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The House in Good Taste

by Elsie De Wolfe · English · Gutenberg #14715 · 336,051 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The House in Good Taste

Author: Elsie De Wolfe


        
Release date: January 17, 2005 [eBook #14715]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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THE HOUSE IN GOOD TASTE

by

ELSIE DE WOLFE

Illustrated with photographs in color and black and white

New York
The Century Co.

1913







[Illustration]




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

      I.  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN HOUSE
     II.  SUITABILITY, SIMPLICITY AND PROPORTION
    III.  THE OLD WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE
     IV.  THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS
      V.  THE TREATMENT OF WALLS
     VI.  THE EFFECTIVE USE OF COLOR
    VII.  OF DOORS, AND WINDOWS, AND CHINTZ
   VIII.  THE PROBLEM OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
     IX.  HALLS AND STAIRCASES
      X.  THE DRAWING-ROOM
     XI.  THE LIVING-ROOM
    XII.  SITTING-ROOM AND BOUDOIR
   XIII.  A LIGHT, GAY DINING-ROOM
    XIV.  THE BEDROOM
     XV.  THE DRESSING-ROOM AND THE BATH
    XVI.  THE SMALL APARTMENT
   XVII.  REPRODUCTIONS OF ANTIQUE FURNITURE AND OBJECTS OF ART
  XVIII.  THE ART OF TRELLIAGE
    XIX.  VILLA TRIANON
     XX.  NOTES ON MANY THINGS




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

   Elsie de Wolfe (Frontispiece)
   In this hall, simplicity, suitability and proportion are observed
   Mennoyer drawings and old mirrors set in panelings
   A portrait by Nattier inset above a fine old mantel
   The Washington Irving house was delightfully rambling
   A Washington Irving House bedroom
   Miss Marbury's bedroom
   The fore-court and entrance of the Fifty-fifth Street house
   A painted wall broken into panels by narrow moldings
   A wall paper of Elizabethan design with oak furniture
   The scheme of this room grew from the jars on the mantel
   A Louis Seize bedroom in rose and blue and cream
   The writing corner of a chintz bedroom
   Black chintz used in a dressing-room
   Printed linen curtains over rose colored silk
   Straight hangings of rose and yellow shot silk
   Muslin glass curtains in the Washington Irving house
   Here are many lighting fixtures harmoniously assembled in a
       drawing-room
   Detail of a fine old French fixture of hand wrought metal
   Lighting fixtures inspired by Adam mirrors
   The staircase in the Bayard Thayer house
   The drawing-room should be intimate in spirit
   The fine formality of well-placed paneling
   The living-room in the C.W. Harkness house at Morristown, New Jersey
   Miss Anne Morgan's Louis XVI boudoir
   Miss Morgan's Louis XVI _lit de repos_
   A Georgian dining-room in the William Iselin house
   Mrs. Ogden Armour's Chinese paper screen
   Mrs. James Warren Lane's painted dining-table
   The private dining-room in the Colony Club
   An old painted bed of the Louis XVI period
   Miss Crocker's Louis XVI bed
   A Colony Club bedroom
   Mauve chintz in a dull green room
   Mrs. Frederick Havemeyer's Chinoiserie chintz bed
   Mrs. Payne Whitney's green feather chintz bed
   My own bedroom is built around a Breton bed
   Furniture painted with chintz designs
   Miss Morgan's Louis XVI dressing-room
   Miss Marbury's chintz-hung dressing-table
   A corner of my own boudoir
   Built-in bookshelves in a small room
   Mrs. C.W. Harkness's cabinet for _objets d'art_
   A banquette of the Louis XV period covered with needlework
   A Chinese Chippendale sofa covered with chintz
   The trellis room in the Colony Club
   Mrs. Ormond G. Smith's trellis room at Center Island, New York
   Looking over the _tapis vert_ to the trellis
   A fine old console in the Villa Trianon
   The broad terrace connects house and garden
   A proper writing-table in the drawing-room
   A cream-colored porcelain stove in a New York house
   Mr. James Deering's wall fountain
   Fountain in the trellis room of Mrs. Ormond G. Smith





I

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN HOUSE


I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women
throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it
what you will--awakening, development, American Renaissance--it is a
most startling and promising condition of affairs.

It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly æsthetic
tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it
should tell the time. Home-makers are determined to have their houses,
outside and in, correct according to the best standards. What do we mean
by the best standards? Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged
house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes his
home with a hopeless disregard of tradition. We must accept the
standards that the artists and the architects accept, the standards that
have come to us from those exceedingly rational people, our ancestors.

Our ancestors built for stability and use, and so their simple houses
were excellent examples of architecture. Their spacious, uncrowded
interiors were usually beautiful. Houses and furniture fulfilled their
uses, and if an object fulfils its mission the chances are that it is
beautiful.

It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual
castle in Spain, but it isn't necessary to live among intolerable
furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle. There never was a
house so bad that it couldn't be made over into something worth while.
We shall all be very much happier when we learn to transform the things
we have into a semblance of our ideal.

How, then, may we go about accomplishing our ideal?

By letting it go!

By forgetting this vaguely pleasing dream, this evidence of our smug
vanity, and making ourselves ready for a new ideal.

By considering the body of material from which it is good sense to
choose when we have a house to decorate.

By studying the development of the modern house, its romantic tradition
and architectural history.

By taking upon ourselves the duty of self-taught lessons of sincerity
and common sense, and suitability.

By learning what is meant by color and form and line, harmony and
contrast and proportion.

When we are on familiar terms with our tools, and feel our vague ideas
clearing into definite inspiration, then we are ready to talk about
ideals. We are fit to approach the full art of home-making.

We take it for granted that every woman is interested in houses--that
she either has a house in course of construction, or dreams of having
one, or has had a house long enough wrong to wish it right. And we take
it for granted that this American home is always the woman's home: a man
may build and decorate a beautiful house, but it remains for a woman to
make a home of it for him. It is the personality of the mistress that
the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how
much happiness they may find there.

You will express yourself in your house, whether you want to or not, so
you must make up your mind to a long preparatory discipline. You may
have only one house to furnish in your life-time, possibly, so be
careful and go warily. Therefore, you must select for your architect a
man who isn't too determined to have _his_ way. It is a fearful mistake
to leave the entire planning of your home to a man whose social
experience may be limited, for instance, for he can impose on you his
conception of your tastes with a damning permanency and emphasis. I once
heard a certain Boston architect say that he taught his clients to be
ladies and gentlemen. He couldn't, you know. All he could do is to set
the front door so that it would reprove them if they weren't!

Who does not know, for instance, those mistaken people whose houses
represent their own or their architects' hasty visits to the fine old
_châteaux_ of the Loire, or the palaces of Versailles, or the fine old
houses of England, or the gracious villas of Italy? We must avoid such
aspiring architects, and visualize our homes not as so many specially
designated rooms and convenient closets, but as individual expressions
of ourselves, of the future we plan, of our dreams for our children. The
ideal house is the house that has been long planned for, long awaited.

[Illustration: IN THIS HALL, SIMPLICITY, SUITABILITY AND PROPORTION ARE
OBSERVED]

Fortunately for us, our best architects are so very good that we are
better than safe if we take our problems to them. These men associate
with themselves the hundred young architects who are eager to prove
themselves on small houses. The idea that it is economical to be your
own architect and trust your house to a building contractor is a
mistaken, and most expensive, one. The surer you are of your architect's
common sense and professional ability, the surer you may be that your
house will be economically efficient. He will not only plan a house that
will meet the needs of your family, but he will give you inspiration for
its interior. He will concern himself with the moldings, the
light-openings, the door-handles and hinges, the unconsidered things
that make or mar your house. Select for your architect a man you'd like
for a friend. Perhaps he will be, before the house comes true. If you
are both sincere, if you both purpose to have the best thing you can
afford, the house will express the genius and character of your
architect and the personality and character of yourself, as a great
painting suggests both painter and sitter. The hard won triumph of a
well-built house means many compromises, but the ultimate satisfaction
is worth everything.

I do not purpose, in this book, to go into the historic traditions of
architecture and decoration--there are so many excellent books it were
absurd to review them--but I do wish to trace briefly the development of
the modern house, the woman's house, to show you that all that is
intimate and charming in the home as we know it has come through the
unmeasured influence of women. Man conceived the great house with its
parade rooms, its _grands appartements_ but woman found eternal parade
tiresome, and planned for herself little retreats, rooms small enough
for comfort and intimacy. In short, man made the house: woman went him
one better and made of it a home.

The virtues of simplicity and reticence in form first came into being,
as nearly as we can tell, in the _Grotta_, the little studio-like
apartment of Isabella d'Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, away back in
1496. The Marchioness made of this little studio her personal retreat.
Here she brought many of the treasures of the Italian Renaissance.
Really, simplicity and reticence were the last things she considered,
but the point is that they were considered at all in such a restless,
passionate age. Later, in 1522, she established the _Paradiso_, a suite
of apartments which she occupied after her husband's death. So you see
the idea of a woman planning her own apartment is pretty old, after all.

The next woman who took a stand that revealed genuine social
consciousness was that half-French, half-Italian woman, Catherine de
Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. She seceded from court because the
court was swaggering and hurly-burly, with florid Marie-de-Medicis at
its head. And with this recession, she began to express in her conduct,
her feeling, her conversation, and, finally, in her house, her awakened
consciousness of beauty and reserve, of simplicity and suitability.

This was the early Seventeenth Century, mind you, when the main salons
of the French houses were filled with such institutions as rows of red
chairs and boxed state beds. She undertook, first of all, to have a
light and gracefully curving stairway leading to her salon instead of
supplanting it. She grouped her rooms with a lovely diversity of size
and purpose, whereas before they had been vast, stately halls with
cubbies hardby for sleeping. She gave the bedroom its alcove, boudoir,
ante-chamber, and even its bath, and then as decorator she supplanted
the old feudal yellow and red with her famous silver-blue. She covered
blue chairs with silver bullion. She fashioned long, tenderly colored
curtains of novel shades. Reticence was always in evidence, but it was
the reticence of elegance. It was through Madame de Rambouillet that the
armchair received its final distribution of yielding parts, and began
to express the comfort of soft padded backward slope, of width and
warmth and color.

It was all very heavy, very grave, very angular, this Hôtel Rambouillet,
but it was devised for and consecrated to conversation, considered a new
form of privilege! The _précieuses_ in their later jargon called chairs
"the indispensables of conversation."

I have been at some length to give a picture of Madame de Rambouillet's
hôtel because it really is the earliest modern house. There, where the
society that frequented it was analyzing its soul in dialogue and long
platonic discussion that would seem stark enough to us, the word which
it invented for itself was _urbanité_--the coinage of one of its own
foremost figures.

It is unprofitable to follow on into the grandeurs of Louis XIV, if one
hopes to find an advance there in truth-telling architecture. At the end
of that splendid official success the squalor of Versailles was
unspeakable, its stenches unbearable. In spite of its size the Palace
was known as the most comfortless house in Europe. After the death of
its owner society, in a fit of madness, plunged into the _rocaille_.
When the restlessness of Louis XV could no longer find moorings in this
brilliancy, there came into being little houses called _folies_, garden
hermitages for the privileged. Here we find Madame de Pompadour in
calicoes, in a wild garden, bare-foot, playing as a milkmaid, or seated
in a little gray-white interior with painted wooden furniture, having
her supper on an earthen-ware service that has replaced old silver and
gold. Amorous alcoves lost their painted Loves and took on gray and
white decorations. The casinos of little _comédiennes_ did not glitter
any more. English sentiment began to bedim Gallic eyes, and so what we
know as the Louis XVI style was born.

And so, at that moment, the idea of the modern house came into its own,
and it could advance--as an idea--hardly any further. For with all the
intrepidity and passion of the later Eighteenth Century in its search
for beauty, for all the magic-making of convenience and ingenuity of the
Nineteenth Century, the fundamentals have changed but little. And now we
of the Twentieth Century can only add material comforts and an
expression of our personality. We raise the house beyond the reach of
squalor, we give it measured heat, we give it water in abundance and
perfect sanitation and light everywhere, we give it ventilation less
successfully than we might, and finally we give it the human quality
that is so modern. There are no dungeons in the good modern house, no
disgraceful lairs for servants, no horrors of humidity.

[Illustration: MENNOYER DRAWINGS AND OLD MIRRORS SET IN PANELINGS]

And so we women have achieved a house, luminous with kind purpose
throughout. It is finished--that is our difficulty! We inherit it, all
rounded in its perfection, consummate in its charms, but it is finished,
and what can we do about a thing that is finished I Doesn't it seem that
we are back in the old position of Isabella d'Este--eager, predatory,
and "thingy"? And isn't it time for us to pull up short lest we
sidestep the goal? We are so sure of a thousand appetites we are in
danger of passing by the amiable commonplaces. We find ourselves
dismayed in old houses that look too simple. We must stop and ask
ourselves questions, and, if necessary, plan for ourselves little
retreats until we can find ourselves again.

What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes on within it,
a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler
kind that we may grow to understand, a house that _looks_ amenity.

Suppose you have obtained this sort of wisdom--a sane viewpoint. I think
it will give you as great a satisfaction to re-arrange your house with
what you have as to re-build, re-decorate. The results may not be so
charming, but you can learn by them. You can take your indiscriminate
inheritance of Victorian rosewood of Eastlake walnut and cocobolo, your
pickle-and-plum colored Morris furniture, and make a civilized interior
by placing it right, and putting detail at the right points. Your sense
of the pleasure and meaning of human intercourse will be clear in your
disposition of your best things, in your elimination of your worst ones.

When you have emptied the tables of _rubbish_ so that you can put
_things_ down on them at need, placed them in a light where you can
write on them in repose, or isolated real works of art in the middle of
them; when you have set your dropsical sofas where you want them for
talk, or warmth and reading; when you can see the fire from the bed in
your sleeping-room, and dress near your bath; if this sort of sense of
your rights is acknowledged in your rearrangement, your rooms will
always have meaning, in the end. If you like only the things in a chair
that have meaning, and grow to hate the rest you will, without any other
instruction, prefer--the next time you are buying--a good Louis XVI
_fauteuil_ to a stuffed velvet chair. You will never again be guilty of
the errors of meaningless magnificence.

To most of us in America who must perforce lead workaday lives, the
absence of beauty is a very distinct lack. I think, indeed, that the
present awakening has come to stay, and that before very long, we shall
have simple houses with fireplaces that draw, electric lights in the
proper places, comfortable and sensible furniture, and not a gilt-legged
spindle-shanked table or chair anywhere. This may be a decorator's
optimistic dream, but let us all hope that it may come true.




II

SUITABILITY, SIMPLICITY AND PROPORTION


When I am asked to decorate a new house, my first thought is
suitability. My next thought is proportion. Always I keep in mind the
importance of simplicity. First, I study the people who are to live in
this house, and their needs, as thoroughly as I studied my parts in the
days when I was an actress. For the time-being I really am the
chatelaine of the house. When I have thoroughly familiarized myself with
my "part," I let that go for the time, and consider the proportion of
the house and its rooms. It is much more important that the wall
openings, windows, doors, and fireplaces should be in the right place
and should balance one another than that there should be expensive and
extravagant hangings and carpets.

My first thought in laying out a room is the placing of the electric
light openings. How rarely does one find the lights in the right place
in our over-magnificent hotels and residences! One arrives from a
journey tired out and travel-stained, only to find oneself facing a
mirror as far removed from the daylight as possible, with the artificial
lights directly behind one, or high in the ceiling in the center of the
room. In my houses I always see that each room shall have its lights
placed for the comfort of its occupants. There must be lights in
sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of
the dressing-table, and so on.

Then I consider the heating of the room. We Americans are slaves to
steam heat. We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions
by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat. In my own houses I have
a fireplace in each room, and I burn wood in it. There is a
heating-system in the basement of my house, but it is under perfect
control. I prefer the normal heat of sunshine and open fires. But,
granted that open fires are impossible in all your rooms, do arrange in
the beginning that the small rooms of your house may not be overheated.
It is a distinct irritation to a person who loves clean air to go into a
room where a flood of steam heat pours out of every corner. There is
usually no way to control it unless you turn it off altogether. I once
had the temerity to do this in a certain hotel room where there was a
cold and cheerless empty fireplace. I summoned a reluctant chambermaid,
only to be told that the chimney had never had a fire in it and the
proprietor would rather not take such a risk!

[Illustration: A PORTRAIT BY NATTIER INSET ABOVE A FINE OLD MANTEL]

Perhaps the guest in your house would not be so troublesome, but don't
tempt her! If you have a fireplace, see that it is in working order.
We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the
first time, by her surroundings. We judge her temperament, her habits,
her inclinations, by the interior of her home. We may talk of the
weather, but we are looking at the furniture. We attribute vulgar
qualities to those who are content to live in ugly surroundings. We
endow with refinement and charm the person who welcomes us in a
delightful room, where the colors blend and the proportions are as
perfect as in a picture. After all, what surer guarantee can there be of
a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited,
than taste? It is a compass that never errs. If a woman has taste she
may have faults, follies, fads, she may err, she may be as human and
feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!

How can we develop taste? Some of us, alas, can never develop it,
because we can never let go of shams. We must learn to recognize
suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our
needs. I grant you we may never fully appreciate the full balance of
proportion, but we can exert our common sense and decide whether a thing
is suitable; we can consult our conscience as to whether an object is
simple, and we can train our eyes to recognize good and bad proportion.
A technical knowledge of architecture is not necessary to know that a
huge stuffed leather chair in a tiny gold and cream room is unsuitable,
is hideously complicated, and is as much out of proportion as the
proverbial bull in the china-shop.

A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or
not. How can we believe that a woman of sincerity of purpose will hang
fake "works of art" on her walls, or satisfy herself with imitation
velvets or silks? How can we attribute taste to a woman who permits
paper floors and iron ceilings in her house? We are too afraid of the
restful commonplaces, and yet if we live simple lives, why shouldn't we
be glad our houses are comfortably commonplace? How much better to have
plain furniture that is comfortable, simple chintzes printed from old
blocks, a few good prints, than all the sham things in the world? A
house is a dead-give-away, anyhow, so you should arrange is so that the
person who sees your personality in it will be reassured, not
disconcerted.

Too often, here in America, the most comfortable room in the house is
given up to a sort of bastard collection of gilt chairs and tables,
over-elaborate draperies shutting out both light and air, and huge and
frightful paintings. This style of room, with its museum-like
furnishings, has been dubbed "Marie Antoinette," _why_, no one but the
American decorator can say. Heaven knows poor Marie Antoinette had
enough follies to atone for, but certainly she has never been treated
more shabbily than when they dub these mausoleums "Marie Antoinette
rooms."

I remember taking a clever Englishwoman of much taste to see a woman who
was very proud of her new house. We had seen most of the house when the
hostess, who had evidently reserved what she considered the best for
the last, threw open the doors of a large and gorgeous apartment and
said, "This is my Louis XVI ballroom." My friend, who had been very
patient up to that moment, said very quietly, "What makes you think so?"

Louis XVI thought a salon well furnished with a few fine chairs and a
table. He wished to be of supreme importance. In the immense salons of
the Italian palaces there were a few benches and chairs. People then
wished spaces about them.

Nowadays, people are swamped by their furniture. Too many centuries, too
many races, crowd one another in a small room. The owner seems
insignificant among his collections of historical furniture. Whether he
collects all sorts of things of all periods in one heterogeneous mass,
or whether he fills his house with the furniture of some one epoch, he
is not at home in his surroundings.

The furniture of every epoch records its history. Our ancestors of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries inherited the troublous times of
their fathers in their heavy oaken chests. They owned more chests than
anything else, because a chest could be carried away on the back of a
sturdy pack mule, when the necessity arose for flight.

