Customer Reviews

The Perfect Palette: Fifty Inspired Color Plans for Painting Every Room in Your Home

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I like this book because it is so easy to read and use. The photos and drawings are especially beautiful and give you an idea of how the color recipes will look in a room. The most fun for me was to flip through all of the different color sections and try to imagine the colors in my own house. I love how the text helps the reader to understand the mood and atmosphere that the recipes will create. I have already chosen three recipes for my house and bought 1 quart each of the paint (like the author suggests)! I appreciated that the more complicated reading about painting techniques, tips and tools are separated out into the intro and appendices. I expected these sections to be "heavy" reading and hard to get through but they are very simple and straightforward. I actually liked reading them after enjoying the beautiful recipes... These sections are VERY useful and have really prepared me to paint it "right" the first time. Especially helpful are the tips on how to make a hall look deeper, or a room look less boxy, etc.

My favorite recipes: "Blueberry Hill" "Pompeii" and "Lilac."

This was a very small financial investment in a book that will really change my whole house.

I am choosing colors that are more adventurous than I would ever have chosen before.

Enjoy this book, I did (and still do).

I'm not a writer, and I'm REALLY no interior decorator. So, when I looked through the zillions of How To books, this one just stood out. I'd even checked out one of the Martha Stewart ones - no contest. With Stewart's methods you'd need a month and a staff of painters. Sorry Martha, you never picked up a brush.

But not only is The Perfect Palette a gorgeous book with flawless room color combining recipes that come out looking amazing, but Bonnie Krims ACTUALLY USED THEM ALL, she's tried them. Plus, she's done her own illustrations and written a little story about each recipe. The book is like a coffee table book, but it's also a really good HOW TO kind of book. I thought doing a new paint job on my rooms was going to be a real drudge, but with this book I really got into it because the colors were so different from what I'd normally think would work, but on the walls, amazing!

Then, based on the finished walls, I used the book's instructions on setting up a room, and after rearranging some of the furniture and knick-knacks and lamps - my friends were blown away. That's all I can say. If you're really serious about getting your rooms in shape, I think this is THE book to buy.

This book was extremely helpful to me in finding color combinations for various rooms. I found it especially useful in rooms where I already had a feature I couldn't/wouldn't change. For example, I have custom window shades in my kitchen that it isn't practical to replace, but I want to paint the walls. By using the color plans in the book for the colors in my shades, I've found three different choices for the walls that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own (probably because none of them are off-white).

Reading the other reviews, I think people who expect a 'decorating' book will be disapointed in this book. There are very few photographs of actual rooms, just a picture of each color combination. But if you need a reference for colors that work together you should find this book helpful. In addition to the three major colors in each scheme, the author suggests wood tones and accent colors to go with each plan. She also offers some excellent suggestions for choosing colors outside the plans, for example - use the darkest, richest end of the color chip to select a color, then work back to lighter shades until the color is usable in your particular situation.

I found the book very helpful, and feel certain it's a reference I will continue to use.

Out of all the decorating books I have purchased, this was the most immediately useful to me because I used it to select the color palette for my new home.

I purchased this book prior to closing on my new home, and used it to select room and accent colors for every single room in my home. The book encouraged me to use colors I naturally liked, but showed me how to combine colors so that going from room to room the colors transitioned well.

The book also provided paint chip #'s so I went to my paint store and looked up the colors in the book's palettes, and brought the appropriate chips home so I could see them in my own home.

I will use this book as a color reference guide whenever I do any further decorating projects.

Excellent value for the money also.

This book is just awesome. I used several of the colors in the book and they looked wonderful on my walls. This is one of the few paint books that I have bought that actually provide the brand and color names. It is extremely frustrating to pick up decorating books or magazines, find a color that's appealing and then find no reference to the brand or color name. This book actually provides three different paint brands to pick from for each color. I also really liked her descriptions of different color combinations and the feelings (restful, cozy, bright) that goes along with the different colors. The price is reasonable so even if you don't use the colors in the book, its a great place to get ideas. I highly recommend this book. I hope she releases another!

I am a complete stickler when it comes to decorating and paint color. I'll test quarts and quarts of different paint colors before choosing paint color for a room, and am very concerned about getting a flow of color throughout my house. The Perfect Palette has truly been a remarkable tool for me. Up to now, I have yet to find a book that provides paint color combinations and a detailed explanation for using them. Despite the books age, (it was published in '98) and the fact that Benjamin Moore changed their color numbers, this book is the only book that actually helped me to get the paint colors in my house working in a unified, cohesive fashion. The Perfect Palette is very, very useful, which is more than I can say for many of the newer paint books I've looked at. If you want to get your rooms beautifully painted and create a sense of connection between all the rooms in the house, buy this book. It is tried and true.

I really enjoyed using this paint guide. Painting using this book was actually fun to do and I am happy with all the beautiful colors I used throughout my home (foyer, kitchen, living and dining rooms). This book gave me a new-found courage with color. My friends and neighbors keep telling me how much they love my house now. (I will be buying them copies of the book for Christmas.) I hope the author will write a "Perfect Palette 2" so that when I repaint or redecorate in 5 or 6 years I'll have all the latest colors.

In a recent review, it came to my attention that a reader felt you can't get the new Benjamin Moore paint colors or other paint brands mixed to match the colors in The Perfect Palette book. It should be clarified that any paint store can mix any paint color from any paint chip any time. In addition, all Benjamin Moore paint dealers will continue to mix any of the old Benjamin Moore colors using the old numbers whenever they are asked to do so. This book will continue to be a tremendously useful resource for choosing paint colors well into the future.

After agonizing over paint chips and testing lots of swatches on the walls of different rooms, I still made color mistakes. Then I found this book, and am delighted with the results. These palettes are fabulous!

I bought this book when it first came out years ago and based the color scheme of my house on a "recipe" in the book. I pulled it out again recently hoping to paint my living room while still tying into all the other colors I initially used in the foyer and adjoining rooms... The color combinations in this book still strike me as the most beautiful I have seen. I have never found another book like it.

When I went to the paint store I found that Benjamin Moore had changed their paint color numbers, but the paint store had no problem mixing my chosen color for me from the book.

The best thing this book did was give me courage to use color. I caught the bug when I first painted and now there's no stopping me. It has given my house such personality and my accessories and artwork really stand out against the wall colors. None of the colors in the book are "wild" or "outrageous" (or I wouldn't have used them). Even though I used yellows and greens and other colors in different rooms, everything seems to flow really well because the colors were designed to go together.

I would definitely recommend this book.