Interior Decorating For Everybody 2

PUBLISHED BY Wahyu Raharjo

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
FOREWORD .............

HOW TO REARRANGE A ROOM
Method of procedure. Inherited eyesores. Line. Color. Treatment of small rooms and suites. Old ceilings. Old floors. To paint brass bedsteads. Hangings. Owning two or three antique pieces of furniture, how proceed. Appropriateness to setting. How to give your home a personal quality.

HOW TO ANALYZE A ROOM AS PROFESSIONALS DO BEFORE YOU REDECORATE

HOW TO CREATE A ROOM
Mere comfort. Period rooms. Starting a collection of antique furniture. Reproductions. Painted furniture. Order of procedure in creating a room. How to decide upon color scheme. Study values.
Period ballroom. A distinguished room. Each room a stage "set.” Background. Flowers as decoration. Placing ornaments.
Tapestry. Tendency to antique tempered by vivid Bakst colors.

HOW TO DETERMINE CHARACTER OF HANGINGS AND FURNITURE-COVERING FOR A GIVEN ROOM
Silk, velvet, corduroy, rep, leather, use of antique silks, chintz. When and how used.

THE STORY OF TEXTILES
Materials woven by hand and machine, embroidered, or the combination of the two known as tapestry. Painted tapestry. Art fostered by the Church. Decorated walls and ceilings, i3th century, England.

CANDLESTICKS, LAMPS, FIXTURES FOR GAS AND ELECTRICITY, AND SHADES
Fixtures, as well as mantelpiece, must follow architect's scheme. Plan wall space for furniture. Shades for lights. Important as to line and color.
WINDOW SHADES AND AWNINGS
Colored gauze sash-curtains. Window shades of glazed linen, with design in colors. Striped canvas awnings.

TREATMENT OF PICTURES AND PICTURE FRAMES
Selecting pictures. Pictures as pure decoration. "Staring" a picture. Restraint necessary in hanging pictures. Hanging miniatures.

TREATMENT OF PIANO CASES
Where interest centers around piano. Where piano is part of ensemble.

TREATMENT OF DINING-ROOM BUFFETS AND DRESSING-TABLES
Articles placed upon them,

TREATMENT OF WORK TABLES, BIRD CAGES, DOG BASKETS, AND FISH GLOBES
Value as color notes.

TREATMENT OF FIREPLACES
In Proportions, tiles, andirons, grate.

TREATMENT OF BATHROOMS
A man's bathroom. A woman's bathroom. Bathroom fixtures. Bathroom glassware.

PERIOD ROOMS
Chiseling of metals. Ormolu. Chippendale. Colonial. Victorian. The art of furniture making. How to hang a mirror.
The study of color schemes. Tapestries.
A narrow hall.

PERIODS IN FURNITURE
The story of the evolution of periods. Assyria. Egypt. Greece. Rome. France. England. America, Epoch-making styles.

CONTINUATION OF PERIODS IN FURNITURE
Greece. Rome. Byzantium. Dark Ages. Middle Ages. Gothic. Moorish. Spanish. Anglo-Saxon. Caesar’s Table. Charlemagne's Chair. Venice,



THE GOTHIC PERIOD.
Interior decoration of Feudal Castle. Tapestry. Hallmarks of Gothic oak carving.

THE RENAISSANCE
Italy. The Medici. Great architects, painters, designers, and workers in metals. Marvelous pottery. Furniture inlaying. Hallmarks of Renaissance. Oak carving. Metal work. Renaissance in Germany and Spain.

FRENCH FURNITURE
Renaissance of classic period. Francis I, Henry II, and the Louis. Architecture, mural decoration, tapestry, furniture, wrought metals, ormolu, silks, velvets, porcelains.

THE PERIODS OF THE THREE LOUIS
How to distinguish them. Louis XIV. Louis XV. Louis XVI. Outline. Decoration. Coloring. Mural Decoration. Tapestry.

CHARTS SHOWING HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF FURNITURE
French and English.

THE MAHOGANY PERIOD...
Chippendale. Heppel white. Sheraton. The Adam Brothers. Characteristics of these and the preceding English periods; Gothic, Elizabethan, Jacobean, William and Mary, Queen Anne. William Morris. Pre-Raphaelites,

THE COLONIAL PERIOD
Furniture, Landscape paper. The story of the evolution of wall decoration.

THE REVIVAL OF DIRECTOIRE AND EMPIRE FURNITURE
Shown in modern painted furniture.

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD
Architecture and interior decoration become unrelated. Machine-made furniture. Victorian cross-stitch, beadwork, wax and linen flowers. Bristol glass. Value to day as notes of variety.

PAINTED FURNITURE
Including "mission" furniture. Treatment of an un-plastered cottage. Furniture, color-scheme.
TREATMENT OF AN INEXPENSIVE BEDROOM
Factory furniture. Chintz. The cheapest mirrors. Floors. Walls. Pictures. Treatment of old floors.

TREATMENT OF A GUEST ROOM
Where economy is not a matter of importance. Paneled walls. Louis XV painted furniture. Taffeta curtains and bed-cover. Chintz chair-covers. Cream net sash-curtains. Figured linen window shades.

A MODERN HOUSE IN WHICH GENUINE JACOBEAN FURNITURE is APPROPRIATELY SET
Traditional color-scheme of crimson and gold.

UNCONVENTIONAL BREAKFAST-ROOMS AND SPORTS BALCONIES
Porch-rooms. Appropriate furnishings. Color schemes.

SUN-ROOMS
Color schemes according to climate and season. A small, cheap, summerhouse converted into one of some pretensions by altering vital details.

TREATMENT OF A WOMAN'S DRESSING-ROOM
Solving problems of the toilet. Shoe cabinets. Jewel cabinets. Dressing tables.

THE TREATMENT OF CLOSETS
Variety of closets. Color scheme. Chintz covered boxes.

TREATMENT OF A NARROW HALL
Furniture. Device for breaking length of hall.

TREATMENT OF A VERY SHADED LIVING-ROOM
In a warm climate. In a cool climate. Warm and cold colors.

SERVANTS' ROOMS
Practical and suitable attractiveness.

THE BABY'S ROOMS: THE DAY BOOM, THE NIGHT ROOM

ROOMS FOR THE ELDERLY

A YOUNG GIRL'S ROOM

THE YOUNG BOY'S ROOM

TABLE DECORATION
Appropriateness the keynote. Tableware. Linen, lace, and flowers. Japanese simplicity. Background.

WHAT TO AVOID IN INTERIOR DECORATION: RULES FOR BEGINNERS
Appropriateness. Intelligent elimination.

Furnishings. Color scheme. Small suites. Background. Placing rugs and hangings. Treatment of long wall-space.

Men's rooms. Table decoration. Tea table. How to train the taste, eye, and judgment.

FADS IN COLLECTING
A pannier fleur collection. A typical experience in collecting. A "find" in an obscure American junk-shop. Getting on the track of some Italian pottery. Collections used as decoration. A "find" in Spain.

WEDGWOOD POTTERY, OLD AND MODERN
The history of Wedgwood. Josiah Wedgwood, the founder.

ITALIAN POTTERY STATUETTES.

VENETIAN GLASS, OLD AND MODERN
Murano Museum collection. Table-gardens in Venetian glass.

IN CONCLUSION
Four Fundamental Principles of Interior Decoration Re-stated.












Portion of a Drawing Room, Perfect in Composition and Detail












There is something unusually exquisite about, this composition. You will discover at a glance perfect balance, repose line, everywhere, yet with it infinite grace and a winning charm. One can imagine a tea tray brought in, a table placed and those two attractive chairs drawn together so that my lady and a friend may chat over the teacups.

o The mirror is an Italian Louis XVI.

o The sconces, table and chairs, are French.

o The vases, Italian, are all antiques.

A becoming mellow light comes through the shade of deep cream Italian parchment paper with Louis XVI decorations.

It should be said that the vases are Italian medicine jars literally that. The Italian chemists, for their drugs, once used them and some are of astonishing workmanship and have great intrinsic value, as well as the added value of age and uniqueness.

The color scheme is as attractive as the lines. The walls are grey, curtains of green and grey, antique taffeta being used, while the chairs have green silk on their seats and the table is of green and faded gold. The green used is a wonderfully beautiful shade.




















FOREWORD

If you would have your rooms interesting as well as beautiful, make them say something, give them a spinal column by keeping all ornamentation subservient to line.

Before you buy anything, try to imagine how you want each room to look when completed; get the picture well in your mind, as a painter would; think out the main features, for the details all depend upon these and will quickly suggest themselves. This is, in the long run, the quickest and the most economical method of furnishing.

There is a theory that no room can be created all at once, that it must grow gradually. In a sense this is a fact, so far as it refers to the amateur. The professional is always occupied with creating and recreating rooms and can instantly summon to mind complete schemes of decoration. The amateur can also learn to mentally furnish rooms. It is a fascinating pastime when one gets the knack of it

Beautiful things can be obtained anywhere and for the minimum price, if one has a feeling for line and color, or for either. If the lover of the beautiful was not born with this art instinct, it may be quickly acquired. A decorator creates or rearranges one room; the owner does the next, alone, or with assistance, and in a season or two has spread his or her own wings and worked out legitimate schemes, teeming with individuality. One observes, is pleased with results and asks oneself why. This is the birth of Good Taste. Next, one experiments, makes mistakes, rights them, masters a period, outgrows or wearies of it, and takes up another.

Progress is rapid and certain in this fascinating amusement, study call it what you will, if a few of the laws underlying all successful interior decoration are kept in mind.











These are:

HARMONY in line and color scheme;

SIMPLICITY in decoration and number of objects in room, which is to be dictated by usefulness of said objects; and insistence upon

SPACES, which, like rests in music, have as much value as the objects, dispersed about the room.

Treat your rooms like "still life," see to it that each group, such as a table, sofa, and one or two chairs make a "composition," suggesting comfort as well as beauty. Never have an isolated chair, unless it is placed against the wall, as part of the decorative scheme.

In preparing this book the chief aim has been clearness and brevity, the slogan of our day!

We give a broad outline of the historical periods in furnishing, with a view to quick reference work.

The thirty-two illustrations will be analyzed for the practical instruction of the reader who may want to furnish a house and is in search of definite ideas as to lines of furniture, color schemes for upholstery and hangings, and the placing of furniture and ornaments in such a way as to make the composition of rooms appear harmonious from the artist's point of view.

