Real LI

“Color at Home: Creating Style With Paint” by Meg and Steven Roberts (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95): This book delivers on its promise to show splendid rooms of deep, rich color, sometimes in hues that ordinarily might not appeal to homeowners. The book’s pages run through the full color palette, starting with red and ending with black and white. Some of the color choices are startling: There’s a photo of an old-fashioned wall telephone, but it’s pink; interior walls go quickly from yellow to red. Considerable thought goes into matching, contrasting or blending, so that a home fronted by evergreen bushes gets painted with a misty green; a vase of daffodils is reflected in a bedroom mirror showing walls of butter yellow. Particularly effective, if unspoken, is that careful color selection can remake a room or an entire house without a huge investment of time or money. The authors are believers in the effect of color on mood and these pages certainly show how different they can appear because of relatively minor changes in color and decisions about what furniture or simple accessories will go with those choices.

- PAM ROBINSON