People never had time to sit down in the Sixteenth Century. Their
feverish unrest is recorded in their stiff, backed chairs. It was not
until the Seventeenth Century that they had time to sit down and talk.
We need no book of history to teach us this--we have only to observe the
ample proportions of the arm-chairs of the period.

Our ancestors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries worked with a
faith in the permanence of what they created. We have lost this happy
confidence. We are occupied exclusively with preserving and reproducing.
We have not succeeded in creating a style adapted to our modern life. It
is just as well! Our life, with its haste, its nervousness and its
preoccupations, does not inspire the furniture-makers. We cannot do
better than to accept the standards of other times, and adapt them to
our uses.

Why should we American woman run after styles and periods of which we
know nothing? Why should we not be content with the fundamental things?
The formal French room is very delightful in the proper place but when
it is unsuited to the people who must live in it it is as bad as a sham
room. The woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as
the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong
time!

This is what I am always fighting in people's houses, the unsuitability
of things. The foolish woman goes about from shop to shop and buys as
her fancy directs. She sees something "pretty" and buys it, though it
has no reference either in form or color to the scheme of her house.
Haven't you been in rooms where there was a jumble of mission
furniture, satinwood, fine old mahogany and gilt-legged chairs? And it
is the same with color. A woman says, "Oh, I love blue, let's have
blue!" regardless of the exposure of her room and the furnishings she
has already collected. And then when she has treated each one of her
rooms in a different color, and with a different floor covering, she
wonders why she is always fretted in going from one room to another.

Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must
select the furniture of some one period and stick to that. It isn't at
all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth
Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be
compared.

There are so many beautiful things that have come to us from other times
that it should be easy to make our homes beautiful, but I have seen what
I can best describe as apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like
aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures
in the form of tassels, and such horrors, in many houses of to-day under
the guise of being "authentic period furniture." Only a connoisseur can
ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can
easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes.
I shan't talk about ear-marks here, however, because dozens of
collectors have compiled excellent books that tell you all about curves
and lines and grain-of-wood and worm-holes. My business is to persuade
you to use your graceful French sofas and your simple rush bottom New
England chairs in different rooms--in other words, to preach to you the
beauty of suitability. Suitability! _Suitability!_ SUITABILITY!!

It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of
furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How
many rooms have I not cleared of junk--this heterogeneous mass of
ornamental "period" furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room
"look cozy." Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the
room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in
their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture
of the room becomes its decoration.




III

THE OLD WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE


I have always lived in enchanting houses. Probably when another woman
would be dreaming of love affairs, I dream of the delightful houses I
have lived in. And just as the woman who dreams of many lovers finds one
dream a little dearer than all the rest, so one of my houses has been
dearer to me than all the others.

[Illustration: THE WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE WAS DELIGHTFULLY RAMBLING]

This favorite love of mine is the old Washington Irving house in New
York, the quaint mansion that gave historic Irving Place its name. For
twenty years my friend, Elizabeth Marbury, and I made this old house our
home. Two years ago we reluctantly gave up the old house and moved into
a more modern one--also transformed from old into new--on East
Fifty-fifth Street. We have also a delightful old house in France, the
Villa Trianon, at Versailles, where we spend our summers. So you see we
have had the rare experience of transforming three mistreated old houses
into very delightful homes.

When we found this old house, so many years ago, we were very young, and
it is amusing now to think of its evolution. We had so many dreams, so
many theories, and we tried them all out on the old house. And like a
patient, well-bred maiden aunt, the old house always accepted our
changes most placidly. There never was such a house!

You could do anything to it, because, fundamentally, it was good. Its
wall spaces were inviting, its windows were made for framing pleasant
things. When we moved there we had a broad sweep of view: I can remember
seeing the river from our dining-room. Now the city has grown up around
the old house and jostled it rudely, and shut out much of its sunshine.

There is a joy in the opportunity of creating a beautiful interior for a
new and up-to-date house, but best of all is the joy of furnishing an
old house like this one. It is like reviving an old garden. It may not
be just your idea of a garden to begin with, but as you study it and
deck its barren spaces with masses of color, and fit a sundial into the
spot that so needs it, and give the sunshine a fountain to play with,
you love the old garden just a little more every time you touch it,
until it becomes to you the most beautiful garden in all the world.

Gardens and houses are such whimsical things! This old house of ours had
been so long mistreated that it was fairly petulant and querulous when I
began studying it. It asked questions on every turn, and seemed
surprised when they were answered. The house was delightfully rambling,
with a tiny entrance hall, and narrow stairs, and sudden up and down
steps from one room to another like the old, old house one associates
with far-away places and old times.

The little entrance hall was worse than a question, it was a problem, but
I finally solved it. The floor was paved with little hexagon-shaped tiles
of a wonderful old red. A door made of little square panes of mirrors was
placed where it would deceive the old hall into thinking itself a spacious
thing. The walls were covered with a green-and-white-stripe wall-paper
that looked as old as Rip Van Winkle. This is the same ribbon-grass paper
that I afterward used in the Colony Club hallway. The woodwork was painted
a soft gray-green. Finally, I had my collection of faded French costume
prints set flat against the top of the wall as a frieze. The hall was so
very narrow that as you went up stairs you could actually examine the old
prints in detail. Another little thing: I covered the handrail of the
stairs with a soft gray-green velvet of the same tone as the woodwork, and
the effect was so very good and the touch of it so very nice that many of
my friends straightway adopted the idea.

But I am placing the cart before the horse! I should talk of the shell
of the house before the contents, shouldn't I? It is hard to talk of
this particular house as a thing apart from its furnishings, however,
for every bit of paneling, every lighting-fixture, the placing of each
mirror, was worked out so that the shell of the house and its
furnishings might be in perfect harmony.

The drawing-room and dining-room occupied the first floor of the house.
The drawing-room was a long, narrow room with cream woodwork and walls.
The walls were broken into panels by the use of a narrow molding. In the
large panel above the mantel-shelf I had inset a painting by Nattier.
You will see the same painting used in the Fifty-fifth Street house
drawing-room, in another illustration.

The color scheme of rose and cream and dull yellow was worked out from
the rose and yellow Persian rug. Most of the furniture we found in
France, but it fitted perfectly into this aristocratic and dignified
room. Miss Marbury and I have a perfect right to French things in our
drawing-room, you see, for we are French residents for half the year.
And, besides, this gracious old house welcomed a fine old Louis XIV sofa
as serenely as you please. I have no idea of swallowing my words about
unsuitability!

Light, air and comfort--these three things I must always have in a room,
whether it be drawing-room or servant's room. This room had all three.
The chairs were all comfortable, the lights well placed, and there was
plenty of sunshine and air. The color of the room was so subdued that it
was restful to the eye--one color faded into another so subtly that one
did not realize there was a definite color-scheme. The hangings of the
room were of a deep rose color. I used the same colors in the coverings
of the chairs and sofas. The house was curtained throughout with fine
white muslin curtains. No matter what the inner curtains of a room may
be, I use this simple stuff against the window itself. There isn't any
nicer material. To me there is something unsuitable in an array of lace
against a window, like underclothes hung up to dry.

[Illustration: A WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE BEDROOM]

The most delightful part of the drawing-room was the little
conservatory, which was a plain, lamentable bay-window once upon a time.
I determined to make a little flower-box of it, and had the floor of it
paved with large tiles, and between the hardwood floor of the
drawing-room and the marble of the window space was a narrow curb of
marble, which made it possible to have a jolly little fountain in the
window. The fountain splashed away to its heart's content, for there was
a drain pipe under the curb. At the top of the windows there were
shallow white boxes filled with trailing ivy that hung down and screened
the glass, making the window as delightful to the passer-by without as
to us within. There were several pots of rose-colored flowers standing
in a prim row on the marble curb.

You see how much simpler it is to make the best of an old bay window
than to build on a new conservatory. There are thousands of houses with
windows like this one of ours, an unfortunate space of which no use is
made. Sometimes there is a gilt table bearing a lofty jar, sometimes a
timid effort at comfort--a sofa--but usually the bay window is sacred to
its own devices, whatever they may be! Why not spend a few dollars and
make it the most interesting part of the room by giving it a lot of
vines and flowers and a small fountain? It isn't at all an expensive
thing to do.

From the drawing-room you entered the dining-room. This was a long room
with beautifully spaced walls, a high ceiling, and quaint cupboards. The
arrangement of the mirrors around the cupboards and doors was unusual
and most decorative. This room was so beautiful in itself that I used
very little color--but _such_ color! We never tired of the gray and
white and ivory color-scheme, the quiet atmosphere that made glorious
the old Chinese carpet, with its rose-colored ground and blue-and-gold
medallions and border. The large India-ink sketches set in the walls are
originals by Mennoyer, the delightful Eighteenth Century artist who did
the overdoors of the Petit Trianon.

The mirror-framed lighting fixtures I brought over from France. The
dining-table too, was French, of a creamy ivory-painted wood. The chairs
had insets of cane of a deeper tone. The recessed window-seat was
covered with a soft velvet of a deep yellow, and there were as many
little footstools beside the window-seat as there were chairs in the
room. Doesn't everyone long for a footstool at table?

I believe that everything in one's house should be comfortable, but
one's bedroom must be more than comfortable: it must be intimate,
personal, one's secret garden, so to speak. It may be as simple as a
convent cell and still have this quality of the personality of its
occupant.

There are two things that are as important to me as the bed in the
bedrooms that I furnish, and they are the little tables at the head of
the bed, and the lounging chairs. The little table must hold a good
reading light, well shaded, for who doesn't like to read in bed? There
must also be a clock, and there really should be a telephone. And the
_chaise-longue_, or couch, as the case may be, should be both
comfortable and beautiful. Who hasn't longed for a comfortable place to
snatch forty winks at midday?

My own bedroom in this house was very pleasant to me. The house was very
small, you see, and my bedroom had to be my writing-and reading-room
too, so that accounts for the bookshelves that fill the wall space above
and around the mantel and the large writing-table. The room was built
around a wonderful old French bed which came from Brittany. This old bed
is of carved mahogany, with mirrored panels on the side against the
wall, and with tall columns at the ends. It is always hung with
embroidered silk in the rose color that I adore and has any number of
pillows, big and little. The _chaise-longue_ was covered with this same
silk, as were the various chair cushions. The other furnishings were in
keeping. It was a delightfully comfortable room, and it grew a little at
a time. I needed bookshelves, and I built them. A drop-light was
necessary, and I found the old brass lantern which hung from the
ceiling. And so it was furnished, bit by bit, need by need.

Miss Marbury's bedroom in this house was entirely different in type, but
exactly the same in comfort. The furniture was of white enamel, the
walls ivory-white, and the rug a soft dull blue. The chintz used was the
familiar Bird of Paradise, gorgeous in design, but so subdued in tone
that one never tires of it. The bed had a flat, perfectly fitted cover
of the chintz, which is tucked under the mattress. The box spring was
also covered with the chintz, and the effect was always tidy and
satisfactory. This is the neatest disposal of the bed-clothes I have
seen. I always advise this arrangement.

Besides the bed there was the necessary little table, holding a
reading-light and so forth, and at the head of the bed a most adorable
screen of white enamel, paneled with chintz below and glass above. There
was a soft couch of generous width in this room, with covers and
cushions of the chintz.

Over near the windows was the dressing-table with the lighting-fixtures
properly placed. This table, hung with chintz, had a sheet of plate
glass exactly fitting its top. The writing-table, near the window is
also part of my creed of comfort. There should be a writing-table in
every bedroom. My friends laugh at the little fat pincushions on my
writing-tables, but when they are covered with a bit of the chintz or
tapestry or brocade of the room they are very pretty, and I am sure pins
are as necessary on the writing-table as on the dressing-table.

[Illustration: MISS MARBURY'S BEDROOM]

Another thing I like on every writing-table is a clear glass bowl of
dried rose petals, which gives the room the faintest spicy fragrance.
There is also a little bowl of just the proper color to hold pens and
clips and odds and ends. I get as much pleasure from planning these
small details as from the planning of the larger furniture of the room.

The house was very simple, you see, and very small, and so when the time
came to leave it we had grown to love every inch of it. You can love a
small house so completely! But we couldn't forgive the skyscrapers
encroaching on our supply of sunshine, and we really needed more room,
and so we said good-by to our beloved old house and moved into a new
one. Now we find ourselves in danger of loving the new one as much as
the old. But that is another story.




IV

THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS


One walks the streets of New York and receives the fantastic impression
that some giant architect has made for the city thousands of houses in
replica. These dismal brownstone buildings are so like without, and
alas! so like within, that one wonders how their owners know their homes
from one another. I have had the pleasure of making over many of these
gloomy barracks into homes for other people, and when we left the old
Irving Place house we took one of these dreary houses for ourselves, and
made it over into a semblance of what a city house should be.

You know the kind of house--there are tens of thousands of them--a four
story and basement house of pinkish brownstone, with a long flight of
ugly stairs from the street to the first floor. The common belief that
all city houses of this type must be dark and dreary just because they
always _have_ been dark and dreary is an unnecessary superstition.

My object in taking this house was twofold: I wanted to prove to my
friends that it was possible to take one of the darkest and grimiest of
city houses and make it an abode of sunshine and light, and I wanted to
furnish the whole house exactly as I pleased--for once!

The remaking of the house was very interesting. I tore away the ugly
stone steps and centered the entrance door in a little stone-paved
fore-court on the level of the old area-way. The fore-court is just a
step below the street level, giving you a pleasant feeling of
invitation. Everyone hates to climb into a house, but there is a subtle
allure in a garden or a court yard or a room into which you must step
down. The fore-court is enclosed with a high iron railing banked with
formal box-trees. Above the huge green entrance door there is a graceful
iron balcony, filled with green things, that pulls the great door and
the central window of the floor above into an impressive composition.
The façade of the house, instead of being a commonplace rectangle of
stone broken by windows, has this long connected break of the door and
balcony and window. By such simple devices are happy results
accomplished!

The door itself is noteworthy, with its great bronze knob set squarely
in the center. On each side of it there are the low windows of the
entrance hall, with window-boxes of evergreens. Compare this orderly
arrangement of windows and entrance door with the badly balanced houses
of the old type, and you will realize anew the value of balance and
proportion.

From the fore-court you enter the hall. Once within the hall, the, house
widens magically. Surely this cool black and white apartment cannot be
a part of restless New York! Have you ever come suddenly upon an old
Southern house, and thrilled at the classic purity of white columns in a
black-green forest? This entrance hall gives you the same thrill; the
elements of formality, of tranquillity, of coolness, are so evident. The
walls and ceiling are a deep, flat cream, and the floor is laid in large
black and white marble tiles. Exactly opposite you as you enter, there
is a wall fountain with a background of mirrors. The water spills over
from the fountain into ferns and flowers banked within a marble curb.
The two wall spaces on your right and left are broken by graceful niches
which hold old statues. An oval Chinese rug and the white and orange
flowers of the fountain furnish the necessary color. The windows
flanking the entrance doorway are hung with flat curtains of coarse
white linen, with inserts of old filet lace, and there are side curtains
of dead black silk with borderings of silver and gold threads.

In any house that I have anything to do with, there is some sort of desk
or table for writing in the hall. How often I have been in other
people's houses when it was necessary to send a message, or to record an
address, when the whole household began scurrying around trying to find
a pencil and paper! This, to my mind, is an outward and visible sign of
an inward--and fundamental!--lack of order.

[Illustration: THE FORECOURT AND ENTRANCE OF THE FIFTY-FIFTH STREET
HOUSE]

In this hall there is a charming desk particularly adapted to its
place. It is a standing desk which can be lowered or heightened at will,
so that one who wishes to scribble a line or so may use it without
sitting down. This desk is called a _bureau d'architect_. I found it in
Biarritz. It would be quite easy to have one made by a good
cabinet-maker, for the lines and method of construction are simple. My
hall desk is so placed that it is lighted by the window by day and the
wall lights by night, but it might be lighted by two tall candlesticks
if a wall light were not available. There is a shallow drawer which
contains surplus writing materials, but the only things permitted on the
writing surface of the desk are the tray for cards, the pad and pencils.

The only other furniture in the hall is an old porter's chair near the
door, a chair that suggests the sedan of old France, but serves its
purpose admirably.

A glass door leads to the inner hall and the stairway, which I consider
the best thing in the house. Instead of the usual steep and gloomy
stairs with which we are all familiar, here is a graceful spiral
stairway which runs from this floor to the roof. The stair hall has two
walls made up of mirrors in the French fashion, that is, cut in squares
and held in place by small rosettes of gilt, and these mirrored walls
seemingly double the spaciousness of what would be, under ordinary
conditions, a gloomy inside hallway.

The house is narrow in the extreme, and the secret of its
successful renaissance is plenty of windows and light color and
mirrors--mirrors--mirrors! It has been called the "Little House of Many
Mirrors," for so much of its spaciousness and charm is the effect of
skilfully managed reflections. The stair-landings are most ingeniously
planned. There are landings that lead directly from the stairs into the
rooms of each floor, and back of one of the mirrored stair walls there
is a little balcony connecting the rooms on that floor, a private
passageway.

The drawing-room and dining-room occupy the first floor. The
drawing-room is a pleasant, friendly place, full of quiet color. The
walls are a deep cream color and the floor is covered with a beautiful
Savonnerie rug. There are many beautiful old chairs covered with
Aubusson tapestry, and other chairs and sofas covered with rose colored
brocade. This drawing-room is seemingly a huge place, this effect being
given by the careful placing of mirrors and lights, and the skilful
arrangement of the furniture. I believe in plenty of optimism and white
paint, comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the
hearth and flowers wherever they "belong," mirrors and sunshine in all
rooms.

But I think we can carry the white paint idea too far: I have grown a
little tired of over-careful decorations, of plain white walls and white
woodwork, of carefully matched furniture and over-cautious
color-schemes. Somehow the feeling of homey-ness is lost when the
decorator is too careful. In this drawing-room there is furniture of
many woods, there are stuffs of many weaves, there are candles and
chandeliers and reading-lamps, but there is harmony of purpose and
therefore harmony of effect. The room was made for conversation, for
hospitality.

A narrow landing connects the dining-room and the drawing-room. The
color of the dining-room has grown of itself, from the superb Chinese
rug on the floor and the rare old Mennoyer drawings inset in the walls.
The woodwork and walls have been painted a soft dove-like gray. The
walls are broken into panels by a narrow gray molding, and the Mennoyers
are set in five of these panels. In one narrow panel a beautiful wall
clock has been placed. Above the mantel there is a huge mirror with a
panel in black and white relief above it. On the opposite wall there is
another mirror, with a console table of carved wood painted gray beneath
it. There is also a console table under one of the Mennoyers.

The two windows in this room are obviously windows by day, but at night
two sliding doors of mirrors are drawn, just as a curtain would be
drawn, to fill the window spaces. This is a little bit tricky, I admit,
but it is a very good trick. The dining-table is of carved wood painted
gray and covered with yellow damask, which in turn is covered with a
sheet of plate glass. The chairs are covered with a blue and gold
striped velvet. The rug has a gold ground with medallions and border of
blue, ivory and rose. Near the door that leads to the service rooms
there is a huge screen made of one piece of wondrous tapestry. No other
furniture is needed in the room.

The third floor is given over to my sitting-room, bedroom,
dressing-room, and so forth, and the fourth floor to Miss Marbury's
apartments. These rooms will be discussed in other chapters.

The servants' quarters in this house are very well planned. In the back
yard that always goes with a house of this type I had built a new wing,
five stories high, connected with the floors of the house proper by
window-lined passages. On the dining-room floor the passage becomes a
butler's pantry. On the bedroom floors the passages are large enough for
dressing-rooms and baths, connecting with the bedrooms, and for outer
halls and laundries connecting with the maids' rooms and the back
stairs. In this way, you see, the maids can reach the dressing-rooms
without invading the bedrooms. The kitchen and its dependencies occupy
the first floor of the new wing, the servants' bedrooms the next three
floors, and the top floor is made up of clothes closets, sewing-rooms,
store rooms, etc.