The index will render possible a quick reference to illustrations and explanatory text, so that the book may be a guide for those ambitious to try their hand at the art of interior decoration. The manner of presentation is consciously didactic, the authors believing that this is the simplest method by which such a book can offer clear, terse suggestions. They have aimed at keeping "near to the bone of fact" and when the brief statements of the fundamental laws of interior decoration give way to narrative, it is with the hope of opening up vistas of personal application to embryo collectors or students of periods.







Table of Illustrations

I Portion of a Drawing room, Perfect in Composition and Detail (Frontispiece)

II Bedroom in Country House. Modern Painted Furniture

III Suggestion for Treatment of a Very Small Bedroom

IV A Man's Office in Wall Street

V A Corner of the Same Office

VI Another View of the Same Office

VII Corner of a Room, Showing Painted Furniture, Antique and Modern.... 45

VIII Example of a Perfect Mantel, Ornaments and Mirror

IX Dining room in Country House, Showing Modern Painted Furniture

X Dining-room Furniture, Italian Renaissance, Antique

XI Corner of Dining-room in New York Apartment, Showing Section of Italian Refectory Table and Italian Chairs, both Antique and Renaissance in Style

XII An Italian Louis XVI Salon in a New York Apartment

XIII Another Side of the Same Italian Louis XVI

Salon .......... 101

XIV A Narrow Hall Where Effect of Width is

Attained by Use of Tapestry with Vista. 109

XV Venetian glass, Antique and Modern. .117

XVI Corner of a Room in a Small Empire Suite. 125 xxiii

XVII An Example of Perfect Balance and Beauty in Mantel Arrangement

XVIII Corner of a Drawing room, Furniture Showing Directories Influence

XIX Entrance Hall in New York Duplex Apartment. Italian Furniture

XX Combination of Studio and Living room in New York Duplex Apartment

XXI Part of a Victorian Parlor in One of the Few Remaining New York Victorian Mansions

XXII Two Styles of Day beds, Modern Painted

XXIII Boudoir in New York Apartment. Painted Furniture, Antique and Reproductions

XXIV Example of Lack of Balance in Mantel Arrangement

XXV Treatment of Ground Lying Between House and Much Traveled Country Road

XXVI An Extension Roof in New York Converted into a Balcony

XXVII A Common-place Barn Made Interesting

XXVIII Narrow Entrance Hall of a New York Antique Shop

XXIX Example of a Charming Hall Spoiled by Too Pronounced a Rug

XXX A Man s Library

XXXI A Collection of Empire Furniture, Ornaments, and China

XXXII Italian Reproductions in Pottery After Classic Models










"Those who duly consider the influence of the fine-arts on the human mind, will not think it a small benefit to the world, to diffuse their productions as wide, and preserve them as long as possible. The multiplying of copies of fine work, in beautiful and durable materials, must obviously have the same effect in respect to the arts as the invention of printing has upon literature and the sciences: by tfyeir means the principal productions of both kinds will be forever preserved, and will effectually prevent the return of ignorant and barbarous ages."

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD: Catalogue of 1787.

One of the most joyful obligations in life should be the planning and executing of BEAUTIFUL HOMES, keeping ever in mind that distinction is not a matter of scale, since a vast palace may find its rival in the smallest group of rooms, provided the latter obeys the law of good line, correct proportions, harmonious color scheme and appropriateness: a law insisting that all useful things be beautiful things.











CHAPTER I

HOW TO REARRANGE A ROOM

LUCKY is the man or woman of taste who has no inherited eyesores, which, because of association, must not be banished! When these exist in large numbers one thing only remains to be done: look them over, see to what period the majority belong, and proceed as if you wanted a mid-Victorian, late Colonial or brass-bedstead room.

To rearrange a room successfully, begin by taking everything out of it (in reality or in your mind), then decide how you want it to look, or how, owing to what you own and must retain, you are obliged to have it look. Design and color of wall decorations, hangings, carpets, lighting fixtures, lamps and ornaments on mantel, depend upon the character of your furniture.

It is the mantel and its arrangement of ornaments that sound the keynote upon first entering a room.

Conventional simplicity in number and arrangement of ornaments gives balance and repose, hence dignity. Dignity once established, one could afford to be individual, and introduce a riot of colors, provided they are all in the same key. Luxurious cushions, soft rugs and a hundred and one feminine touches will create atmosphere and knit together the austere scheme of line the anatomy of your room. Color and textiles are the flesh of interior decoration.

In furnishing a small room you can add greatly to its apparent size by using plain paper and making the woodwork the same color, or slightly darker in tone. If you cannot find wallpaper of exactly the color and shade you wish, often it is possible to use the wrong side of a paper and produce exactly the desired effect.

In repapering old rooms with imperfect ceilings it is easy to disguise this by using a paper with a small design in the same tone. Ret perfectly plain ceiling paper will show every defect in the surface of the ceiling.

If your house or flat is small you can gain a great effect of space by keeping the same color scheme throughout that is, the same color or related colors. To make a small hall and each of several small rooms on the same floor different in any pronounced way is to cut up your home into a restless, unmeaning checkerboard, where one feels conscious of the walls and all limitations. The effect of restful spaciousness may be obtained by taking the same small suite and treating its walls, floors and draperies, as has been suggested, in the same color scheme or a scheme of related keys in color. That is, wood browns, beiges and yellows; violets, mauves and pinks; different tones of grays; different tones of yellows, greens and blues.

Now having established your suite and hall all in one key, so that there is absolutely no jarring note as one passes from room to room, you may be sure of having achieved that most desirable of all, qualities in interior decoration repose. We have seen the idea here suggested carried out in small summer homes with most successful results; the same color used on walls and furniture, while exactly the same chintz was employed in every bedroom, opening out of one hall. By this means it was possible to give to a small, unimportant cottage, a note of distinction otherwise quite impossible. Here, however, let us say that, if the same chintz is to be used in every room, it must be neutral in colors chintz in which the color scheme is, say, yellows in different tones, browns in different tones, or greens or grays. To vary the character of each room, introduce different colors in the furniture covers, the sofa-cushions and lampshades. Our point is to urge the repetition of a main background in a small group of rooms; but to escape monotony by planning that the accessories in each room shall strike individual notes of decorative, contrasting color.

What to do with old floors is a question many of us have faced. If your house has been built with floors of wide, common boards which have become rough and separated by age, in some cases allowing dust to sift through from the cellar, and you do not wish to go to the expense of all-over carpets, you have the choice of several methods. The simplest and least expensive is to paint or stain the floors. In this case employa floor painter and begin by removing all old paint. Paint removers come for the purpose. Then have the floors planed to make them even. Next, fill the cracks with putty. The most practical method is to stain the floors some dark color: mahogany, walnut, weathered oak, black, green or any color you may prefer, and then wax them.

This protects the color. In a room where daintiness is desired, and economy is not important, as for instance in a room with white painted furniture, you may have white floors and a square carpet rug of some plain dark toned velvet; or, if preferred, the painted border may be in some delicate color to match the wall paper. To resume, if you like a dull finish, have the wax rubbed in at intervals, but if you like a glossy background for rugs, use a heavy varnish after the floors are colored. This treatment we suggest for more or less formal rooms. In bedrooms, put down an inexpensive filling as a background for rugs, or should yours be a summer home, use straw matting.

A room with modern painted furniture is shown here. The lines and decorations are Empire. Note the lyre backs of chairs and headboard in day bed. Treatment of this bed is that suggested where twin beds are used and room affords wall space for but one of them.

This Is A Bedroom In Country House. Modern Painted Furniture




For halls and dining rooms plain dark-colored linoleum, costing not less than two dollars a yard makes an inexpensive floor covering.

If it is waxed it becomes not only very durable but, also, extremely effective, suggesting the dark tiles in Italian houses. We do not advise the purchase of the linoleums, which represent inlaid floors, as they are invariably unsuccessful imitations.

If it is necessary to economize and your brass bedstead must be used even though you dislike it, you can have it painted the color of your walls. It requires a number of coats. A soft pearl grey is good. Then use a color, or colors, in your silk or chintz bedspread. Sun-proof material in a solid color makes an attractive cover, with a narrow fringe in several colors straight around the edges and also, forming a circle or square on the top of the bed-cover.

If your gas or electric fixtures are ugly and you cannot afford more attractive ones, buy very cheap, perfectly plain, ones and paint them to match the walls, giving decorative value to them with colored silk shades.

If you wish to use twin beds and have not wall space for them, treat one like a couch or day bed. See Plate II. Your cabinet-maker can remove the footboard, then draw the bed out into the room, place in a position convenient to the light either by day or night, after which put a cover of cretonne or silk over it and cushions of the same. Never put a spotted material on a spotted material. If your couch or sofa is done in a figured material of different colors, make your sofa cushions of plain material to tone down the sofa. If the sofa is a plain color, then tone it up make it more decorative by using cushions of several colors.

If you like your room, but find it Cold in atmosphere, try deep cream gauze for sash curtains. They are wonderful atmosphere producers. The advantage of two tiers of sash curtains (see Plate IX) is that one can part and push back one tier for air, light or looking out, and still use the other tier to modify the light in the room.

Another way to produce atmosphere in a cold room is to use a tone-on-tone paper. That is, a paper striped in two depths of the same color.

In choosing any wall paper it is imperative that you try a large sample of it in the room for which it is intended, as the reflection from a nearby building or brick wall can entirely change a beautiful yellow into a thick mustard color. How wallpaper looks in the shop is no criterion. As stated sometimes the wrong side of wallpaper gives you the tone you desire.

Shows one end of a very small bedroom with modern painted furniture, so simple in line and decoration that it would be equally appropriate either for a young man or for a young woman. We say "young,'' because there is something charmingly fresh and youthful about this type of furniture.
The color is pale pistachio green, with mulberry lines; the same combination of colors being repeated in painting the walls, which have a grey background, lined with mulberry the broad stripe and a narrow green line. The bed cover is mulberry; the lampshade is green with mulberry and grey in the fringe.

On the walls are delightful old prints framed in black glass with gold lines, and a narrow moulding of gilded oak, an old style revived.


A square of antique silk covers the night table, and the floor is polished hard wood.

Here is your hall bedroom, the wee guest room in a flat, or the extra guest room under the eaves of your country house, made equally beguiling. The result of this artistic simplicity is a restful sense of space.




