and it's written with the passion one has come to expect from McCloud. To those who find this book hard to use, what do you want Kevin to do, come round your house and choose the colours for you? Be creative, pick what you like and experiment. That's the whole idea of the book! I did and I've ended up using colour in a way that I never thought possible.

Best colour book ever for interior design!
This is a superb book.

I am an amateur who's tried to use colour in my home but with disappointing results. I love colour and, over the years, I've looked at many books on interior design and on colour. There are a few good books for painters and graphic designers (Itten's Elements of Color, Color Star and Art of Color) but I've never before seen such a sophisticated but at the same time (elegantly) simple book that goes well beyond the basic colour charts and in a very usable way. I can't wait to try one of the suggested combinations.

I wish Kevin McCloud (whom I've watched in many Grand Designs programmes since we've always wanted to have our own home built but a) can't face the torture involved and b) can't find the land near London) would do something at a similar level of quality for lighting (his 1995 book is out of print).

P.S. In 2009 his new book "Colour Now" was published and he again puts together various palettes that create different moods and effects, explaining as he goes. Lovely.

Surprisingly well done, useful, readable reference
I love color in interior design but have never been a whiz at deciding whether this exact blue in conjunction with that exact red will give me this exact effect. McCloud's book ingeniously solves my problem by presenting beautifully simple double-page spreads dedicated each to a particular color scheme with explanation. There are sophisticated schemes based on variations on a single color, well-researched and amusingly explained period palettes, palettes for northern or southern exposures, neutral palettes, vibrant palettes, and probably some I'm forgetting. Possibilities range from pale eggshell sophistication to primary blue on red modern shock. Throughout, McCloud educates the reader about the history of color and its effect on the emotion, always with a light touch and never dipping into dullness. The color reproduction, as you'd expect, is perfect.