I firmly believe that the whole question of household comfort evolves
from the careful planning of the service portion of the house. My
servants' rooms are all attractive. The woodwork of these rooms is
white, the walls are cream, the floors are waxed. They are all gay and
sweet and cheerful, with white painted beds and chests of drawers and
willow chairs, and chintz curtains and bed-coverings that are
especially chosen, _not_ handed down when they have become too faded to
be used elsewhere!




V

THE TREATMENT OF WALLS


Surely the first considerations of the house in good taste must be
light, air and sanitation. Instead of ignoring the relation of sanitary
conditions and decorative schemes, the architect and client of to-day
work out these problems with excellent results. Practical needs are
considered just as worthy of the architect as artistic achievements. He
is a poor excuse for his profession if he cannot solve the problems of
utility and beauty, and work out the ultimate harmony of the
house-to-be.

If one enters a room in which true proportion has been observed, where
the openings, the doors, windows and fireplace, balance perfectly, where
the wall spaces are well planned and the height of the ceiling is in
keeping with the floor-space, one is immediately convinced that here is
a beautiful and satisfactory room, before a stick of furniture has been
placed in it. All questions pertaining to the practical equipment and
the decorative amenities of the house should be approached
architecturally. If this is done, the result cannot fail to be
felicitous, and our dream of our house beautiful comes true!

Before you begin the decoration of your walls, be sure that your floors
have been finished to fulfil their purposes. Stain them or polish them
to a soft glow, keep them low in tone so that they may be backgrounds.
We will assume that the woodwork of each room has been finished with a
view to the future use and decoration of the room. We will assume that
the ceilings are proper ceilings; that they will stay in their place,
i.e., the top of the room. This is a most daring assumption, because
there are so many feeble and threatening ceilings overhanging most of us
that good ones seem rare. But the ceiling is an architectural problem,
and you must consider it in the beginning of things. It may be beamed
and have every evidence of structural beauty and strength, or it may be
beamed in a ridiculous fashion that advertises the beams as shams,
leading from nowhere to nowhere. It may be a beautiful expanse of creamy
modeled plaster resting on a distinguished cornice, or it may be one of
those ghastly skim-milk ceilings with distorted cupids and roses in
relief. It may be a rectangle of plain plaster tinted cream or pale
yellow or gray, and keeping its place serenely, or it may be a
villainous stretch of ox-blood, hanging over your head like the curse of
Cain. There are hundreds of magnificent painted ceilings, and vaulted
arches of marble and gold, but these are not of immediate importance to
the woman who is furnishing a small house, and are not within the scope
of this book. So let us exercise common sense and face our especial
ceiling problem in an architectural spirit. If your house has
structural beams, leave them exposed, if you like, but treat them as
beams; stain them, and wax them, and color the spaces between them cream
or tan or warm gray, and then make the room beneath the beams strong
enough in color and furnishings to carry the impressive ceiling.

If you have an architect who is also a decorator, and he has ideas for a
modeled plaster ceiling, or a ceiling with plaster-covered beams and
cornice and a fine application of ornament, let him do his best for you,
but remember that a fine ceiling demands certain things of the room it
covers. If you have a simple little house with simple furnishings, be
content to have your ceilings tinted a warm cream, keep them always
clean.

When all these things are settled--floors and ceilings and woodwork--you
may begin to plan your wall coverings. Begin, you understand. You will
probably change your plans a dozen times before you make the final
decisions. I hope you will! Because inevitably the last opinion is
best--it grows out of so many considerations.

The main thing to remember, when you begin to cover your walls, is that
they are walls, that they are straight up and down, and have breadth and
thickness, that they are supposedly strong, in other words, that they
are a structural part of your house. A wall should always be treated as
a flat surface and in a conventional way. Pictorial flowers and lifelike
figures have no place upon it, but conventionalized designs may be used
successfully--witness the delighted use of the fantastic landscape
papers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Walls should always be
obviously _walls_, and not flimsy partitions hung with gauds and
trophies. The wall is the background of the room, and so must be flat in
treatment and reposeful in tone.

Walls have always offered tempting spaces for decoration. Our ancestors
hung their walls with trophies. Our pioneer of to-day may live in an
adobe hut, but he hangs his walls with things that suggest beauty and
color to him, calendars, and trophies and gaudy chromos. The rest of his
hut he uses for the hard business of living, but his walls are his
theater, his literature, his recreation. The wolf skin will one day give
place to a painting of the chase, the gaudy calendars to better things,
when prosperity comes. But now these crude things speak for the pioneer
period of the man, and therefore they are the right things for the
moment. How absurd would be the refined etching and the delicate
water-color on these clay walls, even were they within his grasp!

The first impulse of all of us is to hang the things we admire on our
walls. Unfortunately, we do not always select papers and fabrics and
pictures we will continue to admire. Who doesn't know the woman who goes
to a shop and selects wall papers as she would select her gowns, because
they are "new" and "different" and "pretty"? She selects a "rich" paper
for her hall and an "elegant" paper for her drawing-room--the chances
are it is a nile green moire paper! For her library she thinks a paper
imitating an Oriental fabric is the proper thing, and as likely as not
she buys gold paper for her dining-room. She finds so many charming
bedroom papers that she has no trouble in selecting a dozen of them for
insipid blue rooms and pink rooms and lilac rooms.

She forgets that while she wears only one gown at a time she will live
with all her wall papers all the time. She decides to use a red paper of
large figures in one room, and a green paper with snaky stripes in the
adjoining room, but she doesn't try the papers out; she doesn't give
them the fair test of living with them a few days.

You can always buy, or borrow, a roll of the paper you like and take it
home and live with it awhile. The dealer will credit the roll when you
make the final decisions. You should assemble all the papers that are to
be used in the house, and all the fabrics, and rugs, and see what the
effect of the various compositions will be, one with another. You can't
consider one room alone, unless it be a bedroom, for in our modern
houses we believe too thoroughly in spaciousness to separate our living
rooms by ante-chambers and formal approaches. We must preserve a certain
amount of privacy, and have doors that may be closed when need be, but
we must also consider the effect of things when those doors are open,
when the color of one room melts into the color of another.

[Illustration: A PAINTED WALL BROKEN INTO PANELS BY NARROW MOLDINGS]

To me, the most beautiful wall is the plain and dignified painted
wall, broken into graceful panels by the use of narrow moldings, with
lighting fixtures carefully placed, and every picture and mirror hung
with classic precision. This wall is just as appropriate to the six-room
cottage as to the twenty-room house. If I could always find perfect
walls, I'd always paint them, and never use a yard of paper. Painted
walls, when very well done, are dignified and restful, and most
sanitary. The trouble is that too few plasterers know how to smooth the
wall surface, and too few workmen know how to apply paint properly. In
my new house on East Fifty-fifth Street I have had all the walls
painted. The woodwork is ivory white throughout the house, except in the
dining-room, where the walls and woodwork are soft gray. The walls of
most of the rooms and halls are painted a very deep tone of cream and
are broken into panels, the moldings being painted cream like the
woodwork. With such walls you can carry out any color-plan you may
desire.

You would think that every woman would know that walls are influenced by
the exposure of the room, but how often I have seen bleak north rooms
with walls papered in cold gray, and sunshiny south rooms with red or
yellow wall papers! Dull tones and cool colors are always good in south
rooms, and live tones and warm colors in north rooms. For instance, if
you wish to keep your rooms in one color-plan, you may have white
woodwork in all of them, and walls of varying shades of cream and
yellow. The north rooms may have walls painted or papered with a soft,
warm yellow that suggests creamy chiffon over orange. The south rooms
may have the walls of a cool creamy-gray tone.

Whether you paint or paper your walls, you should consider the placing
of the picture-molding most carefully. If the ceiling is very high, the
walls will be more interesting if the picture-molding is placed three or
four feet below the ceiling line. If the ceiling is low, the molding
should be within two inches of the ceiling. These measurements are not
arbitrary, of course. Every room is a law unto itself, and no cut and
dried rule can be given. A fine frieze is a very beautiful decoration,
but it must be _very_ fine to be worth while at all. Usually the dropped
ceiling is better for the upper wall space. It goes without saying that
those dreadful friezes perpetrated by certain wall paper designers are
very bad form, and should never be used. Indeed, the very principle of
the ordinary paper frieze is bad; it darkens the upper wall
unpleasantly, and violates the good old rule that the floors should be
darkest in tone, the side walls lighter, and the ceiling lightest. The
recent vogue of stenciling walls may be objected to on this account,
though a very narrow and conventional line of stenciling may sometimes
be placed just under the picture rail with good effect.

In a great room with a beamed ceiling and oak paneled walls a painted
fresco or a frieze of tapestry or some fine fabric is a very fine thing,
especially if it has a lot of primitive red and blue and gold in it, but
in simple rooms--beware!

Lately there has been a great revival of interest in wood paneling. We
go abroad, and see the magnificent paneling of old English houses, and
we come home and copy it. But we cannot get the workmen who will carve
panels in the old patterns. We cannot wait a hundred years for the soft
bloom that comes from the constant usage, and so our paneled rooms are
apt to be too new and woody. But we have such a wonderful store of
woods, here in America, it is worth while to panel our rooms, copying
the simple rectangular English patterns, and it is quite permissible to
"age" our walls by rubbing in black wax, and little shadows of
water-color, and in fact by any method we can devise. Wood paneled
walls, like beamed ceilings, are best in great rooms. They make boxes of
little ones.

Painted walls, and walls hung with tapestries and leather, are not
possible to many of us, but they are the most magnificent of wall
treatments. I know a wonderful library with walls hung in squares of
Spanish leather, a cold northern room that merits such a brilliant wall
treatment. The primitive colors of the Cordova leather workers, with
gold and crimson dominant, glow from the deep shadows. Spanish and
Italian furniture and fine old velvets and brocades furnish this room.
The same sort of room invites wood paneling and tapestry, whereas the
ideal room for painted walls in a lighter key is the ballroom, or some
such large apartment. I once decorated a ballroom with Pillement panels,
copied from a beautiful Eighteenth Century room, and so managed to bring
a riot of color and decoration into a large apartment. The ground of the
paneling was deep yellow, and all the little birds and flowers
surrounding the central design were done in the very brightest,
strongest colors imaginable. The various panels had quaint little scenes
of the same Chinese flavor. Of course, in such an apartment as a
ballroom there would be nothing to break into the decorative plan of the
painted walls, and the unbroken polished floor serves only to throw the
panels into their proper prominence. Painted walls, when done in some
such broad and daring manner, are very wonderful, but they should not be
attempted by the amateur, or, indeed, by an expert in a room that will
be crowded with furniture, and curtains, and rugs.

If your walls are faulty, you must resort to wall papers or fabrics.
Properly selected wall papers are not to be despised. The woodwork of a
room, of course, directly influences the treatment of its walls. So many
people ask me for advice about wall papers, and forget absolutely to
tell me of the finish of the framing of their wall spaces. A pale
yellowish cream wall paper is very charming with woodwork of white, but
it would not do with woodwork of heavy oak, for instance.

[Illustration: A WALL PAPER OF ELIZABETHAN DESIGN WITH OAK FURNITURE]

A general rule to follow in a small house is: do not have a figured
wall paper if you expect to use things of large design in your rooms. If
you have gorgeous rugs and hangings, keep your walls absolutely plain.
In furnishing the Colony Club I used a ribbon grass paper in the
hallway. The fresh, spring-like green and white striped paper is very
delightful with a carpet and runner of plain dark-green velvet, and
white woodwork, and dark mahogany furniture, and many gold-framed
mirrors. In another room in this building where many chintzes and
fabrics were used, I painted the woodwork white and the walls a soft
cream color. In the bedrooms I used a number of wall papers, the most
fascinating of these, perhaps, is in the bird room. The walls are hung
with a daringly gorgeous paper covered with birds--birds of paradise and
paroquets perched on flowery tropical branches. The furniture in this
room is of black and gold lacquer, and the rug and hangings are of jade
green. It would not be so successful in a room one lived in all the year
around, but it is a good example of what one can do with a tempting wall
paper in an occasional room, a guest room, for instance.

Some of the figured wall papers are so decorative that they are more
than tempting, they are compelling. The Chinese ones are particularly
fascinating. Recently I planned a small boudoir in a country house that
depended on a gay Chinoiserie paper for its charm. The design of the
paper was made up of quaint little figures and parasols and birds and
twisty trees, all in soft tones of green and blue and mauve on a deep
cream ground. The woodwork and ceiling repeated the deep cream, and the
simple furniture (a day bed, a chest of drawers, and several chairs)
were of wood, painted a flat blue green just the color of the twisty
pine-trees of the paper.

We had a delightful time decorating the furniture with blue and mauve
lines, and we painted parasols and birds and flowers on chair backs and
drawer-knobs and so forth. The large rug was of pinky-mauve-gray, and
the coverings of the day bed and chairs were of a mauve and gray striped
stuff, the stripes so small that they had the effect of being threads of
color. There were no pictures, of course, but there was a long mirror
above the chest of drawers, and another over the mantel. The
lighting-fixtures, candlesticks and appliqués, were of carved and
painted wood, blue-green with shades of thin mauve silk over rose.

Among the most enchanting of the new papers are the black and white
ones, fantastic Chinese designs and startling Austrian patterns. Black
and white is always a tempting combination to the decorator, and now
that Josef Hoffman, the great Austrian decorator, has been working in
black and white for a number of years, the more venturesome decorators
of France, and England and America have begun to follow his lead, and
are using black and white, and black and color, with amazing effect. We
have black papers patterned in color, and black velvet carpets, and
white coated papers sprinkled with huge black polka dots, and all manner
of unusual things. It goes without saying that much of this fad is
freakish, but there is also much that is good enough and refreshing
enough to last. One can imagine nothing fresher than a black and white
scheme in a bedroom, with a saving neutrality of gray or some dull tone
for rugs, and a brilliant bit of color in porcelain. There is no hint of
the mournful in the decorator's combination of black and white: rather,
there is a naïve quality suggestive of smartness in a gown, or chic in a
woman. A white walled room with white woodwork and a black and white
tiled floor; a black lacquer bed and chest of drawers and chair; glass
curtains of white muslin and inside ones of black and white Hoffman
chintz; a splash of warm orange-red in an oval rug at the bedside, if it
be winter, or a cool green one in summer--doesn't this tempt you?

I once saw a little serving-maid wearing a calico gown, black crosses on
a white ground, and I was so enchanted with the cool crispness of it
that I had a glazed wall paper made in the same design. I have used it
in bedrooms, and in bathrooms, always with admirable effect. One can
imagine a girl making a Pierrot and Pierrette room for herself, given
whitewashed walls, white woodwork, and white painted furniture. An
ordinary white cotton printed with large black polka dots would make
delightful curtains, chair-cushions, and so forth. The rug might be
woven of black and white rags, or might be one of those woven from the
old homespun coverlet patterns.

The landscape papers that were so popular in the New England and
Southern houses three generations ago were very wonderful when they were
used in hallways, with graceful stairs and white woodwork, but they were
distressing when used in living-rooms. It is all very well to cover the
walls of your hall with a hand-painted paper, or a landscape, or a
foliage paper, because you get only an impressionistic idea of a
hall--you don't loiter there. But papers of large design are out of
place in rooms where pictures and books are used. If there is anything
more dreadful than a busy "parlor" paper, with scrolls that tantalize or
flowers that demand to be counted, I have yet to encounter it.

Remember, above all things that your walls must be beautiful in
themselves. They must be plain and quiet, ready to receive sincere
things, but quite good enough to get along without pictures if
necessary. A wall that is broken into beautiful spaces and covered with
a soft creamy paint, or paper, or grasscloth, is good enough for any
room. It may be broken with lighting fixtures, and it is finished.

[Illustration: THE SCHEME OF THIS ROOM GREW FROM THE JARS ON THE
MANTEL]




VI

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF COLOR


What a joyous thing is color! How influenced we all are by it, even if
we are unconscious of how our sense of restfulness has been brought
about. Certain colors are antagonistic to each of us, and I think we
should try to learn just what colors are most sympathetic to our own
individual emotions, and then make the best of them.

If you are inclined to a hasty temper, for instance, you should not live
in a room in which the prevailing note is red. On the other hand, a
timid, delicate nature could often gain courage and poise by living in
surroundings of rich red tones, the tones of the old Italian damasks in
which the primitive colors of the Middle Ages have been handed down to
us. No half shades, no blending of tender tones are needed in an age of
iron nerves. People worked hard, and they got downright blues and reds
and greens--primitive colors, all. Nowadays, we must consider the effect
of color on our nerves, our eyes, our moods, everything.

Love of color is an emotional matter, just as much as love of music. The
strongest, the most intense, feeling I have about decoration is my love
of color. I have felt as intimate a satisfaction at St. Mark's at
twilight as I ever felt at any opera, though I love music.

Color! The very word would suggest warm and agreeable arrangement of
tones, a pleasing and encouraging atmosphere which is full of life. We
say that one woman is "so full of color," when she is alert and happy
and vividly alive. We say another woman is "colorless," because she is
bleak and chilling and unfriendly. We demand that certain music shall be
full of color, and we always seek color in the pages of our favorite
books. One poet has color and to spare, another is cynical and hard
and--gray. We think and criticize from the standpoint of an appreciation
of color, although often we have not that appreciation.

There is all the difference in the world between the person who
appreciates color and the person who "likes colors." The child, playing
with his broken toys and bits of gay china and glass, the American
Indian with his gorgeous blankets and baskets and beads--all these
primitive minds enjoy the combination of vivid tones, but they have no
more feeling for color than a blind man. The appreciation of color is a
subtle and intellectual quality.

Sparrow, the Englishman who has written so many books on
housefurnishing, says: "Colors are like musical notes and chords, while
color is a pleasing result of their artistic use in a combined way. So
colors are means to an end, while color is the end itself. The first are
tools, while the other is a distinctive harmony in art composed of many
lines and shades."

We are aware that some people are "color-blind," but we do not take the
trouble to ascertain whether the majority of people see colors crudely.
I suppose there are as many color-blind people as there are people who
have a deep feeling for color, and the great masses of people in
between, while they know colors one from another, have no appreciation
of hue. Just as surely, there are some people who cannot tell one tune
from another and some people who have a deep and passionate feeling for
music, while the rest--the great majority of people--can follow a tune
and sing a hymn, but they can go no deeper into music than that.

Surely, each of you must know your own color-sense. You know whether you
get results, don't you? I have never believed that there is a woman so
blind that she cannot tell good from bad effects, even though she may
not be able to tell _why_ one room is good and another bad. It is as
simple as the problem of the well-gowned woman and the dowdy one. The
dowdy woman doesn't realize the degree of her own dowdiness, but she
_knows_ that her neighbor is well-gowned, and she envies her with a
vague and pathetic envy.

If, then, you are not sure that you appreciate color, if you feel that
you, like your children, like the green rug with the red roses because
it is "so cheerful," you may be sure that you should let color-problems
alone, and furnish your house in neutral tones, depending on
book-bindings and flowers and open fires and the necessary small
furnishings for your color. Then, with an excellent background of soft
quiet tones, you can venture a little way at a time, trying a bit of
color here for a few days, and asking yourself if you honestly like it,
and then trying another color--a jar or a bowl or a length of
fabric--somewhere else, and trying that out. You will soon find that
your joy in your home is growing, and that you have a source of
happiness within yourself that you had not suspected. I believe that
good taste can be developed in any woman, just as surely as good manners
are possible to anyone. And good taste is as necessary as good manners.