When rearranging your room do not desecrate the few good antiques you happen to own by the use of a too modern color scheme. Have the necessary modern pieces you have bought to supplement your treasures stained or painted in a dull, dark color in harmony with the antiques, and then use subdued colors in the floor coverings, curtains and cushions.

If you own no good old ornaments, try to get a few good shapes and colors in inexpensive reproductions of the desired period.

If your room is small, and the bathroom opens out of it, add to the size of the room by using the same color scheme in the bathroom, and conceal the plumbing and fixtures by a low screen. If the connecting door is kept open, the effect is to enlarge greatly the appearance of the small bedroom, whereas if the bedroom decorations are dark and the bathroom has a light floor and walls, it abruptly cuts itself off and emphasizes the smallness of the bedroom.

Everything depends upon the appropriateness of the furniture to its setting. We recall some much admired dining-room chairs in the home of the Maclaines of Lochbuie in Argyleshire, west coast of Scotland. The chairs in question are covered with sealskin from the seals caught off that rugged coast they are quite delightful in a remote country house; but they would not be tolerated in London.

The question of placing photographs is not one to be treated lightly. Remember, intimate photographs should be placed in intimate rooms, while photographs of artists and all celebrities are appropriate for the living room or library. It is extremely seldom that a photograph unless of public interest is not out of place in a formal room.

To repeat, never forget that your house or flat is your home, and, that to have any charm whatever of a personal sort, it must suggest you not simply the taste of a professional decorator. So work with your decorator (if you prefer to employ one) by giving your personal attention to styles and colors, and selecting those most sympathetic to your own nature. Your architect will be grateful if you will show the same interest in the details of building your home, rather than assuming the attitude that you have engaged him in order to rid yourself of such bother.

If you are building a pretentious house and decide upon some clearly defined period of architecture, let us say, Georgian (English eighteenth century) we would advise keeping your first floor mainly in that period as to furniture and hangings, but upstairs let yourself go, that is, make your rooms any style you like. Go in for a gay riot of color, such combinations as are known as Bakst coloring, if that happens to be your fancy. This Russian painter and designer was fortunate in having the theatre in which to demonstrate his experiments in vivid color combinations, and sometimes we quite forget that he was but one of many who have used sunset palettes.

Recently the fair butterfly daughters of a mother whose taste has grown sophisticated, complained "But, Mother, we dislike periods, and here you are building a Tudor house!" forgetting, by the way, that the so-called Bakst interiors, adored by them, are equally a period.

This home, a very wonderful one, is being worked out on the plan suggested, that is, the first floor is decorated in the period of the exterior of the house, while the personal rooms on the upper floors reflect, to a certain extent, the personality of their occupants. Remember there must always be a certain relationship between all the rooms in one suite, the relationship indicated by lines and a background of the same, or a harmonizing color-scheme.



















Here we have a man's office in Wall Street, New York, showing how a lawyer with large interests surrounds himself with necessities, which contribute to his comfort, sense of beauty and art instincts.

The desk is big, solid and commodious, yet artistically unusual.






CHAPTER II

How To Analyze A Room As Professionals Do Before You Redecorate
LOOK carefully at the room, which you intend doing over. Cannot you, unaided, find out why all of your efforts, some of them expensive ones, have failed to make it attractive?
You say that the moment you enter your room you have an impression of confused disorder pervading the whole plaque. Has the mantel too many things on it, and are these objects placed without any plan as to orderly, balanced arrangement? This is true in most cases where the general impression made by a room is one of disorder. Perhaps your mantel ornaments are neither beautiful nor interesting, and are unrelated in shape and color to the other decorative objects in the room.
Until amateur decorators learn to make the mantels in their rooms the keynote of their decorative schemes, it is wise not to experiment beyond the rule of three ornaments. These must be absolutely in character with the other furnishings. That is, your Colonial room is not the place for French ornaments, nor your French room the place for Colonial ornaments and clock, unless you have made yourself so familiar with the characteristics of the styles that you. Recognize related periods and can therefore combine them. In a room with very inexpensive furniture and hangings use equally inexpensive ornaments. In every case harmony is beauty.
Suppose you continue the analysis of your room by asking yourself if it has too many things in it to be "restful"? Have you, perhaps, used furniture, which does not go together as to shapes, color of woods or the materials used as upholstery? Have you too many "spots" in the room? By which we mean, are there too many figured materials with different designs and colors, used as hangings and for furniture coverings? Is your figured material, chintz, cretonnes or brocade, all of one design and coloring, but have you used too much of it, so that the effect is confused and un-restful?
Have you figured and several-colored wallpaper and a chintz with different design and cpk oring? This is a mistake. It is possible to get wallpapers and chintzes to match if you insist on everything being figured. But remember that you’re figured hangings will look their best with plain walls and only one or two pieces of furniture covered with the chintz or brocade.
Is your room small and have you made the woodwork a sharp contrast in color to your walls? You will find that in any room, to paint the woodwork the same color as walls adds immensely to the appearance of its size.
If the thing that you object to in your room furnished with attractive up-to-date furnishings is shiny black walnut wood-work, of the days of our grandmothers, have some one sand-paper the whole of it and you will be amazed by the result. Under that varnished finish is a charming, dull, sable-brown.
Is it possible that your room, which is puzzling you, so would look better if there were no pictures at all on the walls? Is your room really wrong or are you ill and for that reason unfit to judge fairly? There are, no doubt, moods in which, for example, bare walls rest the nerves. There are other moods, which find one grateful for the diversion of pictures. These are points to have in mind when arranging rooms for those who are kept to the house by illness.
Are your large pieces of furniture so placed as to give the appearance of balance to your room? And have you provided yourself with a sufficient number of easily moved pieces such as small tables and chairs, so as to form "groups" which suggest that human beings are expected to live in and enjoy this room!
Is your desk where the light comes over your left shoulder to the page you are writing? Are the lights in the room where they will be of most use? Can you enjoy your open-fire and at the same time have a good light to read by? If you play cards can you light the table and also the hands of each player? Has your room for informal use books and enough of them! Books and an open-fire are the ideal foundation for a home-like room.
If the room under consideration is a bedroom, and you do not want to modify its character, have you provided not only a bed but also a sofa of some kind on which to rest during the day?
Is the "cold" atmosphere of this room you want to alter due to the lack of a few bright flowers? Do you love music and have you many musical friends and yet does your home lack a piano? If you are really a lover of music a piano is as much a part of your home as your desk is a natural feature in your sitting room.
See to it that your home, your rooms each one of them expresses the tastes of the family. This is how you make " atmosphere." It is wise to furnish slowly. Haste is responsible for most mistakes. Begin by owning good shapes and color-combinations, and as you can afford it, discard your things of no intrinsic value for beautiful shapes and colors with value.
Sometimes a room, which gave the appearance of an auction room for confusion of objects, has been transformed into a thing of order and beauty by painting all of the furniture the same color. It is often wise to sacrifice good wood to get a harmonious effect.
It is amazing what happy results one can get if one does not cling too firmly to the idea, often a fallacy, that some inherited curtains or rugs are "too good to dye." If you really want to master the secrets of how to decorate your home be prepared to let go of some of your long-cherished views.
House furnishing which is beautiful need not cost any more than house furnishing, which is ugly or simply dull and uninteresting. If you would decorate give in at once and agree to follow the rules of the game: let the laws of decoration dictate to you when it comes to the " composition" of the picture (your room) upon which you are working.
The fact that the field of Interior Decoration is crowded is all the proof is needed that the occupation of decorating is alienating one and that you and all the others are helping to perfect our period of Interior Decoration is in itself reward enough for the time and trouble it costs to produce attractive, magnetic homes.
Do you want to use only the furnishings you already own in the home you are about to arrange or will you use some of the old things and add new pieces or hangings! Or is your Idea to get rid of everything you have in order to make a fresh start with everything new?
We have given sufficient suggestions as to the manipulation of the furnishings one already owns.
If only some of the old furnishings are to be kept and new ones bought to supplement these, the thing to keep in mind is that our choice when buying is limited by the possibilities of the old possessions. In such a case we advise first manipulating the old. When you have done all that can be done with them along the lines suggested (amputating inartistic ornaments with a saw; re-framing simply the ornate mirrors on bureaus, and painting disfigured or discordant woods) go out and buy the new pieces of furniture, but select things which are related, in shape and general character, to the old pieces.
If you are using hangings with flowered or large figured designs are you also covering some of the furniture with stripes? This should not be done; at any rate, not by the beginner, especially if the materials show several colors.
The reader can see that what we aim at getting into a room is an effect of simplicity and restfulness. Begin your efforts at decoration by having only the pieces of furniture you need in a room and not too many colors* Keep all your colors bright or all subdued; do not mix shades; a wrong shade of a color is like a false note in music. This is what having your “values” right when arranging a color scheme means.
Is your room full of little ornaments and the framed photographs of many friends? If so take all of these small things (possibly souvenirs of your travels) and intimate photographs out of the now crowded room and use only a very few of each at one time. Intimate photographs belong in intimate rooms and if you will keep them all together, say on the top of your book-shelves, you will be surprised how the arrangement improves the appearance of your room, It establishes order at once.
Have you restful spaces between your pieces of furniture and are there some small tables with nothing on them, awaiting the unexpected need, as a vase of flowers, cigarettes, tea or after-dinner coffee cup? Remember that in any room, which is attractive simple or elaborate restful spaces, and one or two small, empty tables are necessities. In music the rests have as much value as the notes. It is so in decoration.
Is that impression of confusion one feels on entering your room due to the fact that your rugs are put down at different angles? Let them follow the lines of your walls. Is the design in carpets or rugs too pronounced? It should not be so. In the average home plain carpets or very inconspicuously figured rugs, which are in harmony with the color scheme, are the things to choose. Keep all of the rugs in one room similar in coloring.
Are the lighting fixtures, frames of pictures and of mirrors in keeping with style of your furniture! They should be. How about the pictures themselves! Are they appropriate for the room in which you have hung them! Are they good of their kind? Have you been careful about keeping similar subjects on one wall!
Harmony in house furnishing is not difficult to understand, and if you never violate this principle when furnishing, your home will be beautiful whether its furnishings cost the lowest price possible or a fortune. You can see yourself that if you make the mistake of putting into an inexpensively furnished room some wonderful antique, inlaid desk or rare table, suited to a room of quite different character, you will utterly ruin your "picture,” upset the law of harmony, and, in a sense, the rare object will be thrown away, while your charming "creation" in the shape of a simple (and beautiful) room fails to count as intelligent decoration.
When you are beginning at the foundation and furnishing with entirely new things, your problems are fewer. But they exist. Don't make the mistake of thinking that decorating (even with endless money and time) can be successful if one starts in without a plan of action.
Where are you going to live; how are you going to live as to service, etc.; have you both men and women, old and young, in your household; can you gratify the tastes of all and at the same time make your house furnishing give the impression of harmony? These are some of the questions to ponder.
If you really know what you want in decoration the battle is half won. Work with the rules of this new game before you, and after your first room is completed you will know by heart the first principles of house furnishing.



















