Two new titles explore the many ways to splash your home with joie de vivre.

Happy Home: Everyday Magic for a Colorful Life is the new book by designer Charlotte Hedeman Gueniau. She advocates filling your home with happy colours that make you smile. You see a front door painted cheery yellow and accented with pretty pink scatter mats. Hallways wear a coat of periwinkle blue and are crowned with light fixtures with patterned lampshades. Rooms are adorned with flowers and embroidered fabrics.

Smiles come from kitschy souvenirs and quirky accessories, as well as heirlooms with a family story. She views walls as playgrounds to display lively art and personal collections.

For Jonathan Adler, happy, happy, happy comes with unbridled self expression and small indulgences. In 100 Ways to Happy Chic Your Life, he reveals his favourite tricks for happy living in his trademark cheeky style.

Small indulgences include creating a tea moment, napping in unusual places and watching bad TV. Luxury is a stack of towels on a chair in the bathroom. “Same rules as an orgy: You need at least three as a minimum, then add on as many as you desire.”

Throw a sheepskin on a chair for casual squish and Laplander chic. Embrace the music of wind chimes and make your own valentines. Adler is not afraid to be irreverent or conventional. Although he will cheerfully embellish a staid portrait with mustache and goatee, he will also space out with cross stitch. Above all, his message is to keep an open mind about any domestic activity that brings you pleasure and makes you glad to be alive.

- Jane

I love to recommend new interior design books to friends who enjoy them. Three of my friends have very different styles and consequently get recommendations for different books. Every now and again, a new book comes in that has a lot to offer anyone interested in design, no matter what their style preference is. A Living Space by Kit Kemp is a new title that does just that.

Kemp has an unusual resume. She is an interior designer who, together with her husband, owns a chain of hotels in London and New York. Her design work for these hotels has received international acclaim. The book features rooms from these hotels as well as their homes.

Kemp has an outstanding flair for colour and pattern mix. She creates rooms that are lively and inviting for the large-scale hotel settings as well as domestic interiors. Her spaces feature customized furnishings, many commissioned art works and fabric from collections she has designed for two companies.

She shares her sources of inspiration which are often textiles and objects collected while traveling.

“My aim as a designer,” she says, “Is to make surroundings a joyful thing – to bring in elements of intrigue and curiosity that create a sense of adventure and fun.”

It is one of the freshest new interior design books I’ve seen.

- Jane

The photo of delectable Greek food in a traditional blue-and-white setting in my last blog made me think about this wonderful colour scheme and all the delicious ways it is applied. If you search our catalogue with the phrase “blue in interior decoration”, the results reveal its ongoing popularity. Here are a few of my favourite titles.

Decorating with Blue and White shows the colour scheme applied to every style of décor, including Mediterranean. In a country kitchen, soft blue and white appears in checks on comfy armchairs with large striped ottomans. It is echoed in kitchen accessories like polka-dot mugs and enameled cookware.

Bathroom blues are expressed in glass tiles and pretty towels. Outdoor blues include the deep cobalt painted on a Moroccan door and traditional tiles around a pool.

350 Inspiring Ways to Decorate with Blue is a 2011 title from House Beautiful in a convenient paper-back size which makes it easy to browse on the C-train. Designers share their favourite paint colours and sources and talk about why the colour resonates with them.

You see blues from the sea and sky, as well as dusky navy and indigo. Sometimes blue dominates the room; in other spaces, it is used as an accent. As you would expect from House Beautiful, most of the décor is traditional or contemporary classic.

Although Blue & White Living by Stephanie Hoppen was published in 1998, many of the classic blue-and-white combinations remain fresh today. A large living room by John Stefanidis features furniture slip covered in blue-and-white ticking. Blue ikat cushions line a long bench in this light-filled room.

These books are bound to leave you singing the blues.

-Jane

Zesty eggplant stew, a dish of olives and fresh lemons against a backdrop of cobalt blue. That’s the delectable cover of The Country Cooking of Greece by Diane Kochilas. She is a chef and owner of a cooking school in Ikaria who also writes a weekly food column for Greece’s largest newspaper.

Kochilas provides more than just recipes; she takes you for a tour of the culture and people. You meet the mussel man who owns a popular taverna and cultivates mussels in “the rich, sweet-salty waters of the Thermaikos Gulf”. You learn about Greek oregano, the kalamata olive harvest and Santorini tomatoes that flourish unexpectedly in the chalky, volcanic soil of the island.

She writes an ode to the classic Greek salad which melds the amazing flavours of simple fresh ingredients. I can’t wait to try the Cretan beet salad with yogurt and walnuts. Pistachio-crusted feta and ouzo-glazed duck breast are calling my name.

I like that the recipes are as much about method as ingredients and that many of the recipes have an uncomplicated list of ingredients consistent with country home cooking.

The cover lured me in with a visual feast and the book lived up to its cover.

- Jane

Next blog:This beautiful blue-and-white tablescape reminds me of all the lovely decorating books that embrace the blues.

If you think that happiness comes in a paint can (and I do), there’s no such thing as too many books about colour. Here's a new one for your reading list.

In The Right Color: Finding the Perfect Palette for Every Room in Your Home, author Eve Ashcraft undertakes the task of explaining the complexities of colour selection. She is a colour expert who has been dubbed the “paint guru” by the New York Times.

Ashcraft begins with a story to explain the process of creating a colour scheme inspired by a porcelain saucer. You quickly learn that matching is for amateurs and she’s a pro.

In the section called Color in Context, she considers the impact on colour of many elements, including light, setting, contrast and surface materials. She explores other options for ceilings besides white and discusses whether or not to highlight trim. Here, she also explores colour “rules” that may needlessly limit your thinking on the topic.