We may take our first lessons in color from Nature, on whose storehouse
we can draw limitlessly. Nature, when she plans a wondrous splash of
color, prepares a proper background for it. She gives us color plans for
all the needs we can conceive. White and gray clouds on a blue sky--what
more could she use in such a composition? A bit of gray green moss upon
a black rock, a field of yellow dandelions, a pink and white spike of
hollyhocks, an orange-colored butterfly poised on a stalk of
larkspur--what color-plans are these!

[Illustration: A LOUIS SEIZE BEDROOM IN ROSE AND BLUE AND CREAM]

I think that the first consideration after you have settled your
building-site should be to place your house so that its windows may
frame Nature's own pictures. With windows facing north and south, where
all the fluctuating and wayward charm of the season unrolls before your
eyes, your windows become the finest pictures that you can have. When
this has been arranged, it is time to consider the color-scheme for the
interior of the house, the colors that shall be in harmony with the
window-framed vistas, the colors that shall be backgrounds for the
intimate personal furnishings of your daily life. You must think of your
walls as backgrounds for the colors you wish to bring into your rooms.
And by colors I do not mean merely the primary colors, red and blue and
yellow, or the secondary colors, green and orange and violet, I mean the
white spaces, the black shadows, the gray halftones, the suave creams,
that give you the _feeling_ of color.

How often we get a more definite idea of brilliant color from a
white-walled room, with dark and severe furniture and no ornaments, no
actual color save the blue sky framed by the windows and the flood of
sunshine that glorifies everything, than from a room that has a dozen
fine colors, carefully brought together, in its furnishings!

We must decide our wall colors by the aspect of our rooms. Rooms facing
south may be very light gray, cream, or even white, but northern rooms
should be rich in color, and should suggest warmth and just a little
mystery. Some of you have seen the Sala di Cambio at Perugia. Do you
remember how dark it seems when one enters, and how gradually the
wonderful coloring glows out from the gloom and one is comforted and
soothed into a sort of dreamland of pure joy, in the intimate
satisfaction of it all? It is unsurpassable for sheer decorative charm,
I think.

For south rooms blues and grays and cool greens and all the dainty gay
colors are charming. Do you remember the song Edna May used to sing in
"The Belle of New York"? I am not sure of quoting correctly, but the
refrain was: "Follow the Light!" I have so often had it in mind when
I've been planning my color schemes--"Follow the Light!" But light
colors for sunshine, remember, and dark ones for shadow.

For north rooms I am strongly inclined to the use of paneling in our
native American woods, that are so rich in effect, but alas, so little
used. I hope our architects will soon realize what delightful and
inexpensive rooms can be made of pine and cherry, chestnut and cypress,
and the beautiful California redwood. I know of a library paneled with
cypress. The beamed ceiling, the paneled walls, the built-in shelves,
the ample chairs and long tables are all of the soft brown cypress.
Here, if anywhere, you would think a monotony of brown wood would be
obvious, but think of the thousands of books with brilliant bindings!
Think of the green branches of trees seen through the casement windows!
Think of the huge, red-brick fireplace, with its logs blazing in orange
and yellow and vermillion flame! Think of the distinction of a copper
bowl of yellow flowers on the long brown table! Can't you see that this
cypress room is simply glowing with color?

I wish that I might be able to show all you young married girls who are
working out your home-schemes just how to work out the color of a room.
Suppose you are given some rare and lovely jar, or a wee rug, or a rare
old print, or even a quaint old chair from long ago, and build a room
around it. I have some such point of interest in every room I build, and
I think that is why some people like my rooms--they feel, without quite
knowing why, that I have loved them while making them. Now there is a
little sitting-room and bedroom combined in a certain New York house
that I worked out from a pair of Chinese jars. They were the oddest
things, of a sort of blue-green and mauve and mulberry, with flecks of
black, on a cream porcelain ground.

First I found a wee Oriental rug that repeated the colors of the jugs.
This was to go before the hearth. Then I worked out the shell of the
room: the woodwork white, the walls bluish green, the plain carpet a
soft green. I designed the furniture and had it made by a skilful
carpenter, for I could find none that would harmonize with the room.

The day bed which is forty-two inches wide, is built like a wide roomy
sofa. One would never suspect it of being a plain bed. Still it makes no
pretensions to anything else, for it has the best of springs and the
most comfortable of mattresses, and a dozen soft pillows. The bed is of
wood and is painted a soft green, with a dark-green line running all
around, and little painted festoons of flowers in decoration. The
mattress and springs are covered with a most delightful mauve chintz, on
which birds and flowers are patterned. There are several easy chairs
cushioned with this chintz, and the window hangings are also of it. The
chest of drawers is painted in the same manner. There are glass knobs on
the drawers, and a sheet of plate glass covers the top of it. An old
painting hangs above it.

The open bookshelves are perfectly plain in construction. They are
painted the same bluish-green, and the only decoration is the line of
dark green about half an inch from the edge. Any woman who is skilful
with her brush could decorate furniture of this kind, and I daresay many
women could build it.

There is another bedroom in this house, a room in red and blue. "Red and
blue"--you shudder. I know it! But _such_ red and _such_ blue!

Will you believe me when I assure you that this room is called cool and
restful-looking by everyone who sees it? The walls are painted plain
cream. The woodwork is white. The perfectly plain carpet rug is of a
dull red that is the color of an old-fashioned rose--you know the roses
that become lavender when they fade? The mantel is of Siena marble, and
over it there is an old mirror with an upper panel painted in colors
after the manner of some of those delightful old rooms found in France
about the time of Louis XVI. If you have one very good picture and will
use it in this way, inset over the mantel with a mirror below it, you
will need no other pictures in your room.

[Illustration: By permission of the Butterick Publishing Co.
THE WRITING CORNER OF A CHINTZ BEDROOM]

The chintz used in this room is patterned in the rose red of the carpet
and a dull cool blue, on a white ground. This chintz is used on the
graceful sofa, the several chairs and the bed, which are ivory in tone.
The hangings of the bed are lined with taffetas of rose red. The
bedcover is of the same silk, and the inner curtains at the window are
lined with it. The small table at the head of the bed, the kidney table
beside the sofa, and the small cabinets near the mantel, are of
mahogany. There is a mahogany writing-table placed at right angles to
the windows.

From this rose and blue bedroom you enter a little dressing-room that is
also full of color. Here are the same cream walls, the dull red carpet,
the old blue silk shades on lamps and candles, but the chintz is
different: the ground is black, and gray parrots and paroquets swing in
blue-green festoons of leaves and branches. The dressing-table is placed
in front of the window, so that you can see yourself for better or for
worse. There is a three-fold mirror of black and gold lacquer, and a
Chinese cabinet of the same lacquer in the corner. The low seat before
the dressing-table is covered with the chintz. A few costume prints hang
on the wall. You can imagine how impossible it would be to be
ill-tempered in such a cheerful place.




VII

OF DOORS, AND WINDOWS, AND CHINTZ


What a sense of intimacy, of security, encompasses one when ushered into
a living room in which the door opens and _closes_! Who that has read
Henry James's remarkable article on the vistas dear to the American
hostess, our portiere-hung spaces, guiltless of doors and open to every
draft, can fail to feel how much better our conversation might be were
we not forever conscious that between our guests and the greedy ears of
our servants there is nothing but a curtain! All that curtains ever were
used for in the Eighteenth Century was as a means of shutting out drafts
in large rooms inadequately heated by wood fires.

How often do we see masses of draperies looped back and arranged with
elaborate dust-catching tassels and fringes that mean nothing. These
curtains do not even draw! I am sure that a good, well-designed door
with a simple box-lock and hinges would be much less costly than velvet
hangings. A door is not an ugly object, to be concealed for very shame,
but a fine architectural detail of great value. Consider the French and
Italian doors with their architraves. How fine they are, how imposing,
how honest, and how well they compose!

Of course, if your house has been built with open archways, you will
need heavy curtains for them, but there are curtains _and_ curtains. If
you need portieres at all, you need them to cut off one room from
another, and so they should hang in straight folds. They should be just
what they pretend to be--honest curtains with a duty to fulfil. For the
simple house they may be made of velvet or velveteen in some neutral
tone that is in harmony with the rugs and furnishings of the rooms that
are to be divided. They should be double, usually, and a faded gilt gimp
may be used as an outline or as a binding. There are also excellent
fabrics reproducing old brocades and even old tapestries, but it is well
to be careful about using these fabrics. There are machine-made
"tapestries" of foliage designs in soft greens and tans and browns on a
dark blue ground that are very pleasing. Many of these stuffs copy in
color and design the verdure tapestries, and some of them have fine
blues and greens suggestive of Gobelin. These stuffs are very wide and
comparatively inexpensive. I thoroughly advise a stuff of this kind, but
I heartily condemn the imitations of the old tapestries that are covered
with large figures and intricate designs. These old tapestries are as
distinguished for their colors, their textures, and their very crudities
as for their supreme beauty of coloring. It would be foolish to imitate
them.

As for windows and their curtains--I could write a book about them! A
window is such a gay, animate thing. By day it should be full of
sunshine, and if it frames a view worth seeing, the view should be a
part of it. By night the window should be hidden by soft curtains that
have been drawn to the side during the sunshiny hours.

In most houses there is somewhere a group of windows that calls for an
especial kind of curtain. If these windows look out over a pleasant
garden, or upon a vista of fields and trees, or even upon a striking
sky-line of housetops, you will be wise to use a thin, sheer glass
curtain through which you can look out, but which protects you from the
gaze of passers-by. If your group of windows is so placed that there is
no danger of people passing and looking in, then a short sash curtain of
swiss muslin is all that you require, with inside curtains of some
heavier fabric--chintz or linen or silk--that can be drawn at night.

If you are building a new house I strongly advise you to have at least
one room with a group of deep windows, made up of small panes of leaded
glass, and a broad window-seat built beneath them. There is something so
pleasant and mellow in leaded glass, particularly when the glass itself
has an uneven, colorful quality. When windows are treated thus
architecturally they need no glass curtains. They need only side
curtains of some deep-toned fabric.

[Illustration: By permission of the Butterick Publishing Co.
BLACK CHINTZ USED IN A DRESSING-ROOM]

As for your single windows, when you are planning them you will be
wise to have the sashes so placed that a broad sill will be possible.
There is nothing pleasanter than a broad window sill at a convenient
height from the floor. The tendency of American builders nowadays is to
use two large glass sashes instead of the small or medium-sized panes of
older times.

This is very bad from the standpoint of the architect, because these
huge squares of glass suggest holes in the wall, whereas the square or
oblong panes with their straight frames and bars advertise their
suitability. The housewife's objection to small panes is that they are
harder to clean than the large ones, but this objection is not worthy of
consideration. If we really wish to make our houses look as if they were
built for permanency we should consider everything that makes for beauty
and harmony and hominess. There is nothing more interesting than a
cottage window sash of small square panes of glass unless it be the
diamond-paned casement window of an old English house. Such windows are
obviously windows. The huge sheets of plate glass that people are so
proud of are all very well for shops, but they are seldom right in small
houses.

I remember seeing one plate glass window that was well worth while. It
was in the mountain studio of an artist and it was fully eight by ten
feet--one unbroken sheet of glass which framed a marvelous vista of
mountain and valley. It goes without saying that such a window requires
no curtain other than one that is to be drawn at night.

The ideal treatment for the ordinary single window is a soft curtain of
some thin white stuff hung flat and full against the glass. This curtain
should have an inch and a half hem at the bottom and a narrow hem at the
sides. It should be strung on a small brass rod, and should be placed as
close to the glass as possible, leaving just enough space for the window
shade beneath it. The curtain should hang in straight folds to the
window sill, escaping it by half an inch or so.

I hope it is not necessary for me to go into the matter of lace curtains
here. I feel sure that no woman of really good taste could prefer a
cheap curtain of imitation lace to a simple one of white swiss-muslin. I
have never seen a house room that was too fine for a swiss-muslin
curtain, though of course there are many rooms that would welcome no
curtains whatever wherein the windows are their own excuse for being.
Lace curtains, even if they may have cost a king's ransom, are in
questionable taste, to put it mildly. Use all the lace you wish on your
bed linen and table linen, but do not hang it up at your windows for
passers-by to criticize.

[Illustration: PRINTED LINEN CURTAINS OVER ROSE-COLORED SILK]

Many women do not feel the need of inside curtains. Indeed, they are not
necessary in all houses. They are very attractive when they are well
hung, and they give the window a distinction and a decorative charm that
is very valuable. I am using many photographs that show the use of
inside curtains. You will observe that all of these windows have glass
curtains of plain white muslin, no matter what the inside curtain may
be.

Chintz curtains are often hung with a valance about ten or twelve inches
deep across the top of the window. These valances should be strung on a
separate rod, so that the inside curtains may be pulled together if need
be. The ruffled valance is more suitable for summer cottages and
bedrooms than for more formal rooms. A fitted valance of chintz or
brocade is quite dignified enough for a drawing-room or any other.

In my bedroom I have used a printed linen with a flat valance. This
printed linen is in soft tones of rose and green on a cream ground. The
side curtains have a narrow fluted binding of rose-colored silk. Under
these curtains are still other curtains of rose-colored shot silk, and
beneath those are white muslin glass curtains. With such a window
treatment the shot silk curtains are the ones that are drawn together at
night, making a very soft, comforting sort of color arrangement. You
will observe in this photograph that the panels between doors and
windows are filled with mirrors that run the full length from the
molding to the baseboard. This is a very beautiful setting for the
windows, of course.

It is well to remember that glass curtains should not be looped back.
Inside curtains may be looped when there is no illogical break in the
line. It is absurd to hang up curtains against the glass and then draw
them away, for glass curtains are supposed to be a protection from the
gaze of the passers-by. If you haven't passers-by you can pull your
curtains to the side so that you may enjoy the out-of-doors. Do not lose
sight of the fact that your windows are supposed to give you sunshine
and air; if you drape them so that you get neither sunshine nor air you
might as well block them up and do away with them entirely.

To me the most amazing evidence of the advance of good taste is the
revival of chintzes, printed linens, cottons and so forth, of the
Eighteenth Century. Ten years ago it was almost impossible to find a
well-designed cretonne; the beautiful chintzes as we know them were
unknown. Now there are literally thousands of these excellent fabrics of
old and new designs in the shops. The gay designs of the printed cottons
that came to us from East India, a hundred years ago, and the fantastic
chintzes known as Chinese Chippendale, that were in vogue when the Dutch
East India Company supplied the world with its china and fabrics; the
dainty French _toiles de Jouy_ that are reminiscent of Marie Antoinette
and her bewitching apartments, and the printed linens of old England and
later ones of the England of William Morris, all these are at our
service. There are charming cottons to be had at as little as twenty
cents a yard, printed from old patterns. There are linens hand-printed
from old blocks that rival cut velvet in their lustrous color effect and
cost almost as much. There are amazing fabrics that seem to have come
from the land of the Arabian nights--they really come from Austria and
are dubbed "Futurist" and "Cubist" and such. Some of them are inspiring,
some of them are horrifying, but all of them are interesting. Old-time
chintzes were usually very narrow, and light in ground, but the modern
chintz is forty or fifty inches wide, with a ground of neutral tone that
gives it distinction, and defies dust.

When I began my work as a decorator of houses, my friends, astonished
and just a little amused at my persistent use of chintz, called me the
"Chintz decorator." The title pleased me, even though it was bestowed in
fun, for my theory has always been that chintz, when properly used, is
the most decorative and satisfactory of all fabrics. At first people
objected to my bringing chintz into their houses because they had an
idea it was poor and mean, and rather a doubtful expedient. On the
contrary, I feel that it is infinitely, better to use good chintzes than
inferior silks and damasks, just as simple engravings and prints are
preferable to doubtful paintings. The effect is the thing!

One of the chief objections to the charming fabric was that people felt
it would become soiled easily, and would often have to be renewed, but
in our vacuum-cleaned houses we no longer feel that it is necessary to
have furniture and hangings that will "conceal dirt." We refuse to
_have_ dirt! Of course, chintzes in rooms that will have hard wear
should be carefully selected. They should be printed on linen, or some
hard twilled fabric, and the ground color should be darker than when
they are to be used in bedrooms. Many of the newer chintzes have dark
grounds of blue, mauve, maroon or gray, and a still more recent chintz
has a black ground with fantastic designs of the most delightful
colorings. The black chintzes are reproductions of fabrics that were in
vogue in 1830. They are very good in rooms that must be used a great
deal, and they are very decorative. Some of them suggest old cut
velvets--they are so soft and lustrous.

My greatest difficulty in introducing chintzes here was to convert women
who loved their plush and satin draperies to a simpler fabric. They were
unwilling to give up the glories they knew for the charms they knew not.
I convinced them by showing them results! My first large commission was
the Colony Club, and I used chintzes throughout the Club: Chintzes of
cool grapes and leaves in the roof garden, hand-blocked linens of many
soft colors in the reading-room, rose-sprigged and English posy designs
in the bedrooms, and so on throughout the building.

Now I am using more chintz than anything else. It is as much at home in
the New York drawing-room as in the country cottage. I can think of
nothing more charming for a room in a country house than a sitting-room
furnished with gray painted furniture and a lovely chintz.

[Illustration: STRAIGHT HANGINGS OF ROSE AND YELLOW SHOT SILK]

Not long ago I was asked to furnish a small sea-shore cottage. The
whole thing had to be done in a month, and the only plan I had to work
on was a batch of chintz samples that had been selected for the house. I
extracted the colorings of walls, woodwork, furniture, etc., from these
chintzes. Instead of buying new furniture I dragged down a lot of old
things that had been relegated to the attic and painted them with a dull
ground color and small designs adapted from the chintzes. The lighting
fixtures, wall brackets, candle sticks, etc.--were of carved wood,
painted in polychrome to match the general scheme. One chintz in
particular I would like to have every woman see and enjoy. It had a
ground of old blue, patterned regularly with little Persian "pears," the
old rug design, you know. The effect of this simple chintz with white
painted walls and furniture and woodwork and crisp white muslin glass
curtains was delicious.

The most satisfactory of all chintzes is the _Toile de Jouy_. The
designs are interesting and well drawn, and very much more decorative
than the designs one finds in ordinary silks and other materials. The
chintzes must be appropriate to the uses of the room, well designed, in
scale with the height of the ceilings, and so forth. It is well to
remember that self-color rugs are most effective in chintz rooms. Wilton
rugs woven in carpet sizes are to be had now at all first class
furniture stores.

Painted furniture is very popular nowadays and is especially delightful
when used in chintz rooms. The furniture we see now is really a revival
and reproduction of the old models made by Angelica Kaufman,
Heppelwhite, and other furniture-makers of their period. The old
furniture is rarely seen outside of museums nowadays, but it has been an
inspiration to modern decorators who are seeking ideas for simple and
charming furniture.

A very attractive room can be made by taking unfinished pieces of
furniture--that is, furniture that has not been stained or painted--and
painting them a soft field color, and then adding decorations of
bouquets or garlands, or birds, or baskets, reproducing parts of the
design of the chintz used in the room. Of course, many of these patterns
could be copied by a good draftsman only, but others are simple enough
for anyone to attempt. For instance, I decorated a room in soft cream,
gray, yellow and cornflower blue. The chintz had a cornflower design
that repeated all these colors. I painted the furniture a very soft
gray, and then painted little garlands of cornflowers in soft blues and
gray-greens on each piece of furniture. The walls were painted a soft
cream color. The carpet rug of tan was woven in one piece with a blue
stripe in the border.

The color illustrations of this book will give you a very good idea of
how I use chintzes and painted furniture. One of the illustrations shows
the use of a black chintz in the dressing-room of a city house. The
chintz is covered with parrots which make gorgeous splashes of color on
the black ground. The color of the foliage and leaves is greenish-blue,
which shades into a dozen blues and greens. This greenish-blue tone has
been used in the small things of the room. The chintz curtains are lined
with silk of this tone, and the valance at the top of the group of
windows is finished with a narrow silk fringe of this greenish-blue. The
small candle shades, the shirred shade of the drop-light, and the
cushion of the black lacquer chair are also of this blue.