CHAPTER III

HOW TO CREATE A ROOM

ONE so often hears the complaint, "I could not possibly set out alone to furnish a room! I don't know anything about periods. Why, a Louis XVI chair and an Empire chair are quite the same to me. Then the question of antiques and reproductions why any one could mislead me!"

If you have absolutely no interest in the arranging or rearranging of your rooms, house or houses, of course, leave it to a decorator and give your attention to whatever does interest you. On the other hand, as with bridge, if you really want to play the game, you can learn it. The first rule is to determine the actual use to which you intend putting the room. * Is it to be a bedroom merely, or a combination of bedroom and boudoir? Is it to be a formal reception-room, or a living room? Is it to be a family library, or a man's study? If it is a small flat, do you aim at absolute comfort, artistically achieved, or do you aim at formality at the expense of comfort?

If you lean toward both comfort and formality, and own a country house and a city abode, there will be no difficulty in solving the problem. Formality may be left to the town house or flat, while during weekends, holidays and summers you can revel in supreme comfort.

Every man or woman is capable of creating comfort. It is a question of those deep chairs with wide seats and backs, soft springs, thick, downy cushions, of tables and book-cases conveniently placed, lights where you want them, beds to the individual taste, double, single, or twins!

The getting together of a period room, one period or periods in combination, is difficult, especially if you are entirely ignorant of the subject. However, here is your cue. Let us suppose you need, or want, a desk, an antique desk. Go about from one dealer to the other until you find the very piece you have dreamed of; one that gives pleasure to you, as well as to the dealer. Then take an experienced friend to look at it. If you have every reason to suppose that the desk is genuine, buy it. Next, read up on the furniture of the particular period to which your desk belongs, in as serious a manner as you do when you buy a prize dog at the show. Now you have made an intelligent beginning as a collector. Reading informs you, but you must buy old furniture to be educated on that subject. Be eternally on the lookout; the really good pieces, veritable antiques, are rare; most of them are in museums, in private collections or in the hands of the most expensive dealers. I refer to those unique pieces, many of them signed by the maker and in perfect condition because during all their existence they have been jealously preserved, often by the very family and in the very house for which they were made. Our chances for picking up antiques are reduced to pieces which on account of reversed circumstances have been turned out of house and home, and, as with human wanderers, much jolting about has told upon them. Most of these are fortified in various directions, but they are treasures all the same, and have a beauty value in line color and workmanship and a wonderful fitness for the purposes for which they were intended. "Surely we are many men of many minds!"


A Corner of the Same Officem The sofa large, strong and luxuriously comfortable; the curtains simple, durable and masculine in gender. The tapestry and architectural picture, decorative and appropriately impersonal, as the wall decorations should be in a room used merely for transacting business.



Some prefer antiques a bit dilapidated; a missing detail serving as a hallmark to calm doubts; others insist upon completeness to the eye and solidity for use; while the connoisseur, with unlimited means, recognizes nothing less than signed sofas and chairs, and other objects d'art. To repeat: be always on the lookout, remembering that it is the man who knows the points of a good dog, horse or car. Who can pick a winner?

Wonderful reproductions are made in New York City and other cities, and thousands bought every day. They are beautiful and desirable pieces of furniture, ornaments or silks; but the lover of antiques learns to detect, almost at a glance, the lack of that quality which a fine old piece has. It is not alone that the materials must be old. There is a certain quality gained from the long association of its parts. One knows when apiece has "found itself," as Kipling would put it Time gives an inimitable finish to any surface.

If you are young in years, immature in taste, and limited as to bank account, you will doubtless go in for a frankly modern room, with cheerful painted furniture, gay or soft-toned chintzes, and inexpensive smart floor coverings. To begin this way and gradually to collect what you want, piece by piece, is to get the most amusement possible out of furnishing. When you have the essential pieces for any one room, you can undertake an ensemble. Some of the rarest collections have been got together in this way, and, if one's fortune expands instead of contracting, old pieces may be always replaced by those still more desirable, more rare, more in keeping with your original scheme.

To buy expensive furnishings in haste and without knowledge, and within a year or two discover everything to be in bad taste, is a tragedy to a person with an instinctive aversion to waste. Antique or modern, every beautiful thing bought is a cherished heirloom in embryo. Remember, we may inherit a good antique or object d'art, buy one, or bequeath one. Let us never be guilty of the reverse, a bar-sinister piece of furniture! Sympathy with unborn posterity should make us careful.

It is always excusable to retain an ugly, inartistic thing if it is useful; but an ornament must be beautiful in line or in color, or it belies its name. Practice that genuine, obvious loyalty, which hides away on a safe, but invisible shelf, the bad taste of our ancestors and friends.

Having settled upon a type of furniture, turn your attention to the walls. Always let the location of your room decide the color of its walls. The room with a sunny exposure may have any color you like, warm or cold, but your north room or any room more or less sunless, requires the warm, sun-producing yellows, pinks, apple-greens, beige and wood-colors, never the cold colors, such as grays, mauves, violets and blues, unless in combination with the warm tones. If it is your intention to hang pictures on the walls, use plain papers. Remember you must never put a spot on a spot! The color of your walls once established, keep in mind two things: that to be agreeable to the artistic eye your ceilings must be lighter than your sidewalls, and your floors darker. Broadly speaking, it is Nature's own arrangement, green trees and hillsides, the sky above, and the dark earth beneath our feet. A ceiling, if lighter in tone than the walls, gives a sense of airiness to a room. Floors, whether of exposed wood, completely carpeted, or covered by rugs, must be enough darker than your sidewalls to "hold down your room," as the decorators say.

If color is to play a conspicuous part, brightly figured silks and cretonnes being used for hangings and upholstery, the floor covering should be indefinite both as to color and design. On the other hand, when rugs or carpets are of a definite design in pronounced colors, particularly if you are arranging a living room, make your walls, draperies and chair-covers plain, and observe great restraint in the use of color. Those who work with them knows that there is no such thing as an ugly color, for all colors are beautiful. Whether a color makes a beautiful or an ugly effect depends entirely upon its juxtaposition to other tones. How well French milliners and dressmakers understand this! To make the point quite clear, let us take magenta. Used alone, nothing has more style, more beautiful distinction, but in wrong combination magenta can be amazingly, depressingly ugly. Magenta with blue is ravishing, beautiful in the subtle way old tapestries are: it touches the imagination whenever that combination is found.

We grow up to, into, and out of color schemes. Each of the Seven Ages of Man has its appropriate setting in color as in line. One learns the dexterous manipulation of color from furnishing, as an artist learns from painting.








Another View of the Same Office - The table is modern, but made on the lines of a refectory table, well suited in length, width and solidity for board meetings, etc. The chairs are Italian in style.

Refuse to accept a color scheme, unless it appeals to your individual taste no matter who suggests it. To one not very sensitive to color here is a valuable suggestion. Find a bit of beautiful old silk brocade, or a cretonne you especially like, and use its color combinations for your rooms usual device of decorators. Let us suppose your silk or cretonne to have a deep-cream background, and scattered on it green foliage, faded salmon-pink roses and little, fine blue flowers.

Use its prevailing color, the deep cream, for walls and possibly woodwork; make the draperies of taffeta or rep in soft apple-greens; use the same color for upholstery, make shades for lamp and electric lights of salmon-pink, then bring in a touch of blue in a sofa cushion, a footstool or small chair, or in a beautiful vase which charms by its shape as well by reproducing the exact tone of blue you desire. There are some who insist no room is complete without its note of blue. Many a room has been built up around some highly prized treasure, a lovely vase or an old Japanese print.

A thing always to be avoided is monotony in color. Who cannot recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look if you scattered flowers about it, roses, tulips, mignonette, flowers of yellow and blue, in the pell-mell confusion of a blooming garden. Now imitate the flower colors by objects d'art so judiciously placed that in a trice you will admire what you once found cold. As if by magic, a white, cream, beige or grey room may be transformed into a smiling bower, teeming with personality, a room where wit and wisdom are spontaneously let loose.

If your taste be for chintzes and figured silks, take it as a safe rule, that given a material with a light background, it should be the same in tone as your walls; the idea being that by this method you get the full decorative value of the pattern on chintz or silk.

Figured materials can increase or diminish the size of a room, open up vistas, push back your walls, or block the vision. For this reason it is unsafe to buy material before trying the effect of it in its destined abode.

Remember that the matter of background is of the greatest importance when arranging your furniture and ornaments. See that your piano is so placed that the pianist has an unbroken background, of wall, tapestry, a large piece of rare old silk, or a mirror. Clyde Fitch, past master at interior decoration, placed his piano in front of broad windows, across which at night were drawn crimson damask curtains. Some of us will never forget Geraldine Farrar, as she sat against that background wearing a dull, clinging blue-green gown, going over the score, from memory, of "Salome."

The aim is to make the performer at the piano the object of interest, therefore place no diverting objects, such as pictures or ornaments, on a line with the listener's eye, except as a vague background.

There can be no more becoming setting for a group of people dining by candle or electric light, than walls paneled with dark wood to the ceiling, or a high wainscoting.

A beautiful sitting-room, not to be forgotten, had light violet walls, dull-gold frames on the furniture which was covered in deep-cream brocades, bits of old purple velvets and violet silks on the tables, under large bowls of Benares bronze filled with violets. The grand piano was protected by a piece of old brocade in faded yellows, and our hostess, a well-known singer, usually wore a simple Florentine tea-gown of soft violet velvet, which together with the lighter violet walls, set off her fair skin and black hair to beautiful advantage.

Put a figured, many-colored sofa cushion behind the head of a pretty woman, and if the dominating color is becoming to her, she is still pretty, but change it to a solid black, purple or dull-gold and see how instantly the degree of her beauty is enhanced by being thrown into relief.

