How to choose an appealing color scheme for your home

Regular readers know how strong an emphasis I put on color as a design element - and how readily I acknowledge that choosing the right color scheme isn't easy. Even professional designers find it hard to do, which is why we see so many plain-vanilla color schemes in otherwise beautifully composed settings.

Help is available, however. Advice on color can be gotten from many books, including some that have nothing to say about trends in color choices. These sorts of books instead focus on theories about color. Besides being fascinating in their own right, it's possible to gain inspiration as well as practical information from books such as "Color for Interior Design," published by Harry N. Abrams, which I discuss below.

Question: I'm puzzled about how to decide on a color scheme for the family room in our new home. Someone told me to start by choosing a work of art for the room and to base the color scheme on that. Is that a good idea? Do you have other suggestions for how I can move in the right direction?

Answer: I'm familiar with the pick-a-picture approach to color scheme selection, and my advice is to forget it. Especially in today's family room, there's likely to be little wall space available for an important work of art, what with the flat-screen TV and the bookcases, mirrors and cabinets typically deployed in these spaces.

I recommend instead that you look through magazines and books until you come across an appealing color scheme. Once you do, please don't think it's sufficient to arrange some paint chips, fabric swatches and furniture finishes side by side. It may all look fine in the abstract, but the actual outcome will depend on how you apportion and place each color in a particular room. That's the hard part.

Let's say you like the combination of brown, beige, red, orange and cream. OK, so we'll choose red orange for the walls and a couple of chairs, along with cream for the ceiling, a chocolate-brown carpet, a beige sofa and a cream-and-brown print on two chairs and the curtains. That'd be one look. Now imagine that same color scheme and the same chocolate-brown carpet and cream ceiling, but with beige walls, chairs in red orange, and a beige-and-orange print on the sofa and curtains. That'd be quite another look. The perception of the size of the space would change with each of those color combinations. And the room's lighting would have to be adjusted from one color arrangement to the other.

Here's where that book comes in. Ethel Rompilla, the author of "Color for Interior Design," is a professor at the New York School of Interior Design, which also gets an author credit. The book is partly about the way color choices affect the appearance of a room, but it's also about how tonal values and contrast influence our perception of a space. Consider the setting shown in the photo. This is the interior of the Schroder House in Utrecht in the Netherlands, built in 1924 by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. It's a striking but harmonious combination of gray, white and black with strong accents of red and blue. The distribution and proportional use of these colors powerfully affects our perception of the space. It may not be your style - or mine - but it sure does make a statement.

Readers with general interior design questions for Rita St. Clair can e-mail her at rsca@ritastclair.com.