In addition, when partnered with paint, light and color react in myriad ways to alter our perception of space. Light, in fact, is a prism of colours. When the sun slants through a misty curtain of rain, we can see that prism. It's called a rainbow. Fashion designer Alexander Julian employed the rainbow when he painted every surface in the striking stairwell of his country house a different color.
All colors contribute to the drama of the space, but no single color dominates.
The vivid combination works because each super-saturated hue is the same intensity. Because light differs from region to region, Kaufman and Dahl, and their photographer Dominique Vorillon, looked at two dozen houses across the United States to ascertain just how and why the colours selected for these homes appear they way they do. As colour and paint consultants, the authors logically concentrate on the painted surfaces of a room, and especially walls. The evocative photographs in the book, though, also reveal how light influences the way we feel about other decorative aspects of a room, too, from fabric draped at the window to polished pots clustered atop a table to flowers collected in a sparkling vase. Particular varieties of light are explored in seven chapters.