A few months back, we added a new title to our collection called Fresh American Spaces by Annie Selke. If you are yearning for a splash of colour to brighten winter-weary interiors, this book will give you a fix.

Selke is a product designer whose popular home furnishings frequently decorate the pages of shelter magazines such as House Beautiful and Better Homes & Gardens. She identifies five distinct design/lifestyle perspectives that she uses to guide her design.

The first one, which she labels Everyday Exuberance, is characterized by vibrant colour. I am captivated by a room inspired by an exotic rug. Here, walls are painted lilac and furniture is upholstered in pink and burnt orange. Sweet colours of the same intensity are balanced by earth tones. The result is a knock-out.

Exciting colour is also a theme in her Cultured Eclectic outlook where colour appears in ethnic textiles, such as Afghani Suzani embroidery and Indonesian batiks. Happy Preppy borrows crayon-box colours to cheer up the rooms.

If you prefer to colour your world with subtlety, she shows the way with Nuanced Neutral and Refined Romantic. She advocates a restrained approach to romantic style that “is about incorporating beauty, grace, and elegance into a space without a heavy hand”.

I like this book a lot. Out in the design world, there is a swirling sea of ideas; if you subscribe to too many of them, your interior landscape becomes chaotic. Selke has the ability to sift through the ocean, distill ideas that work together and help the reader learn from her experience.