The walls of the room are a deep cream in tone, and there are a number
of old French prints from some Eighteenth Century fashion journals hung
on the cream ground. The dressing-table is placed against the windows,
over the radiator, so that there is light and to spare for dressing.
Half curtains of white muslin are shirred on the sashes back of the
dressing-table. The quaint triplicate mirror is of black lacquer
decorated with Chinese figures in gold, and the little, three-cornered
cabinet in the corner is also of black and gold. The chintz is used as a
covering for the dressing-seat.

Another illustration shows the writing-corner of the bedroom which leads
into this dressing-room. The walls and the rose-red carpet are the same
in both rooms, as you see. This bedroom depends absolutely on the rose
and blue chintz for its decoration. There is a quaint bed painted a pale
gray, with rose-red taffeta coverlet. The bed curtains are of the chintz
lined with the rose-red silk. There are several white-enamel chairs
upholstered with the chintz, and there is a comfortable French couch
with a kidney table of mahogany beside it. The corner of the room shown
in the illustration is the most convenient writing-place. The desk is
placed at right angles to the wall between the two windows. The small
furnishings of the writing-desk repeat the queer blues and the rose-red
of the chintz. A very comfortable stool with a cushion of old velvet is
an added convenience.

The chintz curtains at the windows hang in straight, full folds. A flat
valance, cut the length of the design of the chintz, furnishes the top
of the two windows. Some windows do not need these valances, but these
windows are very high and need the connecting line of color. The long
curtains are lined with the rose-red silk, which also shows in a narrow
piping around the edges.

[Illustration: MUSLIN GLASS CURTAINS IN THE WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE]

The other two color illustrations are of the most popular room I have
done, a bedroom and sitting room combined. Everyone likes the color plan
of soft greens, mauve and lavender. There is a large day bed of painted
wood, with mattress, springs and cushions covered with a chintz of mauve
ground and gay birds. The rug is a self-toned rug of very soft green,
and the walls are tinted with the palest of greens. The woodwork is
white, and the furniture is painted a greenish-gray that is just a
little deeper than pearl. A darker green line of paint outlines all
the furniture, which is further decorated with prim little garlands
of flowers painted in dull rose, blue, yellow and green.

The mauve chintz is used for the curtains, and for the huge armchair and
one or two painted chairs. There is a little footstool covered with
brocaded violet velvet, with just a thread of green showing on the
background. The lighting fixtures are of carved wood, painted in soft
colors to match the garlands on the furniture, with shirred shades of
lavender silk. Two lamps made of quaint old green jars with lavender
decorations have shirred shades of the same silk. One of these lamps is
used on the writing-table and the other on the little chest of drawers.

This little chest of drawers, by the way, is about the simplest piece of
furniture I can think of, for any girl who can use her brushes at all.
An ordinary chest of drawers should be given several coats of
paint--pale yellow, green or blue, as may be preferred. Then a thin
stripe of a darker tone should be painted on it. This should be outlined
in pencil and then painted with a deeper tone of green color; for
instance, an orange or brown stripe should be used on pale yellow, and
dark green or blue on the pale green.

A detail of the wall paper or the chintz design may be outlined on the
panels of the drawers and on the top of the chest by means of a stencil,
and then painted with rather soft colors. The top of the chest should be
covered with a piece of plate glass which will have the advantage of
showing the design of the cover and of being easily cleaned.
Old-fashioned glass knobs add interest to this piece of furniture. A
mirror with a gilt frame, or an unframed painting similar to the one
shown in the illustration would be very nice above the chest of drawers.

[Illustration: HERE ARE MANY LIGHTING FIXTURES HARMONIOUSLY ASSEMBLED
IN A DRAWING-ROOM]




VIII

THE PROBLEM OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT


In all the equipment of the modern house, I think there is nothing more
difficult than the problem of artificial light. To have the light
properly distributed so that the rooms may be suffused with just the
proper glow, but never a glare; so that the base outlets for
reading-lamps shall be at convenient angles, so that the wall lights
shall be beautifully balanced,--all this means prodigious thought and
care before the actual placing of the lights is accomplished.

In domestic architecture light is usually provided for some special
function; to dress by, to read by, or to eat by. If properly considered,
there is no reason why one's lighting fixtures should not be beautiful
as well as utilitarian. However, it is seldom indeed that one finds
lights that serve the purposes of utility and beauty.

I have rarely, I might say never, gone into a builder's house (and
indeed I might say the same of many architects' houses) but that the
first things to require changing to make the house amenable to modern
American needs were the openings for lighting fixtures. Usually, side
openings are placed much too near the trim of a door or window, so that
no self-respecting bracket can be placed in the space without
encroaching on the molding. Another favorite mistake is to place the two
wall openings in a long wall or large panel so close together that no
large picture or mirror or piece of furniture can be placed against that
wall. There is also the tendency to place the openings too high, which
always spoils a good room.

I strongly advise the woman who is having a house built or re-arranged
to lay out her electric light plan as early in the game as possible,
with due consideration to the uses of each room. If there is a high
chest of drawers for a certain wall, the size of it is just as important
in planning the lighting fixtures for that wall as is the width of the
fireplace important in the placing of the lights on the chimney-breast.
I advise putting a liberal number of base openings in a room, for it
costs little when the room is in embryo. Later on, when you find you can
change your favorite table and chair to a better position to meet the
inspiration of the completed room and that your reading-lamp can be
moved, too, because the outlet is there ready for it, will come the
compensating moments when you congratulate yourself on forethought.

There are now, fortunately, few communities in America that have not
electric power-plants. Indeed, I know of many obscure little towns of a
thousand inhabitants that have had the luxury of electric lights for
years, and have as yet no gas or water-works! Miraculously, also, the
smaller the town the cheaper is the cost of electricity. This is not a
cut-and-dried statement, but an observation from personal experience.
The little town's electricity is usually a byproduct of some
manufacturing plant, and current is often sold at so much per light per
month, instead of being measured by meter. It is pleasant to think that
many homes have bridged the smelly gap between candles and electricity
in this magic fashion.

Gas light is more difficult to manage than electricity, for there is
always the cumbersome tube and the necessity for adding mechanical
accessories before a good clear light is secured. Gas lamps are hideous,
for some obscure reason, whereas there are hundreds of simple and
excellent wall fixtures, drop lights and reading lamps to be bought
already equipped for electricity. The electric wire is such an
unobtrusive thing that it can be carried through a small hole in any
good vase, or jar, and with a suitable shade you have an attractive and
serviceable reading light. Candlesticks are easily equipped for
electricity and are the most graceful of all fixtures for
dressing-tables, bedside tables, tea tables, and such.

It is well to remember that if a room is decorated in dark colors the
light will be more readily absorbed than in a light-colored room, and
you should select and place your lighting-fixtures accordingly. Bead
covers, fringes and silk shades all obscure the light and re-absorb it,
and so require a great force of light to illuminate properly.

The subject of the selection of lighting-fixtures is limitless. There
are so many fixtures to be had nowadays--good, bad and indifferent--that
it were impossible to point out the merits and demerits of them all.
There are copies of all the best lamps and lanterns of old Europe and
many new designs that grew out of modern American needs. There are Louis
XVI lanterns simple enough to fit well into many an American hallway,
that offer excellent lessons in the simplicity of the master decorators
of old times. Contrast one of these fine old lanterns with the mass of
colored glass and beads and crude lines and curves of many modern hall
lanterns. I like a ceiling bowl of crystal or alabaster with lights
inside, for halls, but the expense of such a bowl is great. However, I
recently saw a reproduction of an old alabaster bowl made of soft,
cloudy glass, not of alabaster, which sold at a fraction of the price of
the original, and it seemed to meet all the requirements.

Of course, one may easily spend as much money on lighting-fixtures as on
the remainder of the house, but that is no reason why people who must
practise economy should admit ugly fixtures into their homes. There are
always good and bad fixtures offered at the lowest and highest prices.
You have no defense if you build your own house. If you are making the
best of a rented house or an apartment, that is different. But good
taste is sufficient armor against the snare of gaudy beads and cheap
glass.

[Illustration: DETAIL OF A FINE OLD FRENCH FIXTURE OF HAND-WROUGHT
METAL]

There was recently an exhibition in New York of the craftsmanship of
the students of a certain school of design. There were some really
beautiful lanterns and wall brackets and reading lamps shown, designed
and executed by young women who are self supporting by day and can give
only a few evening hours, or an occasional day, to the pursuit of their
avocation. One hanging lantern of terra cotta was very fine indeed, and
there were many notable fixtures. There must be easily tens of thousands
of young people who are students in the various schools of design,
manual training high schools and normal art schools.

Why doesn't some far-seeing manufacturer of lighting-fixtures give these
young people a chance to adapt the fine old French and Italian designs
to our modern needs? Why not have your daughter or son copy such an
object that has use and beauty, instead of encouraging the daubing of
china or the piercing of brass that leads to nothing? And if you haven't
a daughter or son, encourage the young artisan, your neighbor, who is
trying to "find himself." Let him copy a few good old fixtures for you.
They will cost no more than the gaudy vulgar fixtures that are sold in
so many shops.

The photograph shown on page 108 illustrates the possibility of using a
number of lighting-fixtures in one room. The room shown is my own
drawing-room. You will observe that in this picture there are many
different lights. The two old French fixtures of wrought gilt, which
flank the mantel mirror, hold wax candles. The two easy chairs have
little tables beside them holding three-pronged silver candlesticks.
There is also a small table holding an electric reading-lamp, made of a
Chinese jar, with a shade of shirred silk. The chandelier is a charming
old French affair of gracefully strung crystal globules. For a formal
occasion the chandelier is lighted, but when we are few, we love the
fire glow and candlelight. If we require a stronger light for reading
there is the lamp.

The photograph here given may suggest a superfluous number of lights,
but the room itself does not. The wall fixtures are of gilt, you see,
the candlesticks of silver, the chandelier of crystal and the lamp of
Chinese porcelain and soft colored silk; so one is not conscious of the
many lights. If all the lights were screened in the same way the effect
would be different. I use this picture for this very reason--to show how
many lights may be assembled and used in one place. In considering the
placing of these lights, the firelight was not forgotten, nor the effect
of the room by day when the sunlight floods in and these many fixtures
become objects of decorative interest.

A lamp, or a wall fixture, or a chandelier, or a candlestick, must be
beautiful in itself--beautiful by sunlight,--if it is really successful.
The soft glow of night light may make commonplace things beautiful, but
the final test of a fixture is its effect in relation to the other
furnishings of the room in sunlight.

[Illustration: LIGHTING FIXTURES INSPIRED BY ADAM MIRRORS]

The picture on page 118 shows the proper placing of wall fixtures when
a large picture is the chief point of interest. These wall fixtures are
particularly interesting because they are in the style of the Adam
mirrors that hang on the recessed wall spaces flanking the chimney wall.
This photograph is a lesson in the placing of objects of art. The large
painting is beautifully spaced between the line of the mantel shelf and
the lower line of the cornice. The wall fixtures are correctly placed,
and anyone can see why they would be distressingly out of key if they
were nearer the picture, or nearer the line of the chimney wall. The
picture was considered as an important part of the chimney-piece before
the openings for the fixtures were made.

Another good lamp is shown on the small table in this picture. There is
really a reading-lamp beside a comfortable couch, which cannot be seen
in the picture. This lamp, like the one in the drawing-room, is made
from a porcelain vase, with a shirred silk shade on a wire frame. An
electric light cord is run through a hole bored for it. If electricity
were not available, an oil receptacle of brass could be fitted into the
vase and the beauty of the lamp would be the same.

There are so many possibilities for making beautiful lamps of good jars
and vases that it is surprising the shops still sell their frightful
lamps covered with cabbage roses and dragons and monstrosities. A blue
and white ginger jar, a copper loving-cup, or even a homely brown
earthenware bean-pot, will make a good bowl for an oil or electric lamp,
but of the dreadful bowls sold in the shops for the purpose the less
said the better. How can one see beauty in a lurid bowl and shade of red
glass! Better stick to wax candles the rest of your life than indulge in
such a lamp!

I know people plead that they have to buy what is offered; they cannot
find simple lamps and hanging lanterns at small prices and so they
_must_ buy bad ones. The manufacturer makes just the objects that people
demand. So long as you accept these things, just so long will he make
them. If all the women who complain about the hideous lighting-fixtures
that are sold were to refuse absolutely to buy them, a few years would
show a revolution in the designing of these things.

There has been of late a vulgar fashion of having a huge mass of colored
glass and beads suspended from near-brass chains in the dining-rooms of
certain apartments and houses. These monstrous things are called
"domes"--no one knows why. For the price of one of them you could buy a
three pronged candlestick, equipped for electricity, for your
dining-room table. It is the sight of hundreds of these dreadful "domes"
in the lamp shops that gives one a feeling of discouragement. The
humblest kitchen lamp of brass and tin would be beautiful by contrast.

When all is said and done, we must come back to wax candles for the
most beautiful light of all. Electricity is the most efficient, but
candlelight is the most satisfying. For a drawing-room, or any formal
room where a clear light is not required, wax candles are perfect. There
are still a few houses left where candlesticks are things of use and are
not banished to the shelves as curiosities. Certainly the clear, white
light of electricity seems heaven-sent when one is dressing or working,
but for between-hours, for the brief periods of rest, the only thing
that rivals the comfort of candlelight is the glow of an open fire.




IX

HALLS AND STAIRCASES


In early days the hall was the large formal room in which the main
business of the house was transacted. It played the part of court-room,
with the lord of the manor as judge. It was used for dining, living, and
for whatever entertainment the house afforded. The stairs were not a
part of it: they found a place as best they could. From the times of the
primitive ladder of the adobe dwelling to the days of the spiral
staircase carried up in the thickness of the wall, the stairway was
always a primitive affair, born of necessity, with little claim to
beauty.

With the Renaissance in Italy came the forerunner of the modern entrance
hall, with its accompanying stair. Considerations of comfort and beauty
began to be observed. The Italian staircase grew into a magnificent
affair, "L'escalier d'honneur," and often led only to the open galleries
and _salons de parade_ of the next floor. I think the finest staircases
in all the world are in the Genoese palaces. The grand staircase of the
Renaissance may still be seen in many fine Italian palaces, notably in
the Bargello in Florence. This staircase has been splendidly reproduced
by Mrs. Gardner in Fenway Court, her Italian palace in Boston. This
house is, by the way, the finest thing of its kind in America. Mrs.
Gardner has the same far-seeing interest in the furtherance of an
American appreciation of art as had the late Pierpont Morgan. She has
assembled a magnificent collection of objects of art, and she opens her
house to the public occasionally and to artists and designers
frequently, that they may have the advantage of studying the treasures.

To return to our staircases: In France the intermural, or spiral,
staircase was considered quite splendid enough for all human needs, and
in the finest châteaux of the French Renaissance one finds these
practical staircases. Possibly in those troublous times the French
architects planned for an aristocracy living under the influence of an
inherited tradition of treachery and violence, they felt more secure in
the isolation and ready command of a small, narrow staircase where one
man well nigh single-handed could keep an army at bay. A large wide
staircase of easy ascent might have meant many uneasy moments, with
plots without and treachery within.

Gradually, however, the old feudal entrance gave way to its
sub-divisions of guardroom, vestibule, and salon. England was last to
capitulate, and in the great Tudor houses still extant one finds the
entrance door opening directly into the Hall. Often in these English
houses there was a screen of very beautiful carved wood, behind which
was the staircase. Inigo Jones introduced the Palladian style into
England, and so brought in the many-storied central salon which served
as means of access to all the house. The old English halls and
staircases designed by Inigo Jones would be perfect for our more
elaborate American country houses. The severe beauty of English paneling
and the carving of newel-post and spindles are having a just revival.
The pendulum swings--and there is nothing new under the sun!

Wooden staircases with carved wooden balustrades were used oftenest in
England, while in the French châteaux marble stairs with wrought-iron
stair-rails are generally found. The perfection to which the art of iron
work may be carried is familiar to everyone who knows the fairy-like
iron work of Jean L'Amour in the Stanislas Palace at Nancy. This
staircase in the Hôtel de Ville is supreme. If you are ever in France
you should see it. It has been copied often by American architects.
Infinite thought and skill were brought to bear on all the iron work
door-handles, lanterns, and so forth. The artistic excellence of this
work has not been equaled since this period of the Eighteenth Century.
The greatest artists of that day did not think it in the least beneath
their dignity and talent to devote themselves to designing the knobs of
doors, the handles of commodes, the bronzes for the decorations of
fireplaces, the shaping of hinges and locks. They were careful of
details, and that is the secret of their supremacy. Nowadays, we may
find a house with a beautiful hall, but the chances are it is spoiled by
crudely designed fittings.

I have written somewhat at length of the magnificent staircases of older
countries and older times than our own, because somehow the subject is
one that cannot be considered apart from its beginnings. All our halls
and stairs, pretentious or not, have come to us from these superb
efforts of masterly workmen, and perhaps that is why we feel
instinctively that they must suggest a certain formality, and restraint.
This feeling is indirectly a tribute to the architects who gave us such
notable examples.

We do not, however, have to go abroad for historic examples of stately
halls and stairs. There are fine old houses scattered all through the
old thirteen states that cannot be surpassed for dignity and simplicity.

One of the best halls in America is that of "Westover," probably the
most famous house in Virginia. This old house was built in 1737 by
Colonel Byrd on the James River, where so many of the Colonial
aristocrats of Virginia made their homes. The plan of the hall is
suggestive of an old English manor house. The walls are beautifully
paneled from an old English plan. The turned balusters are
representative of the late Seventeenth or early Eighteenth Century. The
fine old Jacobean chairs and tables have weathered two centuries, and
are friendly to their new neighbors, Oriental rugs older than
themselves. The staircase has two landings, on the first of which
stands an old Grandfather's-clock, marking the beginning of a custom
that obtains to this day.

This hall is characteristic of American houses of the Colonial period,
and indeed of the average large country house of to-day, for the
straightaway hall, cutting the house squarely in two, is so much a part
of our architecture that we use it as a standard. It is to be found,
somewhat narrower and lower of ceiling, in New England farmhouses and in
Eastern city houses. The Southern house of ante-bellum days varied the
stair occasionally by patterning the magnificent winding staircases of
old England, but the long hall open at both ends, and the long stair,
with one or two landings, is characteristic of all old American houses.

The customary finish for these old halls was a landscape wall paper, a
painted wall broken into panels by molding, a high white wainscoting
with white plaster above, or possibly a gay figured paper of
questionable beauty. Mahogany furniture was characteristic of all these
halls--a grandfather's-clock, a turn-top table, a number of dignified
chairs, and a quaint old mirror. Sometimes there was a fireplace, but
oftener there were doors opening evenly into various rooms of the first
floor. These things are irreproachable to-day. Why did we have to go
through the period of the walnut hat-rack and shiny oak hall furniture,
only to return to our simplicities?

[Illustration: THE STAIRCASE IN THE BAYARD THAYER HOUSE]

When I planned the main hall of the Colony Club I determined to make it
very Colonial, very American, very inviting and comfortable, the sort
of hall you like to remember having seen in an old Virginia house. One
enters from the street into a narrow hall that soon broadens into a
spacious and lofty living-hall. The walls are, of course, white, the
paneled spaces being broken by quaint old Colonial mirrors and
appropriate lighting-fixtures. There is a great fireplace at one end of
the hall, with a deep, chintz-covered davenport before it. There are
also roomy chairs covered with the same delightful chintz, a green and
white glazed English chintz that is as serviceable as it is beautiful.
Besides the chintz-covered chairs, there are two old English chairs
covered with English needlework. These chairs are among the treasures of
the Club. There are several long mahogany tables, and many small tea
tables. The rugs are of a spring green--I can think of no better name
for it.

