New York School of Interior Design
By Ethel Rompilla
Harry N. Abrams, $40
You won’t find page after page of magazine-style interiors in this sober and refined work by the New York School of Interior Design’s award-winning professor of color theory. While other books on the subject attempt to teach how to choose and use colors in interiors, <i>Color for Interior Design</i> asks more of readers by inviting them first to learn about color from prehistory through the Renaissance to the nineteenth century to today. Next, author Rompilla devotes more than 60 pages to color theory and meaning, including a fascinating discussion on exactly how we see colors. Color charts and diagrams are smartly arranged next to photos to illustrate text points, helping to make the information as accessible as possible without the benefit of a lecture by the professor herself. Readers might be tempted to pass over the first two sections and go straight to the final chapter, in which the scientific lessons taught in the previous chapters are applied to actual interiors, but they would be cheating themselves. <i>Color for Interior Design </i>is the next best thing to attending a semester’s worth of Rompilla’s classes on the subject. (via Elements of Living)