Study values just why and how much any decorative article decorates, and remember in furnishing a room, decorating a wall or dining-room table, it is not the intrinsic value or individual beauty of any one article which counts. Each picture on the wall, each piece of furniture, each bit of silver, glass, china, linen or lace, each yard of chintz or silk, every carpet or rug must be beautiful and effective in relation to the others used, for the art of interior decoration lies in this subtle, or obvious, relationship of furnishings.

We acknowledge as legitimate all schemes of interior decoration and insist that what makes any scheme good or bad, successful, or unsuccessful presuming a knowledge of the fundamentals of the art, is the fact that it is planned in reference to the type of man or woman who is to live in it.

A new note has been struck of late in the arranging of bizarre, delightful rooms, which on entering we pronounce "very amusing."

Original they certainly are, in color combinations, tropical in the impression they make, or should we say Oriental?

They have come to us via Russia, Bakst, Munich and Martine of Paris. Like Reinhardt’s staging of "Sum run," because these blazing interiors strike us at an unaccustomed angle, some are merely astonished, others charmed as well. There are temperaments ideally set in these interiors, and there are houses; where they are in place. We cannot regard them as epoch-making, but granted that there is no attempt to conform to two of the rules for furnishing, appropriateness and practicality; the results are refreshingly new and entertaining.


Corner of Room, Showing Painted Furniture; Antique and Modern-Gives an attractive corner by a window, the heavy silk brocade curtains of which are drawn. A standard electric lamp lights the desk, both modern-painted pieces, and the beautiful old flower picture, black background with a profusion of colors in lovely soft tones, is framed by a dull-gold moulding and gives immense distinction. The chair is Venetian Louis XV, the same period as desk in style.

Not to be ignored in this picture is a tin scrap basket beautifully proportioned and painted a vivid emerald green; a valuable addition as a note of cheerful color. The desk and wooden standard of lamp are painted a deep blue-plum color, touched with gold, and the silk curtains are soft mulberry, in two tones.

This is one of the instances where exaggeration has served as a healthy antidote to the tendency toward extreme dinginess rampant about ten years ago, resulting from an obsession to antique everything. The reaction from this, a flaming rainbow of colors, struck a blow to the artistic sense, drew attention back to the value of color and started the creative impulse along the line of a happy medium.

Whether it be a furnished porch, personal suite (as bedroom, boudoir and bath), a family living-room, dining-room, formal reception-room, or period ballroom, never allow members of your household or servants to destroy the effect you have achieved with careful thought and outlay of money, by ruthlessly moving chairs and tables from one room to another. Keep your wicker furniture on the porch, for which it was intended. If it strays into the adjacent living-room, done in quite another scheme, it will absolutely thwart your efforts at harmony, while your porch-room done in wicker and gay chintzes, striped awnings and geranium rail-boxes, cries out against the intrusion of a chair dragged out from the house. Remember that should you intend using your period ballroom from time to time as an audience room for concerts and lectures, you must provide a complete equipment of small, very light (so as to be quickly moved) chairs, in your "period," as a necessary part of your decoration.

The current idea that a distinguished room remains distinguished because costly tapestries and old masters hang on its walls, even when the floor is strewn with vulgar, hired chairs, is an absurd mistake. Each room from kitchen to ballroom is a stage "set,” a harmonious background for certain scenes in life's drama. It is the man or woman who grasps this principle of a distinguished home who can create an interior which endures, one which will hold its own despite the ebb and flow of fashion. Imposing dimensions and great outlay of money do not necessarily imply distinction, a quality depending upon unerring good taste in the minutest details, one which may be achieved equally in a stately mansion, in a city flat, or in a cottage by the sea.

The question of background is absorbingly interesting. A vase, with or without flowers, to add to the composition of your room, that is, to make "a good picture," must be placed so that its background sets it off. Let the Venetian glass vase holding one rose stand in such a position that your green curtain is its background, and not a photograph or other picture. One flower, carefully placed in a room, will have more real decorative value than dozens of costly roses strewn about in the wrong vases, against mottled, line-destroying backgrounds.

Flowers are always more beautiful in a plain vase, whether of glass, pottery, porcelain or silver. If a vase chances to have a decoration in color, then make a point of having the flowers it holds accord in color, if not in shade, with the color or colors in the vase.

There is a general rule that no ornament should ever be placed in front of a picture. The exception to this rule occurs when the picture is one of the large, architectural varieties, whose purpose is primarily mural decoration, an intentional background, as tapestries often are, serving its purpose as nature does when a vase or statue is placed in a park or garden. One sees in portraits by some of the old masters this idea of landscape used as background. Bear in mind, however, that if there is a central design a definite composition in the picture, or tapestry, no ornament should ever be so placed as to interfere with it. If you happen to own a tapestry which is not large enough for your space by one, two or three feet, frame it with a plain border of velvet or velveteen, to match the dominating color, and a shade darker than it appears in the tapestry. This expedient heightens the decorative effect of the tapestry.
















CHAPTER IV

HOW TO DETERMINE CHARACTER OF HANGINGS AND FURNITURE-COVERING FOR A GIVEN ROOM

|N a measure, the materials for hangings and furniture-coverings are determined more or less by the amount one wishes to spend in this direction. For choice, one would say silk or velvet for formal rooms; velvets, corduroys or chintz for living rooms; leather and corduroy with rep hangings for a man's study or smoking-room; thin silks and chintz for bedrooms; chintz for nurseries, breakfast-rooms and porches.

In England, slipcovers of chintz (glazed cretonne) appear, also, in formal rooms; but are removed when the owner is entertaining. If the permanent upholstery is of chintz, then at once your room becomes informal. If you are planning the living-room for a small house or apartment, which must serve as reception-room during the winter months, far more dignity, and some elegance can be obtained for the same expenditure, by using plain velveteen, modern silk brocades in one color, or some of the modern reps to be had in very smart shades of all colors.

If your furniture is choice, rarely beautiful in quality, line and color, hangings and covers must accord. Genuine antiques demand antique silks for hangings and table covers; but no decorator, if at all practical, will cover a chair or sofa in the frail old silks, for they go to pieces almost in the mounting. Waive sentiment in this case, for the modern reproductions are satisfactory to the eye and improve in tone with age.

If you own only a small piece of antique silk, make a square of it for the centre of the table, or cleverly combine several small bits, if these are all you have, into an interesting cover or cushion. Nothing in the world gives such a note of distinction to a room as the use of rare, old silks, properly placed.

The fashion for cretonne and chintz has led to their indiscriminate use by professionals as well as amateurs, and this craze has caused a prejudice against them. Chintz used with judgment can be most attractive. In America the term chintz includes cretonne and stamped linen. If you are planning for them, put together, for consideration, all your bright colored chintz, and in quite another part of your room, or decorator's shop, the chintz of dull, faded colors, as they require different treatment. A general rule for this material bright or dull is that if you would have your chintz decorate, be careful not to use it too lavishly. If it is intended for curtains, then cover only one chair with it and cover the rest in a solid color. If you want chintz for all of your chairs and sofa, make your curtains, sofa cushions and lampshades of a solid color, and be sure that you take one of the leading colors in the chintz. Next indicate your intention at harmony, by "bringing together" the plain curtains or chairs, and your chintz, with a narrow fringe or border of still another color, which figures in the chintz. Let us suppose chintz to be black with a design in greens, mulberry and buff.

Make your curtains plain mulberry, edged with narrow pale green fringe with black and buff in it, or should your chintz be grey with a design in faded blues and violets and a touch of black, make curtains of the chintz, and cover one large chair, keeping the sofa and the remaining chairs grey, with the bordering fringe, or gimp, in one or two of the other shades, sofa cushions and the lamp shades in blues and violets (lining lamp shades with thin pink silk), and use a little black in the bordering fringe.

If you decide upon very brilliant chintz use it only in one chair, a screen, or in a valance over plain curtains with straps to hold them back, or perhaps a sofa cushion. Whether chintz is bright or dull, its pattern is important. As with silks, brocaded in different colors, therefore never use chintz where a chair or sofa calls for tufting. A tufted piece of furniture always looks best done in plain materials.

In using chintz in which both color and design are indefinite, the kind that gives more or less an impression of faded tapestry, you will find that the very indefiniteness of the pattern makes it possible to use the chintz with more freedom, being always sure of a harmonious background. The one thing to guard against is that on entering a room you must not be conscious either of several colors, or of any set design.

The story of the evolution of textiles (any woven material) is fascinating, and like the history of every art, runs parallel with the history of culture and progress in the art of living, physical, mental and spiritual.








Example of a Perfect Mantel, Ornaments and Mirror - Shows an ideal mantel arrangement, faultless as a composition and beautiful and rare in detail. The exquisite white marble mantel is Italian, not French, of the time of Louis XVI.

Though the designs of this period are almost identical, one quickly learns to detect the difference in feeling between the works of the two countries. The Italians are freer, broader in their treatment, show more movement and in a way more grace, where the French work is more detailed and precise, hence at times, by contrast, seems stilted and rigid.

Enchantingly graceful are the two candelabra, also Louis XVI, while the central ornament is ideally chosen for size and design.

The dull gold frame of the mirror is very beautiful, and the painting above the glass interesting and unusual as to subject and execution.

The chair is a good example of Italian Louis XV.


The first European silk is said to have been in the form of transparent gauze, dyed lovely tones for women of the Greek islands, a form of costume later condemned by Greek philosophers.

We know that embroidery was an art three thousand years ago, in fact the figured garments seen on the Assyrian and Egyptian bas-reliefs are supposed to represent materials with embroidered figures not woven patterns where as in the Bible, when we read of embroidery, according to the translators, this sometimes means woven stripes.

The earliest garments of Egypt were of cotton and hemp, or mallow, resembling flax. The older Egyptians never knew silks in any form, nor did the Israelites, nor any of the ancients. The earliest account of this material is given by Aristotle (fourth century). It was brought into Western Europe from China, via India, the Red Sea and Persia, and the first to weave it outside the Orient was a maiden on the Isle of Cos, off the coast of Asia Minor, producing a thin gauze-like tissue worn by her and companions, the material resembling the Seven Veils of Salome. To-day those tiny bits of gauze one sees laid in between the leaves of old manuscript to protect the illuminations, as our publishers use sheets of tissue paper, are said to be examples of this earliest form of woven silk.