She looks at colour choices room by room and, at the back of the book, offers a selection of “28 colours that work” from her own paint collection.

- Jane

Dave's Two Cents:

Have you ever wandered into a big-box church of home improvement looking for a simple can of paint and been blown away by the rainbow of colour chips displayed? The author gives us the benefit of her expertise to choose among this amazing variety.

When all is said and painted, the “right colour” is your choice, whether you pay the painter or the paint store. Why not invest a gram of research to prevent a kg of regret?

- David Ramsey

If you love colour and craft and reclaiming vintage furniture, you will enjoy the rooms created by interior stylist Selina Lake. In her new book, Homespun Style, she celebrates the power of hand-made furnishings to create homes that are personal and distinctive as well as welcoming.

She takes “a modern approach to craft” favouring simple creations over tricky techniques. The contemporary shape of a swivel chair is transformed by a funky, over-sized granny square afghan that is casually wrapped around it. Colourful textiles are made into easy cushion covers or simply draped.

The look is light-hearted and casual. In a cheerful dining area, candy-hued finishes are painted onto mismatched chairs. The walls are decorated with pop art trimmed with swags of pin lights and coloured beads. Above the arrangement hangs a bunting of pretty handkerchiefs knotted together at the corners.

Old light fixtures are redeemed with a splash of flowers painted on a lampshade or ribbon streamers fluttering from a chandelier. A modern chest of drawers was customized by refinishing the drawer fronts with pastel paint and vintage wallpaper.

She also demonstrates how to make eye-catching, still-life arrangements from favourite objects.

Lake insists that applying your passion for handiwork to your home does not mean that you need to be handy. She advocates support of your local artist and craftsperson. And good on her.

I’m thinking that if you admire their artistic ablility or tricky techniques mastered, you should be happy to pay for them.

- Jane

This week, a trio of craft books arrived and they’re all pretty with pink.

First, from textile designer and “Queen of Quilting”, comes Quilts from the House of Tula Pink. Her namesake colour appears on the Fade-to-Pink quilt where the design features a gradual transition from one colour to another.

Pink reappears as a punch of colour on the Lollipops Pillow. Here, scraps of fabric cover buttons that are applied to a stitched pattern on a neutral background. The Beanstalks quilt is another charmer where the pop of pink adds excitement to a whimsical pattern.

Quilted Gifts from your Scraps & Stash invites you to use your collection of fabric ends to create a wide variety of pretty projects.

Ruffled fabric roses embellish the patchwork pillow you see on the cover of the book. Narrow pink and violet fabric stripes separate wider sections of floral fabrics to make attractive placemats. Pink energizes a tote bag designed with lots of pockets and trimmed with apple-green rickrack braid.

In Flower Power Patchwork, you find the power of pink in many other clever projects. Pink prints are mixed on a fabric-covered notebook, cute little pincushions and zigzag chair cushions.

All of these lovely books feature good photos and step-by-step instructions.

While sipping ice tea on your sunny summer deck, you can plan some nifty projects for rainy days and colder months.

- Jane

Sibella Court loves to travel and bring home mementos from her trips. She uses them to create rich interior vignettes which continue to remind her of the travel experiences. Court is a designer who writes for design magazines, owns an online shop and works with Anthropologie, a store that embraces her signature look.

Her new book, Nomad: A global approach to interior style, has a layout somewhere between a scrapbook and mood board. She combines her fusion style of decorating with stories about the people and cultures she has encountered in trips to Japan, Italy, India, Syria and Mexico.

A trip to Japan is reflected in a bedroom corner where a futon is covered with worn peasant textiles dyed with indigo. The reader learns about her stay in a Japanese inn and her visit with a famous indigo dyer.

A beautiful book of Amalfi paper displays a collection of seaside mementos from the Isle of Capri. From India, ethnic textiles drape a lush, tented bedroom. There are amulets and talismans from the Seed Souq of Damascus.

At the back of the book, she lists wide-ranging reference sources for her travels which include books, magazines, music and movies. In Japan, she stayed a while at the Park Hyatt Tokyo and listened to the saxophonist at the bar. The stay was inspired by Lost in Translation directed by Sofia Coppola.

Her style will appeal to those who enjoy rich layers and colours in décor and personal collections where each object recalls a story.

- Jane

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

Another new book has a home in the collection. It is Richard Diebenkorn: the Ocean Park series. This series of abstract paintings transport me back to the clear cerulean blue of the ocean, the white sands and the clapboard beach front houses of southern California.

The artist started producing paintings for this series in 1967. It was at this point, that he moved from a highly successful career making representational figurative paintings to Ocean Park’s strangely emotive abstracts.

The paintings remind me of the experience of flying over the rice fields that surround Sacramento. While flying through the clouds and sky, you could also see them reflected from the patchwork of watery shapes below. The experience was all too fleeting but my memories of it persist. I find that Diebenkorn’s abstract style captures these sensations better than a representational style would. My mind too easily identifies with objects and starts to categorize them withering the emotional impact.

His use of colour and his technique of application are fascinating. Thin layers of colours are partially scraped away to reveal the layers below which creates subtler shades. These complex colours are coupled with sharp delineations of forms that hint of roads and buildings – surreal subdivisions. There is an aerial feel to his paintings.

As well, the paintings flirt with light; an inner light defines them.

Any one of his paintings would have a honoured position on my walls, although the ones he did on the lids of cigar boxes have a special appeal.

This book plays homage to a wonderful body of work and a great painter. It is about time.

- Candace

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.