In modern English and American houses of the smaller class the staircase
is a part of an elongated entrance hall, and there is often no
vestibule. In many of the more important new houses the stairs are
divided from the entrance hall, so that one staircase will do for the
servants, family and all, and the privacy of the entrance hall will be
secured. In my own house in New York, you enter the square hall
directly, and the staircase is in a second hall. This entrance hall is a
real breathing-space, affording the visitor a few moments of rest and
calm after the crowded streets of the city. The hall is quite large,
with a color-plan of black and white and dark green. You will find a
description of this hall in another chapter. I have used this same plan
in many other city houses, with individual variations, of course. The
serene quality of such a hall is very valuable in the city. If you
introduced a lot of furniture the whole thing would be spoiled.

I used an old porcelain stove, creamy and iridescent in glaze, in such a
hall in an uptown house very similar to my own. The stove is very
beautiful in itself, but it was used for use as well as beauty. It
really holds a fire and furnishes an even heat. The stove was flanked by
two pedestals surmounted with baskets spilling over with fruits, carved
from wood and gilded and painted in polychrome. Everything in this hall
is arranged with precision of balance. The stove is flanked by two
pedestals. The niche that holds the stove and the corresponding niche on
the other wall, which holds a statue, are flanked by narrow panels
holding lighting-fixtures. The street wall is broken by doors and its
two flanking windows. The opposite wall has a large central panel
flanked by two glass doors, one leading to the stairway and the other to
a closet, beneath it. Everything is "paired," with resulting effect of
great formality and restraint. Very little furniture is required: A
table to hold cards and notes, two low benches, and a wrought iron stand
for umbrellas. The windows have curtains of Italian linen, coarse
homespun stuff that is very lovely with white walls and woodwork. There
are no pictures on the wall, but there are specially designed
lighting-fixtures in the small panels that frame the niches.

In several of the finer houses that have been built recently, notably
that of Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, the staircase is enclosed, and is in no way
an architectural feature, merely a possible means of communication when
needed. This solution of the staircase problem has no doubt brought
about our modern luxury of elevators. In another fine private house
recently built the grand staircase only goes so far as the formal rooms
of the second floor, and a small iron staircase enclosed in the wall
leads to the intimate family rooms of the bedroom floor. The advantage
of this gain in space can easily be appreciated. All the room usually
taken up by the large wall of the staircase halls, and so forth, can be
thrown into the bedrooms upstairs.

The illustrations of the Bayard Thayer hall and staircase speak for
themselves. Here lighting-fixtures, locks, hinges, have been carefully
planned, so that the smallest part is worthy of the whole. This hall is
representative of the finer private houses that are being built in
America to-day. I had the pleasure of working with the architect and the
owners here, and so was able to fit the decorations and furnishings of
the hall to the house and to the requirements of the people who live in
it.

The present tendency of people who build small houses is to make a
living-room of the hall. I am not in favor of this. I think the hall
should be much more formal than the rest of the house. It is, after all,
of public access, not only to the living-rooms but to the street. The
servant who answers the front door must of necessity constantly traverse
it, so must anyone--the guest or tradesman--admitted to the house. The
furniture should be severe and architectural in design. A column or
pedestal surmounted with a statue, a fountain, an old chest to hold
carriage-rugs, a carved bench, a good table, a standing desk, may be
used in a large house. Nothing more is admissible. In a small house a
well-shaped table, a bench or so, possibly a wall clock, will be all
that is necessary. The wall should be plain in treatment. The stair
carpet should be plain in color. The floor should be bare, if in good
condition, with just a small rug for softness at the door. A tiled floor
is especially beautiful in a hall, if you can afford it.

If your house happens to have the hall and living-room combined, and no
vestibule, you can place a large screen near the entrance door and
obtain a little more privacy. A standing screen of wooden panels is
better than a folding screen, for the folding screen is rarely
well-built, and will be blown down by the draft of the open door. A
standing screen may be made by any carpenter, and painted or stained to
match the woodwork of the room. A straight bench or settle placed
against it will make the screened space seem more like a vestibule.

Another objection to the staircase leading from the living-room of a
small house is that such an arrangement makes it almost impossible to
heat the house properly in winter. I have seen so many bewildered people
whose spacious doorless downstairs rooms were a joy in summer, shivering
all winter long in a polar atmosphere. The stair well seems to suck all
the warmth from the living-room, and coal bills soar.

Above all, don't try to make your hall "pretty." Remember that a hall is
not a living-room, but a thoroughfare open and used by all the dwellers
in the house. Don't be afraid of your halls and stairs looking "cold."
It is a good idea to have one small space in your house where you can go
and sit down and be calm and cool! You can't keep the rest of the house
severe and cool looking, but here it is eminently appropriate and
sensible. The visitor who enters a white and green hall and gets an
effect of real reserve and coolness is all the more appreciative of the
warmth and intimacy of the living-rooms of the house.

After all, for simple American houses there is nothing better than a
straightaway staircase of broad and easy treads, with one or two
landings. There may be a broad landing with a window and window-seat, if
there is a real view, but the landing-seat that is built for no especial
purpose is worse than useless. It is not at all necessary to have the
stairs carpeted, if the treads are broad enough, and turned balusters
painted white with a mahogany hand rail are in scheme. Such a staircase
adds much to the home-quality of a house.




X

THE DRAWING-ROOM


A drawing-room is the logical place for the elegancies of family life.
The ideal drawing-room, to my mind, contains many comfortable chairs and
sofas, many softly shaded lights by night, and plenty of sunshine by
day, well-balanced mirrors set in simple paneled walls, and any number
of small tables that may be brought out into the room if need be, and an
open fire.

The old idea of the drawing-room was a horrible apartment of stiffness
and formality and discomfort. No wonder it was used only for weddings
and funerals! The modern drawing-room is intended, primarily, as a place
where a hostess may entertain her friends, and it must not be chill and
uninviting, whatever else it may be. It should not be littered up with
personal things--magazines, books and work-baskets and objects that
belong in the living-room--but it welcomes flowers and _objets d'art_,
collections of fans, or miniatures, or graceful mirrors, or old French
prints, or enamels, or porcelains. It should be a place where people may
converse without interruption from the children.

Most houses, even of the smaller sort, have three day rooms--the
dining-room, the parlor and the sitting-room, as they are usually
called. People who appreciate more and more the joy of living have
pulled hall and sitting-room together into one great family meeting
place, leaving a small vestibule, decreased the size of the dining-room
and built in many windows, so that it becomes almost an outdoor room,
and given the parlor a little more dignity and serenity and its right
name--the drawing-room.

We use the terms drawing-room and _salon_ interchangeably in
America--though we are a bit more timid of the _salon_--but there is a
subtle difference between the two that is worth noting. The withdrawing
room of old England was the quiet room to which the ladies retired,
leaving their lords to the freer pleasures of the great hall. Indeed,
the room began as a part of my lady's bedroom, but gradually came into
its proper importance and took on a magnificence all its own. The
_salon_ of France also began as a part of the great hall, or _grande
salle_. Then came the need for an apartment for receiving and so the
great bed chamber was divided into two parts, one a real sleeping-room
and the other a _chambre de parade,_ with a great state bed for the
occasional visitors of great position. The great bed, or _lit de
parade_, was representative of all the salons of the time of Louis XIII.
Gradually the owners of the more magnificent houses saw the opportunity
for a series of salons, and so the state apartment was divided into two
parts: a _salon de famille_, which afforded the family a certain
privacy, and the _salon de compagnie_, which was sacred to a
magnificent hospitality. And so the salon expanded until nowadays we use
the word with awe, and appreciate its implication of brilliant
conversation and exquisite decoration, of a radiant hostess, an amusing
and distinguished circle of people. The word has a graciousness, a
challenge that we fear. If we have not just the right house we should
not dare risk belittling our pleasant drawing-room by dubbing it
"salon." In short, a drawing-room may be a part of any well regulated
house. A salon is largely a matter of spirit and cleverness.

A drawing-room has no place in the house where there is no other
living-room. Indeed, if there are many children, and the house is of
moderate size, I think a number of small day rooms are vastly better
than the two usual rooms, living-room and drawing-room, because only in
this way can the various members of the family have a chance at any
privacy. The one large room so necessary for the gala occasions of a
large family may be the dining-room, for here it will be easy to push
back tables and chairs for the occasion. If the children have a nursery,
and mother has a small sitting-room, and father has a little room for
books and writing, a living-room may be eliminated in favor of a small
formal room for visitors and talk.

[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM SHOULD BE INTIMATE IN SPIRIT]

No matter how large your drawing-room may be, keep it intimate in
spirit. There should be a dozen conversation centers in a large room.
There should be one or more sofas, with comfortable chairs pulled up
beside them. No one chair should be isolated, for some bashful person
who doesn't talk well anyway is sure to take the most remote chair and
make herself miserable. I have seen a shy young woman completely changed
because she happened to sit upon a certain deep cushioned sofa of
rose-colored damask. Whether it was the rose color, or the enforced
relaxation the sofa induced, or the proximity of some very charming
people in comfortable chairs beside her, or all of these things--I don't
know! But she found herself. She found herself gay and happy and
unafraid. I am sure her personality flowered from that hour on. If she
had been left to herself she would have taken a stiff chair in a far
corner, and she would have been miserable and self-conscious. I believe
most firmly in the magic power of inanimate objects!

Don't litter your drawing-room with bric-a-brac. Who hasn't seen what I
can best describe as a souvenir drawing-room, a room filled with
curiosities from everywhere! I shall never forget doing a drawing-room
for a woman of no taste. I persuaded her to put away her heavy velvets
and gilt fringes and to have one light and spacious room in the house.
She agreed. We worked out a chintz drawing-room that was delicious. I
was very happy over it and you can imagine my amazement when she came to
me and said, "But Miss de Wolfe, what am I to do with my blue satin
tidies?"

In my own drawing-room I have so many objects of art, and yet I think
you will agree with me that the room has a great serenity. Over the
little desk in one corner I have my collection of old miniatures and
fans of the golden days of the French court. There are ever so many
vases and bowls for flowers, _but they are used_. There are dozens of
lighting-fixtures, brackets, and lamps, and a chandelier, and many
candlesticks, and they are used, also. Somehow, when a beautiful object
becomes a useful object, it takes its place in the general scheme of
things and does not disturb the eye.

The ideal drawing-room has a real fireplace, with a wood fire when there
is excuse for it. An open fire is almost as great an attribute to a
drawing-room as a tactful hostess; it puts you at ease, instantly, and
gives you poise. And just as an open fire and sunshine make for ease, so
do well placed mirrors make for elegance. Use your mirrors as decorative
panels, not only for the purpose of looking at yourself in them, and you
will multiply the pleasures of your room. I have the wall space between
mantel and frieze-line filled with a large mirror, in my New York
drawing-room, and the two narrow panels between the front windows are
filled with long narrow mirrors that reflect the color and charm of the
room. Whenever you can manage it, place your mirror so that it will
reflect some particularly nice object.

Given plenty of chairs and sofas, and a few small tables to hold lights
and flowers, you will need very little other furniture in the
drawing-room. You will need a writing-table, but a very small and
orderly one. The drawing room desk may be very elegant in design and
equipment, for it must be a part of the decoration of the room, and it
must be always immaculate for the visitor who wants to write a note. The
members of the family are supposed to use their own desks, leaving this
one for social emergencies. A good desk is a godsend in a drawing-room,
it makes a room that is usually cold and formal at once more livable and
more intimate. In my own drawing-room I have a small French
writing-table placed near a window, so that the light falls over one's
left shoulder. The small black lacquer desks that are now being
reproduced from old models would be excellent desks for drawing-rooms,
because they not only offer service, as all furniture should, but are
beautiful in themselves. Many of the small tables of walnut and mahogany
that are sold as dressing-tables might be used as writing-tables in
formal rooms, if the mirrors were eliminated.

[Illustration: THE FINE FORMALITY OF WELL-PLACED PANELING]

There is a great difference in opinion as to the placing of the piano in
the drawing-room. I think it belongs in the living-room, if it is in
constant use, though of course it is very convenient to have it near by
the one big room, be it drawing-room or dining-room, when a small dance
is planned. I am going to admit that in my opinion there is nothing more
abused than the piano, I have no piano in my own house in New York. I
love music--but I am not a musician, and so I do not expose myself to
the merciless banging of chance callers. Besides, my house is quite
small and a good piano would dwarf the other furnishings of my rooms. I
think pianos are for musicians, not strummers, who spoil all chance for
any real conversation. If you are fortunate enough to have a musician in
your family, that is different. Go ahead and give him a music room.
Musicians are not born every day, but lovers of music are everywhere,
and I for one am heartily in favor of doing away with the old custom of
teaching every child to bang a little, and instead, teaching him to
_listen_ to music. Oh, the crimes that are committed against music in
American parlors! I prefer the good mechanical cabinet that offers us
"canned" music to the manual exercise of people who insist on playing
wherever they see an open piano. Of course the mechanical instrument is
new, and therefore, subject to much criticism from a decorative
standpoint, but the music is much better than the amateur's. We are
still turning up our noses a little at the mechanical piano players, but
if we will use our common sense we must admit that a new order of things
has come to pass, and the new "canned" music is not to be despised.
Certainly if the instrument displeases you, you can say so, but if a
misguided friend elects to strum on your piano you are helpless. So I
have no piano in my New York house. I have a cabinet of "canned" music
that can be turned on for small dances when need be, and that can be
hidden in a closet between times. Why not?

But suppose you have a piano, or need one: do give it a chance! Its very
size makes it tremendously important, and if you load it with senseless
fringed scarfs and bric-a-brac you make it the ugliest thing in your
room. Give it the best place possible, against an inside wall,
preferably. I saw a new house lately where the placing of the piano had
been considered by the architect when the house was planned. There was a
mezzanine floor overhanging the great living-room, and one end of this
had been made into a piano alcove, a sort of modern minstrel gallery.
The musician who used the piano was very happy, for your real musician
loves a certain solitude, and those of us who listened to his music in
the great room below were happy because the maker of the music was far
enough away from us. We could appreciate the music and forget the
mechanics of it. For a concert, or a small dance, this balcony
music-room would be most convenient. Another good place for the piano is
a sort of alcove, or small room opening from the large living or
drawing-room, where the piano and a few chairs may be placed. Of course
if you are to have a real music-room, then there are great
possibilities.

A piano may be a princely thing, properly built and decorated. The old
spinets and harpsichords, with their charming inlaid cases, were
beautiful, but they gave forth only tinkly sounds. Now we have a
magnificent mechanism, but the case which encloses it is too often
hideous.

There is an old double-banked harpsichord of the early Eighteenth
Century in the Morgan collection at the Metropolitan Museum that would
be a fine form for a piano, if it would hold the "works." It is long and
narrow, fitting against the wall so that it really takes up very little
room. The case is painted a soft dark gray and outlined in darker gray,
and the panels and the long top are in soft colors. The legs are carved
and pointed in polychrome. This harpsichord was made when the beauty of
an object was of as real importance as the mechanical perfection.

Occasionally one sees a modern piano that has been decorated by an
artist. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Alma Tadema, and many of the other
English artists of our generation have made beautiful pianos. Sir Robert
Lorimer recently designed a piano that was decorated, inside and out, by
Mrs. Traquair. From time to time a great artist interests himself in
designing and decorating a piano, but the rank and file, when they
decide to build an extraordinary piano, achieve lumpy masses of wood
covered with impossible nymphs and too-realistic flowers, pianos
suggestive of thin and sentimental tunes, but never of _music_.

When you are furnishing your music-room or drawing-room, be careful
always of your colors. Remember that not only must the room be beautiful
in its broad spaces and long lines and soft colors, but it must be a
background for the gala gowns of women. I once saw a music-room that was
deliberately planned as a background to the gay colors of women's gowns
and the heavy black masses of men's evening clothes, a soft shimmering
green and cream room that was incomplete and cold when empty of the
color of costume. Such a room must have an architectural flavor. The
keynote must be elegant simplicity and aristocratic reserve. Walls
broken into panels, and panels in turn broken by lighting-fixtures, a
polished floor, a well-considered ceiling, any number of chairs, and the
room is furnished. This room, indeed, may evolve into a _salon_.




XI

THE LIVING-ROOM


The living-room! Shut your eyes a minute and think what that means: A
room to _live_ in, suited to all human needs; to be sick or sorry or
glad in, as the day's happenings may be; where one may come back from
far-reaching ways, for "East or West, Hame's best."

Listen a minute while I tell you how I see such a room: Big and restful,
making for comfort first and always; a little shabby here and there,
perhaps, but all the more satisfactory for that--like an old shoe that
goes on easily. Lots of light by night, and not too much drapery to shut
out the sunlight by day. Big, welcoming chairs, rather sprawly, and long
sofas. A big fire blazing on the open hearth. Perhaps, if we are very
lucky we may have some old logs from long since foundered ships, that
will flame blue and rose and green. He must indeed be of a poor spirit
who cannot call all sorts of visions from such a flame!

[Illustration: THE LIVING-ROOM IN THE C.W. HARKNESS HOUSE AT MORRISTOWN,
NEW JERSEY]

There should be a certain amount of order, because you cannot really
rest in a disorderly place, but there should be none of the formality of
the drawing-room. Formality should be used as a sort of foundation on
which the pleasant workaday business of the living-room is planned.
The living-room should always have a flavor of the main hobby of the
family, whether it be books, or music, or sport, or what not. If you
live in the real country there should be nothing in the room too good
for all moods and all weather--no need to think of muddy boots or wet
riding-clothes or the dogs that have run through the dripping fields.

I wonder if half the fathers and mothers in creation know just what it
means later on to the boys and girls going out from their roof-tree to
have the memory of such a living-room?

A living-room may be a simple place used for all the purposes of living,
or it may be merely an official clearing-house for family moods, one of
a dozen other living apartments. The living-room in the modern bungalow,
for instance, is often dining-room, library, hall, music-room, filling
all the needs of the family, while in a large country or city house
there may be the central family room, and ever so many little rooms that
grow out of the overflow needs--the writing-room, the tea room that is
also sun and breakfast room, the music-room and the library. In more
elaborate houses there are also the great hall, the formal drawing-room
and music-room, and the intimate boudoir. To all these should be given a
goodly measure of comfort.

Whether it be one or a dozen rooms, the spirit of it must be the
same--it must offer comfort, order, and beauty to be worth living in.

Just as when a large family is to be considered I believe in one big
meeting-room and a number of smaller rooms for special purposes, so I
believe that when a family is very small there should be one great
living-room and no other day room. Two young people who purpose to live
in a small cottage or a bungalow will be wise to have this one big room
that will serve for dining-room, living-room, and all. The same house
divided into a number of tiny rooms would suffocate them: there would be
no breathing-space. In furnishing such a room it is well to beware of
_sets_ of things: of six dining-room chairs, of the conventional
dining-table, serving-table, and china closet. I advocate the use of a
long table--four by seven feet is not too long--and a number of good
chairs that are alike in style, but not _exactly_ alike.

The chairs should not be the conventional dining-chairs. The idea that
the only dining-room chair possible is a perfectly straight up and down
stiff-backed chair is absurd. In a large house where there is a family
dining-room the chairs should be alike, but in an informal living-room
the chairs may be perfectly comfortable and useful between meals and
serve the purposes of dining-room chairs when necessary. For instance,
with a long oak table built on the lines of the old English refectory
tables you might have a long bench of oak and cane; a large high back
chair with arms of the Stuart order, that is, with graceful, turned
legs, carved frame work, and cane insets; two Cromwellian chairs covered
in some good stuff; and two or three straight oak-and-cane chairs of a
simple type. These chairs may be used for various purposes between
meals, and will not give the room the stiff and formal air that
straight-backed chairs invariably produce. One could imagine this table
drawn up to a window-seat, with bench and chairs beside it, and a dozen
cheerful people around it. There will be little chance of stiffness at
such a dining-table.