The Romans used silk at first only for their women, as it was considered not a masculine material, but gradually they adopted it for the festival robes of men, Titus and Vespasian being among those said to have worn it.

The first silk looms were set up in the royal palaces of the Roman kings in the year 533 A. D. The raw material was brought from the East for a long time but in the sixth century two Greek monks, while in China, studied the method of rearing silk worms and obtaining the silk, and on their departure are said to have concealed the eggs of silk worms in their staves. They are accredited with introducing the manufacture of silk into Greece and hence into Western Europe. After that Greece, Persia and Asia Minor made this material, and Byzantium was famed for its silks, the actual making of which got into the hands of the Jews and was for a long time controlled by them.

Metals (gold, silver and copper) were flattened out and cut into narrow strips for winding around cotton twists. These were the gold and silver threads used in weaving. The Moors and Spaniards instead of metals used strips of gilded parchment for weaving with the silk.



Dining room in Country House, Showing Modern Painted Furniture. Style Directories ideal dining room of its kind, modern painted furniture, Empire in design. In this case yellow with decoration in white; Curtains, thin yellow silk.

Note the Empire electric light fixtures in hand-carved gilded wood, reproductions of an antique silver appliqué.

Even the steam radiators are here cleverly concealed by wooden cases made after Empire designs.

The walls are white and paneled in wood also white.



We know that England was weaving silk in the thirteenth century, and velvets seem to have been used at a very early date. The introduction of silk and velvet into different countries had an immediate and much-needed influence in civilizing the manners of society. It is hard to realize that in the thirteenth century when Edward I married Eleanor of Castile, the highest nobles of England when resting at their ease, stretched at full length on the straw-covered floors of baronial halls, and jeered at the Spanish courtiers who hung the walls and stretched the floors of Edward's castle with silks in preparation for his Spanish bride.

The progress of art and culture was always from the East and moved slowly. Do not go so far back as the thirteenth century. James I of England owned no stockings when he was James VI of Scotland, and had to borrow a pair in which to receive the English ambassador.

In the eleventh century Italy manufactured her own silks, and into them were woven precious stones, corals, seed pearls and colored glass beads that were made in Greece and Venice, as well as gold and silver spangles (twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

Here is an item on interior decorations from Proverbs vii, 16: "I have woven my bed with cords, I have covered it with painted tapestry brought from Egypt." There were painted tapestries made in Western Europe at a very early date, and collectors eagerly seek them (see Plate XIV). In the fourteenth century these painted tapestries were referred to as "Stained Cloth."

Embroidery as an art, as we have already seen, antedates silk weaving. The youngest of the three arts is tapestry. The oldest embroidery stitches are: "the feather stitch," so called because they all took one direction, the stitches over-lapping, like the feathers of a bird; and "cross-stitch" or "cushion" style, because used on church cushions, made for kneeling when at prayer or to hold the Mass book.

Hand-woven tapestries are called "comb-wrought" because the instrument used in weaving was comb-like.

"Cut-work" is embroidery that is cut out and appliquéd, or sewed on another material.

Carpets, which were used in Western Europe, in the Middle Ages, are seldom seen. The Kensington Museum owns two specimens, both of them Spanish; one of the fourteenth and one of the fifteenth century.

In speaking of Gothic art we called attention to the fostering of art by the Church during the Dark Ages. This continued, and we find that in Henry VIIFs time those who visited monasteries and afterward wrote accounts of them call attention to the fact that each monk was occupied either with painting, carving, modeling, embroidering or writing. They worked primarily for the Church, decorating it for the glory of God, but the homes of the rich and powerful laity, even so early as the reign of Henry III (1216-1272), boasted some very beautiful interior decorations, tapestries, painted ceilings and stained glass, as well as carved paneling.

Bostwick Castle, Scotland, had its vaulted ceiling painted with towers, battlements and pinnacles, a style of mural decoration which one sees in the oldest castles of Germany. It recalls the illumination in old manuscripts.




























CHAPTER V

CANDLESTICKS, LAMPS, FIXTURES FOR GAS AND ELECTRICITY, AND SHADES

CANDLESTICKS, lamps, and fixtures for gas and electricity must accord with the lines of your architecture and furniture. The mantelpiece is the connecting link between the architecture and the furnishing of a room. It is the architect's contribution to the furnishing, and for this reason the keynote for the decorator.

In the same way lighting fixtures are links between the construction and decoration of a room, and can contribute to, or seriously divert from, the decorator's design.

It is important that fixtures be so placed as to appear a part of the decoration and not merely to illuminate conveniently a corner of the room, a writing desk, table or piano.

In planning your house after arranging for proper wall space for your various articles of furniture, keep in mind always that lights will be needed and must be at the same time conveniently placed and distinctly decorative.

One is astonished to see how often the careless placing of electric fixtures upsets the actual balance of a room. Therefore keep in mind when deciding upon the lighting of a room the following points: first, fixtures must follow in line style of architecture and furniture; second, the position of fixtures on walls must carry out the architect's scheme of proportion, line and balance; third, the material used in fixtures brass, gilded wood, glass or wrought iron must contribute to the decorator's scheme of line and color; fourth, as a contribution to color scheme the fixtures must be in harmony with the color of the side walls, so as not to cut them up, and the shade should be a light note of color, not one of the dark notes when illuminated.

This brings us to the question of shades. The selecting of shapes and colors for shading the lights in your rooms is of the greatest importance, for the shades are one of the harmonics for striking important color notes, and their value must be equal by day and by night; that is, equally great, even if different. Some shades, beautiful and decorative by daylight, when illuminated, lose their color and become meaningless blots in a room.


Dining-room Furniture, Italian Renaissance

The dining room of this apartment is Italian Renaissance oak, almost black from age, and carved.

The seat pads and lambrequin over window are of deep red velvet. The walls are stretched with dull red brocatelle (a combination of silk and linen), very old and valuable. The chandelier is Italian carved wood, gilded.

Attention is called to the treatment of the windows. No curtains are used, instead, boxes are planted with ivy which is trained to climb the green lattice and helps to temper the light, while the window shades themselves are of a fascinating glazed linen, having a soft yellow background and design of fruit and vines in brilliant colors.









We have in mind a large silk lamp shade of faded sage green, mauve, faun and a dull blue, the same combination appearing in the fringe combination not only beautiful, but harmonizing perfectly with the old Gothic tapestry on the nearby wall. Nothing could be more decorative in this particular room during the day than the shade described; but were it not for the shell pink lining, gleaming through the silk of the shade when lighted, it would have no decorative value at all at night.

In ordering or making shades, be sure that you select colors and materials, which produce a diffused light. A soft thin pink silk as a lining for a silk or cretonne shade is always successful, and if a delicate pink, never clashes with the colors on the outside. A white silk lining is cold and unbecoming. A dark shade unlined, or a light colored shade unlined, even if pink, unless the silk is shirred very full, will not give a diffused, yellow light.

It is because Italian parchment-paper produces the desired glow of light that it has become so popular for making shades, and, coming as it does in deep soft cream, it gives a lovely background for decorations, which in line and color can carry out the style of your room.

Figured Italian papers are equally popular for shades, but their characteristic is to decorate the room by daylight only, and to impart no quality to the light, which they shade. Unless in pale colors, they stop the light, absolutely, throwing it down, if on a lamp, and back against the wall, if on side brackets. Therefore decorators now cut out the lovely designs on these figured papers and use them as appliqués on a deep cream parchment background.

When you decide upon the shape of your shades do not forget that successful results depend upon absolutely correct proportions. Almost any shape, if well proportioned as to height and width, can be made beautiful, and the variety and effect desired, may be secured by varying the colors, the design of decoration, if any, or the texture or the length of fringe.

The "umbrella" shades with long chiffon curtains reaching to the table, not unlike a woman's hat with loose-hanging veil, make a charming and practical lamp shade for a boudoir or a woman's summer sitting-room, especially if furnished in lacquer or wicker. It is a light to rest or talk by, neither for reading nor writing.

The greatest care is required in selecting shades for sidewall lights, because they quickly catch the eye upon entering a room and materially contribute to its appearance or detract from it.








































CHAPTER VI

WINDOW SHADES AND AWNINGS

THE first thing to consider in selecting window shades when furnishing a house is whether their color harmonizes with the exterior. Keeping this point in mind, further limit your selection to those colors and tones, which harmonize with your color schemes for the interior. If you use white net or scrim, your shades must be white, and if ecru net, your shades must be ecru. If the outside of your house calls for one color in shades and the interior calls for another, use two sets. Your dark-green sunshades never interfere, as they can always be covered by the inner set. Sometimes the dark green harmonizes with the coloring of the rooms.

A room often needs, for sake of balance, to be weighted by color on the window sides more than your heavy curtains (silk or cretonne) contribute when drawn back; in such a case decorators use colored gauze for sash curtains in one, two or three shades and layers, which are so filmy and delicate both in texture and coloring that they allow air and light to pass through them, the effect being charming.

Another way to obtain the required color value at your windows is the revival of glazed linens, with beautiful colored designs, made up into shades. These are very attractive in a sunny room where the strong light brings out the design of flowers, fruits or foliage. Plate X shows a room in which this style of shade is used with great success. It is to be especially commended in such a case as Plate X, where no curtains are used at windows. Here the figured linen shade is a deliberate contribution to the decorative scheme of the room and completes it as no other material could.

Awnings can make or mar a house, give it style or keep it in the class of the commonplace. So choose carefully with reference to the color of your house. The fact that awnings show up at a great distance and never "in the hand," as it were, argues in favor of clear stripes, in two colors and of even size, with as few extra threads of other colors as possible.

All awnings fade, even in one season; green is, perhaps, the least durable in the sun, yellows and browns look well the longest Fortunately an awning, a discouraging sight when taken down and in a collapsed mass of faded canvas, will often look well when up and stretched, because the strong light brings out the fresh color of the inside. Hence one finds these rather expensive necessities of summer homes may be used for several seasons.

Corner of Dining-room in New York Apartment, Showing Section of Italian Refectory Table and Italian Chairs, Both Antique and Renaissance
Shows a part of a fine, old Italian refectory table, and one of the chairs, also antiques, which are beautifully proportioned and made comfortable with cushions of dark red velvet, in color like curtains at window, which are of silk brocade.
The standard electric lamps throw the light up only. There are four, one in each corner of the room, and candles light the table.
The wall decoration here is a flower picture.

