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

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.)