It should be remembered that when a part of the living-room is used for
meals, the things that suggest dining should be kept out of sight
between meals. All the china and so forth should be kept in the pantry
or in kitchen cupboards. The table may be left bare between meals.

In a room of this kind the furniture should be kept close to the walls,
leaving all the space possible for moving around in the center of the
room. The book shelves should be flat against the wall; there should be
a desk, not too clumsy in build near the book shelves or at right angles
to some window; there should be a sofa of some kind near the fireplace
with a small table at the head of it, which may be used for tea or books
or what not. If there is a piano, it should be very carefully placed so
that it will not dominate the room, and so that the people who will
listen to the music may gather in the opposite corner of the room. Of
course, a living-room of this kind is the jolliest place in the world
when things go smoothly, but there are times when a little room is a
very necessary place to retreat. This little room may be the study,
library, or a tea room, but it is worth while sacrificing your smallest
bedroom in order to have one small place of retreat.

If you can have a number of living-rooms, you can follow more definite
schemes of decoration. If you have a little enclosed piazza you can make
a breakfast room or a trellis room of it, or by bringing in many shelves
and filling them with flowers you can make the place a delightful little
flower box of a room for tea and talk.

Of course, if you live in the real country you will be able to use your
garden and your verandas as additional living-rooms. With a big
living-porch, the one indoor living-room may become a quiet library, for
instance. But if you haven't a garden or a sun-room, you should do all
in your power to bring the sunshine and gaiety into the living-room, and
take your books and quiet elsewhere. A library eight by ten feet, with
shelves all the way around and up and down, and two comfortable chairs,
and one or two windows, will be a most satisfactory library. If the room
is to be used for reading smallness doesn't matter, you see.

We Americans love books--popular books!--and we have had sense enough to
bring them into our living-rooms, and enjoy them. But when you begin
calling a room a library it should mean something more than a small
mahogany bookcase with a hundred volumes hidden behind glass doors. I
think there is nothing more amusing than the unused library of the
_nouveau riche_, the pretentious room with its monumental bookcases and
its slick area of glass doors and its thousands of unread volumes, caged
eternally in their indecent newness.

Some day when you have nothing better to do visit the _de luxe_ book
shops of some department store, and then visit a dusky old second hand
shop, and you will see what books can do! In the _de luxe_ shop they are
leathern covered things, gaudy and snobbish in their newness. In the old
book shop they are books that have lived, books that invite you to
browse. You'd rather have them with all their germs and dust than the
soulless tomes of uncut pages. You can judge people pretty well by their
books, and the wear and tear of them.

Open shelves are good enough for any house in these days of vacuum
cleaners. In the Bayard Thayer house I had the pleasure of furnishing a
wonderful library of superb paneled walls of mahogany of a velvety
softness, not the bright red wood of commerce. The open bookshelves were
architecturally planned, they filled shallow recesses in the wall, and
when the books were placed upon them they formed a glowing tapestry of
bindings, flush with the main wall.

I think the nicest living-room I know is the reading room of the Colony
Club. I never enjoyed making a room more, and when the Club was first
opened I was delighted to hear one woman remark to another: "Doesn't it
make you feel that it has been loved and lived in for years?"

The room is large and almost square. The walls are paneled in cream and
white, with the classic mantel and mirror treatment of the Adam period.
The large carpet rug is of one tone, a soft green blue. The bookcases
which run around the walls are of mahogany, as are the small, occasional
tables, and the large table in the center of the room. In this room I
have successfully exploded the old theory that all furniture in a well
planned room must be of the same kind! In this room there are several
Marlborough chairs, a davenport and a semi-circular fireside seat
upholstered in a soft green leather, several chairs covered in a chintz
of bird and blossom design, and other chairs covered with old English
needle-work. The effect is not discord, but harmony. Perhaps it is not
wise to advise the use of many colors and fabrics unless one has had
experience in the combining of many tones and hues, but if you are
careful to keep your walls and floors in subdued tones, you may have
great license in the selecting of hangings and chair coverings and
ornament.

I gave great attention to the details of this room. Under the simple
mantel shelf there is inset a small panel of blue and white Wedgwood. On
the mantel there are two jars of Chinese porcelain, and between them a
bronze jardiniere of the Adam period; four figures holding a shallow,
oblong tray, which is filled with flowers. The lamp on the center-table
is made of a hawthorn jar, with a flaring shade. There are many low
tables scattered through the room and beside every chair is a
reading-lamp easily adjusted to any angle. The fireplace fittings are
simple old brasses of the Colonial period. There is only one picture in
this room, and that is the portrait of a long gone lady, framed in a
carved gilt frame, and hung against the huge wall-mirror which is
opposite the fireplace end of the room.

I believe, given plenty of light and air, that comfortable chairs and
good tables go further toward making a living-room comfortable than
anything else. In the Harkness living-room you will see this theory
proven. There are chairs and tables of all sizes, from the great sofas
to the little footstools, from the huge Italian tables to the little
table especially made to hold a few flower pots. Wherever there is a
large table there is a long sofa or a few big chairs; wherever there is
a lone chair there is a small table to hold a reading-light, or flowers,
or what not. The great size of the room, the fine English ceiling of
modeled plaster, the generous fireplace with its paneled over-mantel,
the groups of windows, all these architectural details go far toward
making the room a success. The comfortable chairs and sofas and the ever
useful tables do the rest.

So many people ask me: How shall I furnish my living-room? What paper
shall I use on the walls? What woodwork and curtains--and rugs? One
woman asked me what books she should buy!

Your living-room should grow out of the needs of your daily life. There
could be no two living-rooms exactly alike in scheme if they were lived
in. You will have to decide on the wall colors and such things, it is
true, but the rest of the room should grow of itself. You will not make
the mistake of using a dark paper of heavy figures if you are going to
use many pictures and books, for instance. You will not use a gay
bed-roomy paper covered with flowers and birds. You will know without
being told that your wall colors must be neutral: that your woodwork
must be stained and waxed, or painted some soft tone of your wall color.
Then, let the rugs and curtains and things go until you decide you have
to have them. The room will gradually find itself, though it may take
years and heartache and a certain self-confession of inadequacy. It will
express your life, if you use it, so be careful of the life you live in
it!




XII

SITTING-ROOM AND BOUDOIR


In some strange way the word _boudoir_ has lost its proper significance.
People generally think of it as a highfalutin' name for the bedroom, or
for a dressing-room, whereas really a proper _boudoir_ is the small
personal sitting-room of a woman of many interests. It began in old
France as the private sitting-room of the mistress of the house, a part
of the bedroom suite, and it has evolved into a sort of office _de luxe_
where the house mistress spends her precious mornings, plans the routine
of her household for the day, writes her letters, interviews her
servants, and so forth. The boudoir has a certain suggestion of intimacy
because it is a personal and not a general room, but while it may be
used as a lounging-place occasionally, it is also a thoroughly dignified
room where a woman may receive her chosen friends when she pleases.
Nothing more ridiculous has ever happened than the vogue of the
so-called "boudoir cap," which is really suited only to one's bedroom or
dressing-room. Such misnomers lead to a mistaken idea of the real
meaning of the word.

Some of the Eighteenth Century boudoirs were extremely small. I recall
one charming little room in an old French house that was barely eight
feet by eleven, but it contained a fireplace, two windows, a day bed,
one of those graceful desks known as a _bonheur du jour_, and two
arm-chairs. An extremely symmetrical arrangement of the room gave a
sense of order, and order always suggests space. One wall was broken by
the fireplace, the wall spaces on each side of it being paneled with
narrow moldings. The space above the mantel was filled with a mirror. On
the wall opposite the fireplace there was a broad paneling of the same
width filled with a mirror from baseboard to ceiling. In front of this
mirror was placed the charming desk. On each side of the long mirror
were two windows exactly opposite the two long panels of the mantel
wall. The two narrow end walls were treated as single panels, the day
bed being placed flat against one of them, while the other was broken by
a door which led to a little ante-chamber. Old gilt appliques holding
candles flanked both mantel mirror and desk mirror. Two of those
graceful chairs of the Louis Seize period and a small footstool
completed the furnishing of this room.

[Illustration: MISS ANNE MORGAN'S LOUIS XVI. BOUDOIR]

The boudoir should always be a small room, because in no other way can
you gain a sense of intimacy. Here you may have all the luxury and
elegance you like, you may stick to white paint and simple chintzes, or
you may indulge your passion for pale-colored silks and lace frills.
Here, of all places, you have a right to express your sense of luxury
and comfort. The boudoir furnishings are borrowed from both bedroom
and drawing-room traditions. There are certain things that are used in
the bedroom that would be ridiculous in the drawing-room, and yet are
quite at home in the boudoir. For instance, the _chaise-longue_ is part
of the bedroom furnishing in most modern houses, and it may also be used
in the boudoir, but in the drawing-room it would be a violation of good
taste, because the suggestion of intimacy is too evident.

Nothing is more comfortable in a boudoir than a day bed. It serves so
many purposes. In my own house my boudoir is also my sitting-room, and I
have a large Louis XV day bed there which may be used by an overnight
guest if necessary. In a small house the boudoir fitted with a day bed
becomes a guest-room on occasion. I always put two or three of these day
beds in any country house I am doing, because I have found them so
admirable and useful in my own house.

As you will see by the photographs, this bed in no way resembles an
ordinary bed in the daytime, and it seems to me to be a much better
solution of the extra-bed problem than the mechanical folding-bed, which
is always hideous and usually dangerous. A good day bed may be designed
to fit into any room. This one of mine is of carved walnut, a very
graceful one that I found in France.

In a small sitting-room in an uptown house, an illustration of which is
shown, I had a day bed made of white wood that was painted to match the
chintzes of the room. The mattress and springs were covered with a bird
chintz on a mauve ground, and the pillows were all covered with the same
stuff. The frame of the bed was painted cream and decorated with a dull
green line and small garlands of flowers extracted from the design of
the chintz. When the mattress and springs have been properly covered
with damask, or chintz, or whatever you choose to use, there is no
suggestion of the ordinary bed.

I suppose there isn't a more charming room in New York than Miss Anne
Morgan's Louis XVI boudoir. The everyday sitting-room of a woman of many
interests, it is radiant with color and individuality, as rare rugs are
radiant, as jewels are radiant. The cream walls, with their carved
moldings and graceful panelings, are a pleasant background for all this
shimmering color. The carvings and moldings are pointed in blue. The
floor is covered with a Persian rug which glows with all the soft tones
of the old Persian dye-pots. The day bed, a few of the chairs, and the
chest of drawers, are of a soft brown walnut. There are other chairs
covered with Louis XVI tapestries, brocade and needlework, quite in
harmony with the modern chintz of the day bed and the hangings. Above
the day bed there is a portrait of a lady, hung by wires covered with
shirred blue ribbons, and this blue is again used in an old porcelain
lamp jar on the bedside table. The whole room might have been inspired
by the lady of the portrait, so essentially is it the room of a
fastidious woman.

But to go back to my own boudoir: it is really sitting-room, library,
and rest-room combined, a home room very much like my down-town office
in the conveniences it offers. In the early morning it is my office,
where I plan the day's routine and consult my servants. In the rare
evenings when I may give myself up to solid comfort and a new book it
becomes a haven of refuge after the business of the day. When I choose
to work at home with my secretary, it is as business-like a place as my
down-town office. It is a sort of room of all trades, and good for each
of them.

The walls of the room are pretty well filled with built-in bookshelves,
windows, chimney-piece, and doors, but there is one long wall space for
the day bed and another for the old secretary that holds my porcelain
figurines. The room is really quite small, but by making the furniture
keep its place against the walls an effect of spaciousness has been
obtained.

The walls of the room are painted the palest of egg-shell blue-green.
The woodwork is ivory white, with applied decorations of sculptured
white marble. The floor is entirely covered with a carpet rug of jade
green velvet, and there is a smaller Persian rug of the soft,
indescribable colors of the Orient. The day bed, of which I spoke in an
earlier paragraph, is covered with an old brocade, gray-green figures on
a black ground. A large armchair is also covered with the brocade, and
the window curtains, which cannot be seen in the picture, are of black
chintz, printed with birds of pale greens and blues and grays, with
beaks of rose-red.

There is always a possibility for rose-red in my rooms, I love it so. I
manage the other colors so that they will admit a chair or a stool or a
bowl of rose color. In this room the two chairs beside the couch are
covered with rose-colored damask, and this brings out the rose in the
rug and in the chintz, and accents the deep red note of the leathern
book-bindings. The rose red is subordinated to the importance of the
book-bindings in this room, but there is still opportunity for its use
in so many small things.

In this room, you will notice, I have used open shelves for my books,
and the old secretary which was once a combination desk and bookcase, is
used for the display of my little treasures of porcelain and china, and
its drawers are used for papers and prints. The built in shelves have
cupboards beneath them for the flimsy papers and pamphlets that do not
belong on open shelves. If the same room were pressed into service as a
guest room I should use the drawers in the secretary instead of the
usual chest of drawers, and the day bed for sleeping.

[Illustration: MISS MORGAN'S LOUIS XVI. _LIT DE REPOS_]

The writing-table is placed at right angles to one of the book-filled
panels between the front windows. I have used a writing-table in this
room because I like tables better than heavy desks, and because in this
small apartment a desk would seem heavy and ponderous. The fittings
of the desk are of dark red leather, like that of many of the
book-bindings, and the personal touch that makes the desk _mine_ is a
bowl of roses. Between the two windows in the shallow recess, I have
placed an aquarium, a recent acquisition that delights my soul. The
aquarium is simply an oblong glass box mounted on a teak stand, with a
tracery of teak carving outlining the box, which is the home of the most
gorgeous fan-tailed goldfish. There are water plants in the box, too,
and funny little Chinese temples and dwarf trees. I love to house my
little people happily--my dogs and my birds and my fish. Wee Toi, my
little Chinese dog, has a little house all his own, an old Chinese
lacquer box with a canopy top and little gold bells. It was once the
shrine of some little Chinese god, I suppose, but Wee Toi is very happy
in it, and you can see that it was meant for him in the beginning. It
sits by the fireplace and gives the room an air of real hominess. I was
so pleased with the aquarium and the Chinese lacquer bed for Wee Toi
that I devised a birdcage to go with them, a square cage of gilt wires,
with a black lacquer pointed canopy top, with little gilt bells at the
pointed eaves. The cage is fixed to a shallow lacquer tray, and is the
nicest place you can imagine for a whistling bullfinch to live in. I
suppose I could have a Persian cat on a gorgeous cushion to complete the
place, but I can't admit cats into the room. I plan gorgeous cushions
for _other_ people's "little people," when they happen to be cats.

Miss Marbury's sitting-room is on the next floor, exactly like mine,
architecturally, but we have worked them out differently. I think there
is nothing more interesting than the study of the different developments
of a series of similar rooms, for instance, a dozen drawing-rooms,
twelve stories deep, in a modern apartment house! Each room is left by
the builder with the same arrangement of doors and windows, the same
wall spaces and moldings, the same opportunity for good or bad
development. It isn't often our luck to see all twelve of the rooms, but
sometimes we see three or four of them, and how amazingly different they
are! How amusing is the suggestion of personality, or lack of it!

Now in these two sitting-rooms in our house the rooms are exactly the
same in size, in exposure, in the placing of doors and windows and
fireplaces, and we have further paralleled our arrangement by placing
our day beds in the same wall space, but there the similarity ends. Miss
Marbury's color plan is different: her walls are a soft gray, the floor
is covered in a solid blue carpet rug, rather dark in tone, the chintz
also has a black ground, but the pattern is entirely different in
character from the room below. There is a day bed, similar to mine, but
where my bed has been upholstered with brocade, Miss Marbury's has a
loose slip cover of black chintz. The spaces between the windows in my
room are filled with bookshelves, and in Miss Marbury's room the same
spaces are filled with mirrors. The large wall-space that is background
to my old secretary is in her room given up to long open bookshelves of
mahogany. My over-mantel is mirrored, and hers is filled with an old
painting. The recessed spaces on each side of the chimney breast hold
small semi-circular tables of marquetry, with a pair of long Adam
mirrors hanging above them. Another Adam mirror hangs above the
bookshelves on the opposite wall. These mirrors are really the most
important things in the room, because the moldings and lighting-fixtures
and picture frames have been made to harmonize with them.

The lighting-fixtures are of wood carved in the Adam manner and painted
dark blue and gold. The writing-table has been placed squarely in front
of the center window, in which are hung Miss Marbury's bird cages. There
are a number of old French prints on the wall. The whole room is quieter
in tone than my room, which may be because her chosen color is old-blue,
and mine rose-red.

In a small house where only one woman's tastes have to be considered, a
small downstairs sitting-room may take the place of the more personal
boudoir, but where there are a number of people in the household a room
connecting with the bedroom of the house mistress is more fortunate.
Here she can be as independent as she pleases of the family and the
guests who come and go through the other living-rooms of the house.
Here she can have her counsels with her children, or her tradespeople,
or her employees, without the distractions of chance interruptions, for
this one room should have doors that open _and_ close, doors that are
not to be approached without invitation. The room may be as austere and
business-like as a down-town office, or it may be a nest of comfort and
luxury primarily planned for relaxation, but it must be so placed that
it is a little apart from the noise and flurry of the rest of the house
or it has no real reason-for-being.

Whenever it is possible, I believe the man of the house should also have
a small sitting-room that corresponds to his wife's boudoir. We
Americans have made a violent attempt to incorporate a room of this kind
in our houses by introducing a "den" or a "study," but somehow the man
of the house is never keen about such a room. A "den" to him means an
airless cubby-hole of a room hung with pseudo-Turkish draperies and
papier-mâché shields and weapons, and he has a mighty aversion to it.
Who could blame him? And as for the study, the average man doesn't want
a study when he wants to work; he prefers to work in his office, and
he'd like a room of his own big enough to hold all his junk, and he'd
like it to have doors and windows and a fireplace. The so-called study
is usually a heavy, cheerless little room that isn't any good for
anything else. The ideal arrangement would be a room of average size
opening from his bedroom, a room that would have little suggestion of
business and a great flavor of his hobbies. His wife's boudoir must be
her office also, but he doesn't need a house office, unless he be a
writer, or a teacher, or some man who works at home. After all, I think
the painters and illustrators are the happiest of all men, because they
_have_ to have studios, and their wives generally recognize the fact,
and give them a free hand. The man who has a studio or a workshop all
his own is always a popular man. He has a fascination for his less
fortunate friends, who buzz around him in wistful admiration.




XIII

A LIGHT, GAY DINING-ROOM


First of all, I think a dining-room should be light, and gay. The first
thing to be considered is plenty of sunshine. The next thing is the
planning of a becoming background for the mistress of the house. The
room should always be gay and charming in color, but the color should be
selected with due consideration of its becomingness to the hostess.
Every woman has a right to be pretty in her own dining-room.

I do not favor the dark, heavy treatments and elaborate stuff hangings
which seem to represent the taste of most of the men who go in for
decorating nowadays. Nine times out of ten the dining-room seems to be
the gloomiest room in the house. I think it should be a place where the
family may meet in gaiety of spirit for a pause in the vexatious
happenings of the day. I think light tones, gay wallpapers, flowers and
sunshine are of more importance than storied tapestries and heavily
carved furniture. These things are all very well for the house that has
a small dining-room and a gala dining-room for formal occasions as well,
but there are few such houses.