CHAPTER VII

TREATMENT OF PICTURES AND PICTURE FRAMES

STRIVE to have the subject of your pictures appropriate to the room in which they are to be hung. i. It is impossible to state a rule for this, however, because while there are many styles of pictures which all are able to classify, such as old paintings which are antique in coloring, method and subject, portraits, figure pictures, architectural pictures, flower and fruit pictures, modern oil paintings of various subjects (modern in subject, method and coloring), water colors, etchings, sporting prints, fashion prints, etc., there is, also, a subtle relationship between them seen and felt only by the connoisseur, which leads him to hang in the same room, portraits, architectural pictures and flower pictures, with beautiful and successful results. Often the relationship hangs on similarity in period, style of painting or color scheme. Your expert will see decorative value in a painting, which has neither individual beauty nor intrinsic worth when taken out of a particular setting.

The selecting of pictures for a room hinges first on their decorative value. That is, they’re color and size, and whether the subjects are appropriate and sympathetic.

Always avoid heavy gold frames on paintings, for, unless they are real objects of art, one gets far more distinction by using a narrow black moulding. When in doubt always leans toward the side of simplicity?

If your object is economy as well as simplicity, and you are by chance just beginning to furnish your house and own no pictures, we would suggest good photographs of your favorite old masters, framed close, without a margin, in the passé partout method (glass with a narrow black paper tape binding).

Old colored prints need narrow black passé partout, while broad passé partout in pink, blue or pale green to match the leading tone in wallpaper makes your quaint, old black-and-white prints very decorative.

Never use white margins on any pictures unless your walls are white.

The decorative value of any picture when hung, is dependent upon its background, the height at which it is hung, its position with regard to the light, its juxtaposition to other pictures, and the character of those other pictures that is, their subjects, color and line.
If you are buying pictures to hang in a picture gallery, there is nothing to consider beyond the attraction of the individual picture in mind. But if you are buying a picture to hang on the walls of a room which you are furnishing, you have first to consider it as pure decoration; that is, to ask yourself if in color, period and subject it carries out the idea of your room.

A modern picture is usually out of place in a room furnished with antiques. In the same way a strictly modern room is not a good setting for an old picture, if toned by time.

If you own or would own a modern portrait or landscape and it is the work of an artist, and beautiful in color, why not "star" it, build your room up to it? If you decide to do this, see that everything else representing color is either subservient to the picture, or if of equal value as to color, that they harmonize perfectly with the picture in mind.

We were recently shown a painting giving a view of Central Park from the Plaza Hotel, New York, under a heavy fall of snow, in the late afternoon, when the daylight still lingered, although the electric lights had begun to spangle the scene. The prevailing tone was a delicate, opalescent white, shading from blue to mauve, and we were told that one of our leading decorators intended to hang it in a blue room, which he was furnishing for a New York client.

Etchings are at their best with other etchings, engravings or watercolors, and should be hung in rooms flooded with light and delicately furnished.

The crowding of walls with pictures is always bad; hang only as many as furnish the walls, and have these on a line with the eye and when the pictures vary but slightly in size make a point of having either the tops of the frames 'or the bottoms on the same line, that is, an equal
Distance from floor or ceiling. If this rule is observed a sense of order and restfulness is communicated to the observer.

If one picture is hung over the other uniformity and balance must be preserved. Two smaller ones may balance one large picture.

Hang your miniatures in a straight line across your wall, under a large picture or in a straight line one under the other, down a narrow wall panel.



An Italian Louis XVI Salon in a New York Apartment

From a studio one enters a smaller room, one side of which is shown here, a veritable Italian Louis XVI salon.















CHAPTER VIII

TREATMENT OF PIANO CASES

PROFESSIONAL pianist invariably prefers the case of his or her piano left in its simple ebony or mahogany, and would not approve of its being relegated to the furniture department and decorated accordingly, any more than your violinist, or harpist, would hand over his violin, or harp, for decoration.

When a piano, however, is not the centre of interest in a house, and the artistic ensemble of 'decorative line and color is, the piano case is often ordered at the piano factory to be made to accord in line with the period of the room for which it is intended, after which it is decorated so as to harmonize with the colors in the room. This can be done through the piano factory; but in the case of redecorating a room, one can easily get some independent artist to do this work, a man who has made a study of the decorations on old spinets in palaces, private mansions and museums. Some artists have been very successful in converting what was an inartistic piece of furniture as to size, outline and color, into an object which became a pleasing portion of the color scheme because in proper relation to the whole.

You can always make an ebony or mahogany piano case more in harmony with its setting by covering it, when not in use, with a piece of beautiful old brocade, or a modern reproduction.



















Another Side of Same Italian Louis XVI Salon

The tea table is a modern painted convenience, the two vases are Italian pharmacy jars and the standard for electric lights is a modern-painted piece.















CHAPTER IX

TREATMENT OF DINING-ROOM BUFFETS AND DRESSING TABLES

DINING-ROOM buffet requires the same dignity of treatment demanded by a mantelpiece, whether the silver articles kept on it be of great or small intrinsic value. Here, as in every case, appropriateness dictates the variety of articles, and the observance of the rule that there shall be no crowding nor disorder in the placing of articles insures that they contribute decorative value; in a word, the size of your buffet limits the amount of silver, glass, etc., to be placed upon it.

The variety and number of articles on a dressing-table are subject to the same two laws: that is, every article must be useful and in line and color accord with the deliberate scheme of your room, and there must be no crowding nor disorder, no matter how rare or beautiful the toilet articles are.


























CHAPTER X

TREATMENT OF WORK TABLES, BIRD CAGES, DOG BASKETS AND FISH GLOBES

VERY bedroom planned for a woman, young or old, calls for a work table, work basket or work bag, or all three, and these furnish opportunities for additional "flowers" in your room; for we insist upon regarding accessories as opportunities for extra color notes which harmonize with the main color scheme and enliven your interior quite as flowers would, cheering it up and, incidentally, its inmates! Apropos of this, it was only the other day that some one remarked in our hearing, "This room is so blooming with lovely bits of color in lamp shades, pillows, and objets d'art, that I no longer spend money on cut flowers." There we have it! Precisely the idea we are trying to express. So make your worktable, if you own the sort with a silk workbag
Suspended from the lower part, your workbasket or workbag, represent one, two or three of the colors in your room.

If some one gives you an inharmonious workbag, either build a room up to it, or give it away, but never hang it out in a room done in an altogether different color scheme.

Birdcages, dog-baskets and fish-globes may become harmonious instead of jarring color notes, if one will give a little thought to the matter. In fact some of the black iron wrought cages when occupied by a wonderful parrot with feathers of blue and orange, red and grey, or red, blue and yellow, can be the making of certain rooms. And there are canaries with deep orange feathers, which look most decorative in cages painted dark green, as well as the many-colored parquet, lovely behind golden bars.

Many a woman when selecting a dog has bought one, which harmonized with her costume, or got a costume to set off her dog! Certainly a dark or light brindle bull is a perfect addition to a room done in browns, as is a red Chow or a tortoise-shell cat

See to it that cage and basket set off your bird, dog or cat; but don't let them become too conspicuous notes of color in your room or on your porch; let it be the bird, the dog or the cat which has a color value.

The fish-globe can be of white or any color glass you prefer, and your fish vivid or pale in tone; whichever it is, be sure that they furnish a needed not a superfluous tone of color in a room or on a porch.

A Narrow Hall Where Effect of Width Is Attained by Use of Tapestry
With Vista

Shows narrow hall in an old country house, thought impossible as to appearance, but made charming by "pushing out" the wall with an antique painted tapestry and keeping all woodwork and carpets the same delicate dove grey.

CHAPTER XI

TREATMENT OF FIREPLACES

NOTHING is ever more attractive than the big open fireplace, piled with blazing logs, and with firedogs or andirons of brass or black iron, as may accord with the character of your room. If yours is a period room it is possible to get andirons to match, veritable old ones, by paying for them. The attractiveness of a fireplace depends largely upon its proportions. To look well it should always be wider than high, and deep enough to insure that the smoke goes up the chimney, and not out into your room. If your fireplace smokes you may need a special flue, leading from fireplace to proper chimney top, or a brass hood put on front of the fireplace.

Using the wrong kind of tiles to frame them spoils many otherwise attractive fireplaces. Shiny, enameled tiles in any color are
Bad, and pressed red brick of the usual sort in equally bad, so if you are planning the fireplace of an informal room, choose tiles with a dull finish or brick with a simple rough finish. In period rooms often-beautiful light or heavy moulding entirely frame the three sides of the fireplace when it is of wood. Well-designed marble mantels are always desirable. This feature of decoration is distinctly within the province of your architect, one reason more why he and the interior decorator, whether professional or amateur, should continually confer while building or rebuilding a house.

For coal fires we have a variety of low, broad grates; as well as reproductions of Colonial grates, which are small and swung high between brass uprights, framing the fireplace, with an ash drawer, the front of which is brass. If you prefer the old, one can find this variety of grate in antique shops as well as "Franklin stoves" (portable open fireplaces).

If your rooms are heated with steam, cover the radiators with wooden frames in line with the period of your room cut in open designs to allow heat to come through, and painted to match the woodwork of the room.

Let the fireplace be the centre of attraction in your room and draw about it comfortable chairs, sofas and settles; make it easy to enjoy its hospitable blaze.


CHAPTER XII

TREATMENT OF BATHROOMS

SUMPTUOUS bathrooms are not modern inventions; on the contrary the bath was a religion with the ancient Greeks, and a luxury to the early Italians. What we have to say here is in regard to the bath as a necessity for all classes.

The treatment of bathrooms has become an interesting branch of interior decoration, whereas once it was left entirely to the architect and plumber.

First, one has to decide whether the bathroom is to be finished in conventional white enamel, which cannot be surpassed for dainty appearance and sanitary cleanliness. Equally dainty to look at and offering the same degree of sanitary cleanliness is a bathroom enameled in some delicate tone to accord a color with the bedroom with which it connects.

Some go so far as to make the bathroom the same color as the bedroom, even when this is dark. We have in mind a bath opening out of a man's bedroom. The bedroom is decorated in dull blues, taupe and mulberry.

