Bright, vibrant, intriguing, and unique, chromatic homes are speckled across the world’s landscape. These historic houses and buildings are saturated with colors—often highlighting decorative woodwork and architecture—to enhance, revive, and regenerate various neighborhoods and communities.

John I. “Hans” Gilderbloom explores and celebrates the appeal of these captivating houses in Chromatic Homes: The Joy of Color in Historic Places. Highlighted in gorgeous detail are the relevance of the homes’ styles and colors as well as their history—many believed to have been around for decades in American cities such as Louisville, Cincinnati, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Miami, and around for centuries in far-flung places such as Havana, Cuba, Venice, Italy, and Moscow, Russia. Gilderbloom reveals how renewing and updating historic homes has the ability to transform and galvanize a community, and these houses serve as creative havens for artists, writers, and musicians: author Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple in one of the most famous chromatic homes in San Francisco, and Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a spectacular “painted lady” in Hartford, Connecticut. 

Filled with 182 engaging and eye-catching photos of homes all across the nation and the world, Chromatic Homes perfectly illustrates how the simple act of painting an ornate structure in bright or bold colors can inspire, empower, sustain and enlighten an entire community.

John I. “Hans” Gilderbloom is a professor in the Graduate Planning, Public Administration, Public Health, and Urban Affairs programs at the University of Louisville, where he also directs the highly lauded Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods. Considered one of the foremost urban thinkers of our time, he is the author of five books, 55 scholarly articles and op-eds in Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He wrote this book in his own chromatic home in Louisville, Kentucky, which was previously featured along with a separate profile in the New York Times.