We New Yorkers have been so accustomed to the gloomy basement
dining-rooms of the conventional brown-stone houses of the late eighties
we forgot how nice a dining-room can be. Even though the city
dining-room is now more fortunately placed in the rear of the second
floor it is usually overshadowed by other houses, and can be lightened
only by skilful use of color in curtains, china, and so forth.
Therefore, I think this is the one room in the city house where one can
afford to use a boldly decorative paper. I like very much the Chinese
rice-papers with their broad, sketchy decorations of birds and flowers.
These papers are never tiresomely realistic and are always done in very
soft colors or in soft shades of one color, and while if you analyze
them they are very fantastic, the general effect is as restful as it is
cheerful. You know you can be most cheerful when you are most rested!

The quaint landscape papers which are seen in so many New England
dining-rooms seem to belong with American Colonial furniture and white
woodwork, prim silver and gold banded china. These landscape papers are
usually gay in effect and make for cheer. There are many new designs
less complicated than the old ones. Then, too, there are charming
foliage papers, made up of leaves and branches and birds, which are very
good.

While we may find color and cheer in these gay papers for gloomy city
dining-rooms, if we have plenty of light we may get more distinguished
results with paneled walls. A large dining-room may be paneled with
dark wood, with a painted fresco, or tapestry frieze, and a ceiling with
carved or painted beams, or perhaps one of those interesting cream-white
ceilings with plaster beams judiciously adorned with ornament in low
relief. Given a large dining-room and a little money, you can do
anything: you can make a room that will compare favorably with the
traditional rooms on which we build. You have a right to make your
dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of
light and air. But one thing you must have: simplicity! It may be the
simplicity of a marble floor and tapestried walls and a painted ceiling,
it may be the simplicity of white paint and muslin and fine furniture,
but simplicity it must have. The furniture that is required in a
dining-room declares itself: a table and chairs. You can bring side
tables and china closets into it, or you can build in cupboards and
consoles to take their place, but there is little chance for other
variation, and so the beginning is a declaration of order and
simplicity.

[Illustration: A GEORGIAN DINING-ROOM IN THE WILLIAM ISELIN HOUSE]

The easiest way to destroy this simplicity is to litter the room with
displays of silver and glass, to dot the walls with indifferent
pictures. If you are courageous enough to let your walls take care of
themselves and to put away your silver and china and glass, the room
will be as dignified as you could wish. Remember that simplicity depends
on balance and space. If the walls balance one another in light and
shadow, if the furniture is placed formally, if walls and furniture
are free from mistaken ornament, the room will be serene and
beautiful. In most other rooms we avoid the "pairing" of things, but
here pairs and sets of things are most desirable. Two console tables are
more impressive than one. There is great decorative value in a pair of
mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards
flanking a chimney-piece. You would not be guilty of a pair of wall
fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies
of the same portrait in a room. But when things "pair" logically, pair
them! They will furnish a backbone of precision to the room.

The dining-room in the Iselin house is a fine example of stately
simplicity. It is extremely formal, and yet there is about it none of
the gloominess one associates with New York dining-rooms. The severely
paneled walls, the fine chimney-piece with an old master inset and
framed by a Grinling Gibbons carving, the absence of the usual mantel
shelf, the plain dining-table and the fine old lion chairs all go to
make up a Georgian room of great distinction.

The woman who cannot afford such expensive simplicity might model a
dining-room on this same plan and accomplish a beautiful room at
reasonable expense. Paneled walls are always possible; if you can't
afford wood paneling, paint the plastered wall white or cream and break
it into panels by using a narrow molding of wood. You can get an effect
of great dignity by the use of molding at a few cents a foot. A large
panel would take the place of the Grinling Gibbons carving, and a
mirror might be inset above the fireplace instead of the portrait. The
dining-table and chairs might give place to good reproductions of
Chippendale, and the marble console to a carpenter-made one painted to
match the woodwork.

The subject of proper furniture for a dining-room is usually settled by
the house mistress before her wedding bouquet has faded, so I shall only
touch on the out-of-ordinary things here. Everyone knows that a table
and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind "go
together." The trouble is that everyone knows these things _too_ well,
and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant
departures from the usual.

My own dining-room in New York is anything but usual, and yet there is
nothing undignified about it. The room was practically square, so that
it had a certain orderly quality to begin with. The rooms of the house
are all rather small, and so to gain the greatest possible space I have
the door openings at the extreme end of the wall, leaving as large a
wall space as possible. You enter this room, then, through a door at the
extreme left of the south wall of the room. Another door at the extreme
right of the same wall leads to a private passage. The space left
between the doors is thereby conserved, and is broken into a large
central panel flanked by two narrow panels. The space above the doors is
also paneled. This wall is broken by a console placed under the central
panel. Above it one of the Mennoyer originals, which you may remember in
the Washington Irving dining-room, is set in the wall, framed with a
narrow molding of gray. The walls and woodwork of the room are of
exactly the same tone of gray--darker than a silver gray and lighter
than pewter. Everything, color, balance, proportion, objects of art, has
been uniformly considered.

Continuing, the east wall is broken in the center by the fireplace, with
a mantel of white and gray marble. A large mirror, surmounted with a
bas-relief in black and white, fills the space between mantel shelf and
cornice. This mirror and bas-relief are framed with the narrow carved
molding painted gray. Here again there is the beauty of balance: two
Italian candlesticks of carved and gilded wood flank a marble bust on
the mantel shelf. There is nothing more. On the right of the mirror, in
a narrow panel, there is a wall clock of carved and gilded wood which
also takes its place as a part of the wall, and keeps it.

The north wall is broken by two mirrors and a door leading to the
service-pantry. A large, four-fold screen, made of an uncut tapestry,
shuts off the door. We need all the light the windows give, so there are
no curtains except the orange-colored taffeta valances at the top. I
devised sliding doors of mirrors that are pulled out of the wall at
night to fill the recessed space of the windows. Ventilation is afforded
by the open fireplace, and by mechanical means. You see we do not
occupy this house in summer, so the mirrored windows are quite feasible.

The fourth wall has no openings, and it is broken into three large
paneled spaces. A console has the place of honor opposite the fireplace,
and above it there is a mirror like that over the mantel. In the two
side panels are the two large Mennoyers. There are five of these in the
room, the smaller ones flanking the chimney piece. You see that the
salvation of this room depends on this careful repetition and variation
of similar objects.

Color is brought into the room in the blue and yellow of the Chinese
rug, in the chairs, and in the painted table. The chairs are painted a
creamy yellow, pointed with blue, and upholstered with blue and yellow
striped velvet. I do not like high-backed chairs in a dining-room. Their
one claim to use is that they make a becoming background, but this does
not compensate for the difficulties of the service when they are used.
An awkward servant pouring soup down one's back is not an aid to
digestion, or to the peace of mind engendered by a good dinner.

[Illustration: MRS. OGDEN ARMOUR'S CHINESE-PAPER SCREEN]

[Illustration: MRS. JAMES WARREN LANE'S PAINTED DINING-TABLE]

The painted table is very unusual. The legs and the carved under-frame
are painted cream and pointed with blue, like the chairs, but the top is
as gay as an old-fashioned garden, with stiff little medallions, and
urns spilling over with flowers, and conventional blossoms picked out
all over it. The colors used are very soft, blue and cream being
predominant. The table is covered with a sheet of plate glass. This
table is, of course, too elaborate for a simple dining-room, but the
idea could be adapted and varied to suit many color and furniture
schemes.

Painted furniture is a delight in a small dining-room. In the Colony
Club I planned a very small room for little dinners that is well worth
reproducing in a small house. This little room was very hard to manage
because there were no windows! There were two tiny little openings high
on the wall at one end of the room, but it would take imagination to
call them windows. The room was on the top floor, and the real light
came from a skylight. You can imagine the difficulty of making such a
little box interesting. However, there was one thing that warmed my
heart to the little room: a tiny ante-room between the hall proper and
the room proper. This little ante-room I paneled in yellowish tan and
gray. I introduced a sofa covered with an old brocade just the color of
dried rose leaves--ashes of roses, the French call it--and the little
ante-room became a fitting introduction to the dining-room within.

The walls of the rooms were paneled in a delicious color between yellow
and tan, the wall proper and the moldings being this color, and the
panels themselves filled with a gray paper painted in pinky yellows and
browns. These panels were done by hand by a man who found his
inspiration in the painted panels of an old French ballroom. As the
walls were unbroken by windows there was ample space for such
decoration. A carpet of rose color was chosen, and the skylight was
curtained with shirred silk of the same rose. The table and chairs were
of painted wood, the chairs having seats of the brocade used on the
ante-room sofa. The table was covered with rose colored brocade, and
over this, cobwebby lace, and over this, plate glass. There are two
consoles in the room, with small cabinets above which hold certain
_objets d'art_ in keeping with the room.

Under the two tiny windows were those terrible snags we decorators
always strike, the radiators. Wrongly placed, they are capable of
spoiling any room. I concealed these radiators by building two small
cabinets with panels of iron framework gilded to suggest a graceful
metal lattice, and lined them with rose-colored silk. I borrowed this
idea from a fascinating cabinet in an old French palace, and the result
is worth the deception. The cabinets are nice in themselves, and they do
not interfere with the radiation of the heat.

I have seen many charming country houses and farm houses in France with
dining-rooms furnished with painted furniture. Somehow they make the
average American dining-room seem very commonplace and tiresome. For
instance, I had the pleasure of furnishing a little country house in
France and we planned the dining-room in blue and white. The furniture
was of the simplest, painted white, with a dark blue line for
decoration. The corner cupboard was a little more elaborate, with a
gracefully curved top and a large glass door made up of little panes set
in a quaint design. There were several drawers and a lower cupboard. The
drawers and the lower doors invited decorations a little more elaborate
than the blue lines of the furniture, so we painted on gay little
medallions in soft tones of blue, from the palest gray-blue to a very
dark blue. The chair cushions were blue, and the china was blue
sprigged. Three little pitchers of dark-blue luster were on the wall
cupboard shelf and a mirror in a faded gold frame gave the necessary
variation of tone.

A very charming treatment for either a country or small city dining-room
is to have corner cupboards of this kind cutting off two corners. They
are convenient and unusual and pretty as well. They can be painted in
white with a colored line defining the panels and can be made highly
decorative if the panels are painted with a classic or a Chinese design.
The decoration, however, should be kept in variations of the same tone
as the stripe on the panels. For instance, if the stripe is gray, then
the design should be in dark and light gray and blue tones. The chairs
can be white, in a room of this kind, with small gray and blue
medallions and either blue and white, or plain blue, cushions.

Another dining-room of the same sort was planned for a small country
house on Long Island. Here the woodwork was a deep cream, the walls the
same tone, and the ceiling a little lighter. We found six of those prim
Duxbury chairs, with flaring spindle-backs, and painted them a soft
yellow-green. The table was a plain pine one, with straight legs. We
painted it cream and decorated the top with a conventional border of
green adapted from the design of the china--a thick creamy Danish ware
ornamented with queer little wavy lines and figures. I should have
mentioned the china first, because the whole room grew from that. The
rug was a square of velvet of a darker green. The curtains were soft
cream-colored net. One wall was made up of windows, another of doors and
a cupboard, and against the other two walls we built two long, narrow
consoles that were so simple anyone could accomplish them: simply two
wide shelves resting on good brackets, with mirrors above. The one
splendid thing in the room was a curtain of soft green damask that was
pulled at night to cover the group of windows. Everything else in the
room was bought for a song.

[Illustration: THE PRIVATE DINING-ROOM IN THE COLONY CLUB]

I have said much of cupboards and consoles because I think they are so
much better than the awkward, heavy "china closets" and "buffets" and
sideboards that dominate most dining-rooms. The time has come when we
should begin to do fine things in the way of building fitment furniture,
that is, furniture that is actually or apparently a part of the shell of
the room. It would be so much better to build a house slowly, planning
the furniture as a part of the architectural detail. With each
succeeding year the house would become more and more a part of the
owner, illustrating his life. Of course, this would mean that the
person who planned the developing of the house must have a certain
architectural training, must know about scale and proportion, and
something of general construction. Certainly charming things are to be
created in this way, things that will last, things immeasurably
preferable to the cheap jerry-built furniture which so soon becomes
shabby, which has to be so constantly renewed. People accept new ideas
with great difficulty, and my only hope is that they may grow to accept
the idea of fitment furniture through finding the idea a product of
their own; a personal discovery that comes from their own needs.

I have constantly recommended the use of our native American woods for
panelings and wall furniture, because we have both the beautiful woods
of our new world and tried and proven furniture of the old world, and
what couldn't we achieve with such material available? Why do people
think of a built-in cupboard as being less important than a detached
piece of furniture? Isn't it a braggart pose, a desire to show the
number of things you can buy? Of course it is a very foolish pose, but
it is a popular one, this display of objects that are ear-marked
"expensive."

It is very easy to build cupboards on each side of a fireplace, for
instance, making the wall flush with the chimney-breast. This is always
good architectural form. One side could have a desk which opens beneath
the glass doors, and the other could have cupboards, both presenting
exactly the same appearance when closed. Fitted corner cupboards,
triangular or rounded, are also excellent in certain dining rooms.

Wall tables, or consoles, may be of the same wood as the woodwork or of
marble, or of some dark polished wood. There are no more useful pieces
of furniture than consoles, and yet we only see them in great houses.
Why? Because they are simple, and we haven't yet learned to demand the
simple. I have had many interesting old console-tables of wrought iron
support and marble tops copied, and I have designed others that were
mere semi-circles of white painted wood supported by four slender legs,
but whether they be marble or pine the effect is always simple. There
are charming consoles that have come to us from the Eighteenth Century,
consoles made in pairs, so that they may stand against the wall as
serving-tables, or be placed together to form one round table. This is a
very good arrangement where people have one large living room or hall in
which they dine and which also serves all the purpose of daily
intercourse. This entirely removes any suggestion of a dining-room, as
the consoles may be separated and stand against the wall during the day.

Many modern houses are being built without the conventional dining-room
we have known so long, there being instead an open-air breakfast room
which may be glazed in winter and screened in summer. People have come
to their senses at last, and realize that there is nothing so pleasant
as eating outdoors. The annual migration of Americans to Europe is
responsible for the introduction of this excellent custom. French houses
are always equipped with some outdoor place for eating. Some of them
have, in addition to the inclosed porch, a fascinating pavilion built in
the garden, where breakfast and tea may be served. Modern mechanical
conveniences and the inexpensive electric apparatus make it possible to
serve meals at this distance from the house and keep them hot in the
meantime. One may prepare one's own coffee and toast at table, with the
green trees and flowers and birds all around.

Eating outdoors makes for good health and long life and good temper,
everyone knows that. The simplest meal seems a gala affair when everyone
is radiant and cheerful, whereas a long and elaborate meal served
indoors is usually depressing.




XIV

THE BEDROOM


In olden times people rarely slept in their bedrooms, which were mostly
_chambres de parade_, where everyone was received and much business was
transacted. The real bedroom was usually a smallish closet nearby. These
_chambres de parade_ were very splendid, the beds raised on a dais, and
hung with fine damasks and tapestries--tapestries thick with bullion
fringes. The horror of fresh air felt by our ancestors was well
illustrated here. No draughts from ill-constructed windows or badly hung
doors could reach the sleeper in such a bed.

[Illustration: AN OLD PAINTED BED OF THE LOUIS XVI. PERIOD]

This was certainly different from our modern ideas of hygiene: In those
days furniture that could not be hastily moved was of little importance.
The bed was usually a mere frame of wood, made to be covered with
valuable hangings which could easily be packed and carried away on
occasions that too often arose in the troublous days of the early Middle
Ages. The benches and tables one sees in many foreign palaces to-day are
covered with gorgeous lengths of velvet and brocade. This is a survival
of the custom when furniture was merely so much baggage. With the early
Eighteenth Century, however, there came into being _les petits
appartements_, in which the larger space formerly accorded the bedroom
was divided into ante-chamber, salon or sitting-room, and the bedroom.
Very often the bed was placed in an alcove, and the heavy brocades and
bullion embroideries were replaced by linen or cotton hangings.

When Oberkampf established himself at Jouy in 1760 France took first
place in the production of these printed linens and cottons. This was
the beginning of the age of chintz and of the delightful decorative
fabrics that are so suited to our modern ideas of hygiene. It seems to
me there are no more charming stuffs for bedroom hangings than these
simple fabrics, with their enchantingly fanciful designs. Think of the
changes one could have with several sets of curtains to be changed at
will, as Marie Antoinette used to do at the Petit Trianon. How amusing
it would be in our own modern houses to change the bed coverings, window
curtains, and so forth, twice or three times a year! I like these loose
slip covers and curtains better than the usual hard upholstery, because
if properly planned the slips can be washed without losing their color
or their lines.

Charming Eighteenth Century prints that are full of valuable hints as to
furniture and decorations for bedrooms can be found in most French
shops. The series known as "_Moreau le Jeun_" is full of suggestion.
Some of the interiors shown are very grand, it is true, but many are
simple enough to serve as models for modern apartments. A set of these
pictures will do much to give one an insight into the decoration of the
Eighteenth Century, a vivid insight that can be obtained in no other
way, perhaps.

I do not like the very large bedrooms, dear to the plans of the American
architect. I much prefer the space divided. I remember once arriving at
the Ritz Hotel in London and being given temporarily a very grand royal
suite, overlooking the park, until the smaller quarters I had reserved
should be ready for me. How delighted I was at first with all the huge
vastness of my bedroom! My appreciation waned, however, after a
despairing morning toilet spent in taking many steps back and forth from
dressing-table to bathroom, and from bathroom to hang-closets, and I was
glad indeed, when, at the end of several hours, I was comfortably housed
in my smaller and humbler quarters.

I think the ideal bedroom should be planned so that a small ante-chamber
should separate it from the large outside corridor. The ideal
arrangement is an ante-chamber opening on the boudoir, or sitting-room,
then the bedroom, with its dressing-room and bath in back. This outer
chamber insures quiet and privacy, no matter how small it may be. It may
serve as a clothes-closet, by filling the wall with cupboards, and
concealing them with mirrored doors. The ante-chamber need not be a
luxury, if you plan your house carefully. It is simply a little well of
silence and privacy between you and the hall outside.

[Illustration: MISS CROCKER'S LOUIS XVI. BED]

To go on with my ideal bedroom: the walls, I think, should be simply
paneled in wood, painted gray or cream or white, but if wood cannot be
afforded a plastered wall, painted or distempered in some soft tone, is
the best solution. You will find plain walls and gay chintz hangings
very much more satisfying than walls covered with flowered papers and
plain hangings, for the simple reason that a design repeated hundreds of
times on a wall surface becomes very, very tiresome, but the same design
in a fabric is softened and broken by the folds of the material, and you
will never get the annoying sense of being impelled to count the
figures.

One of the bedrooms illustrated in this book shows an Elizabethan paper
that does not belong to the "busy" class, for while the design is
decorative in the extreme you are not aware of an emphatic repeat. This
is really an old chintz design, and is very charming in blues and greens
and grays on a cream ground. I have seen bedrooms papered with huge
scrolls and sea shells, many times enlarged, that suggest the noisy and
methodical thumping of a drum. I cannot imagine anyone sleeping calmly
in such a room!

This bedroom is eminently suited to the needs of a man. The hangings are
of a plain, soft stuff, accenting one of the deep tones of the wall
covering, and the sash curtains are of white muslin. The furniture is of
oak, of the Jacobean period. The bed is true to its inspiration, with
turned legs and runners, and slatted head and foot boards. The legs and
runners of the bed were really inspired by the chairs and tables of the
period. This is an excellent illustration of the modern furniture that
may be adapted from old models. It goes without saying that the beds of
that period were huge, cumbersome affairs, and this adapted bed is
really more suitable to mo

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