The bathroom has the walls painted in broad stripes of dull blue and taupe, the stripes being quite six inches wide. The floor is tiled in large squares of the same blue and taupe; the tub and other furnishings are in dull blue enamel, and the wall-cabinets (one for shaving brushes, tooth brushes, etc., another for shaving cups, medicine glasses, drinking glasses, etc., and the third for medicines, soaps, etc.) are painted a dull mulberry.

Built into the front of each cabinet door is an old colored print covered with glass and framed with dull blue moulding and on the inside of each cabinet door is a mirror. One small closet in the bathroom is large enough to towels and holds a soiled clothesbasket. On the inside of both doors are full-length mirrors.







Venetian Glass, Antique and Modern

This illustration speaks for itself fruit dishes and fruit, candlesticks, covered jars for dried rose leaves, finger bowls, powder boxes, flower vases and scent bottles all of Venetian Glass in exquisite shades.

The criticism that mirrors in men's bathrooms are necessarily an effeminate touch, can be refuted by the statement that so sturdy a soldier as the Great Napoleon had his dressing room at Fontainebleau lined with them!

This fact reminds us that we have recently seen a most fascinating bathroom, planned for a woman, in which the walls and ceiling are of glass, cut in squares and fitted together in the old French way. Over the glass was a dull-gold trellis and twined in and out of this, ivy, absolutely natural in appearance, but made of painted tin.

The floor tiles, and fixtures were white enamel, and a soft moss-green velvet carpet was laid down when the bath was not used.

Bathroom fixtures are today so elaborate in number and quality, that the conveniences one gets are limited only by one's purse. The leading manufacturers have anticipated the dreams of the most luxurious.

Window-curtains for bathrooms should be made of some material, which will neither fade nor pull out of shape when washed. We would suggest scrim, Swiss, or China silk of a good quality.

When buying bath mats, bathrobes, bath-slippers, bath-towels, washcloths and hand-towels, it is easy to keep in mind the color scheme of your rooms, and by following it out, the general appearance of your suite is immensely improved.

For a woman's bathroom, Venetian glass bottles, covered jars and bowls of every size, come in opalescent pale greens and other delicate tints. See Plate XI. Then there are the white glass bottles, jars, bowls, and trays with bunches of dashing pink roses, to be obtained at any good department store. Glass toilet articles come in considerable variety and at all prices, and to match any color scheme; so use them as notes of color on the glass shelves in your bathrooms. Here, too, is an opportunity to use your old Bristol or Bohemian glass, once regarded as inherited eyesores, but now unearthed, and which, when used to contribute to a color scheme, have a distinct value and real beauty.

Today a bathroom is considered the necessary supplement to every bedroom in an apartment or house, where the space allows, and no house is regarded as a good investment if built with less than one bath to communicate with every two rooms. Yet among the advertisements in the New York City Directory of 1828 we read the following naive statement concerning warm baths, which is meant in all seriousness. It refers to the "Arcade Bath" at 32 Chambers Street, New York City.

"The warm bath is more conducive to health than any luxury which can be employed in a populous city; its beneficial effects are partially described as follows:

"The celebrated Count Rumford has paid particular attention to the subject of Warm Bathing; he has examined it by the test of experiments, long and frequently repeated, and bears testimony to its excellent effects. 'It is not merely on account of the advantages,' says the count, 'which I happen to see from Warm Bathing, which renders me so much an advocate of the practice; exclusive of the wholesomeness of the warm bath, the luxury of bathing is so great, and the tranquil state of the mind and body which follows, is so exquisitely delightful, that I think it quite impossible to recommend it too highly, if we consider it merely as a rational and elegant refinement.


Corner Of A Room In A Empire Suite

The manner in which the warm bath operates, in producing the salutary consequences, seems very evident The genial warmth which is so applied to the skin in the place of the cold air of the atmosphere, by which we are commonly surrounded, expands all those very small vessels, where the extremities of the arteries and veins unite, and by gently stimulating the whole frame, produces a full and free circulation, which if continued for a certain time, removes all obstructions in the vascular system, and puts all the organs into that state of regular, free, and full motion which is essential to health, and also to that delightful repose, accompanied by a consciousness of the power of exertion, which constitutes the highest animal enjoyment of which we are capable.'

"N. B.: As the Bath is generally occupied on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, it is recommended to those who would wish to enjoy the Bath and avoid the crowded moment, to call at other times. The support of the public will be gratefully received and every exertion made to deserve it. For the Proprietor, G. Wright

"Strangers will recognize the Bathing House from the front being extended over two lots of ground, and the centre basement being of freestone.

The bathtub then was the simple tin sort, on the order of the round English tub. Today the variety of bathtubs as to size, shape, material and appointments is bewildering; tubs there are on feet and tubs without feet, tubs sunken in the floor so that one goes down steps into them, tubs of large dimensions and tubs of small, and all with or without "showers," as the purchaser may prefer. Truly the warm baths so highly recommended in Count Rumford's rhapsody are to be had for the turning of one's own faucet at any moment of the day or night!

The Count Rumford in question is that romantic figure, born of simple English parents, in New England (Woburn, Mass, 1753), who went abroad when very young and by the great force of his personality and genius, became the power behind the throne in Bavaria, where he was made Minister of War and Field Marshal by the Elector, and later knighted in recognition of his scientific attainments and innumerable civic reforms. There is a large monument erected to the memory of Count Rumford in Munich. He died at Auteuil, France, in 1814.





















CHAPTER XIII

PERIOD ROOMS

WE use the term "period rooms" with full knowledge of the difficulties involved, in defining Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Directoire, Jacobean, Empire, Georgian, Victorian and Colonial decorations. Each period certainly has its distinctive earmarks in line and typical decoration, but you must realize that a period gradually evolves, at first exhibiting characteristics of its ancestors, then as it matures, showing a definite new type, and, later, when the elation of success has worn off, yielding to various foreign influences. By way of example, note the Chinese decoration on some of the painted furniture of the Louis XVI type, the Dutch influence on Chippendale in line, and the Egyptian on Empire.

One fascinating way of becoming familiar with history is to delve into the origin and development of periods in furniture. The story of Napoleon is recorded in the unpretentious Directoire, the ornate Empire of Fontainebleau, while the conversion of round columns into obelisk-like pilasters surmounted by heads, the bronze and gilded-wood ornaments in the form of the Sphynx, are frank souvenirs of Egypt.

Every period, whether ascribed to England, France, Italy or Holland, has found expression in all adjacent countries. An Italian Louis XVI chair, mirror or appliqué is frequently sold in Paris or London as French and Empire furniture was "made in Germany." Periods have no restricted nationality; but nationality often declares itself in periods. That is to say, lines may be copied; but workmanship is another thing. Apropos of this take the French Empire furniture, massive as much of it is, built squarely and solidly to the floor, but showing most extraordinary grace on account of the amazing delicacy of intricate designs, done by the greatest French sculptors of the time and worked out in metal by the trained hands of men who had a special genius for this art. At no other time, nor in any other country, has an equal degree of perfection in the fine chiseling of metals so much as
Approached the standard attained during the Louis and the Empire periods. If in your wandering, you happen upon a genuine bit of this work in silver or ormoulu, buy it The writer once found in a New Jersey antique shop, a rare Empire bronze vase, urn-shaped, a specimen of the very finest kind of this metal engraving. The price asked for it (in ignorance, of course) was $2.50! The piece would have brought $40 in Paris. But the quest of the antique is another story.
When one realizes the eternal borrowing of one country from another, the ever-recurring renaissance of past periods and the legitimate and illegitimate mixing of styles, it is no wonder that the amateur feels nervously uncertain, or frankly ignorant. Many a professional decorator hesitates to give a final judgment.

To take one case in point, we glibly speak of "Colonial" furniture, that term which covers such a multitude of sins, and inspiring virtues, too! We have the Colonial, which closely resembles the Empire, and we have what is sometimes styled the Chippendale Colonial, following
Louis XIV, XV and XVI. The Chippendale of England. Our Colonial cabinet-makers used as models, beautiful pieces imported from England, Holland and France by the wealthier members of our communities.

Also a Chinese and Japanese influence crept in, on account of the lacquer and carved teak wood, brought home by our seafaring ancestors. It is quite possible that the carved teak wood stimulated the clever maker of some of the most beautiful Victorian furniture made in America, which is gradually finding its way into the hands of collectors.

Some of these cabinet-makers glued together and put under heavy pressure seven to nine layers of rosewood with the grain running at every angle, so as to produce strength. When the layers had been crushed into a solid block, they carved their open designs, using one continuous piece of wood for the ornamental rim of even large sofas.

The best of the Victorian period is attractive, but how can we express our opinion of those American monstrosities of the sixties or seventies, beds in rosewood and walnut, the head-boards covering the side of a room, bureaus proportionately huge, following out the idea that a piece of furniture to be beautiful must be very large and very expensive! It is to be hoped that wary cabinet-makers are to day rescuing the lovely rosewood and walnut wasted at that time.

The art of furniture making, like every other art, came into being to serve a clearly defined purpose. This must not be forgotten. A chair and a sofa are to sit on; a mirror, to reflect. Remember this last fact when hanging one.

It is important that your mirror reflect one of the most attractive parts of your room, and thus contributes its quota to your scheme of decoration. It is interesting to note that chairs were made with solid wooden seats when men wore armor, velvet cushions followed more fragile raiment, and tapestries while always mural decorations were first used in place of doors and partitions, in feudal castles, before there were interior doors and partitions.

Any piece of furniture is artistically bad when it does not satisfactorily serve its purpose. The equally fundamental law that everything useful should at the same time be beautiful cannot be repeated too often.

Period rooms which slavishly repeat, in every piece of furniture and ornament, only one type, have but a museum interest If your rooms are to serve as a home, give them a winning, human quality, keep before your mind's eye, not royal palaces which have become museums, but homes, built and furnished by men and women whose traditions and associations gave them standards of beauty, so that they bought the choicest furniture both at home and abroad.

In such a home, whether it be an intimate palace in Europe, a Colonial mansion in New England, or a Victorian interior of the best type, an extraneous period is often represented by some objet d'art as a delightful, because harmonious note of contrast.

For example, in a Louis XVI salon, where the color scheme is harmonious, one gradually realizes that one of the dominant ornaments in the room is a rare old Chinese vase, brought back from the Orient by one of the family and given a place of honor on account of its uniqueness.

Every one understands and feels deeply the difference between the museum palace or the period rooms of the commonplace decorator,
And such a marvelous, living, breathing, palatial home as that "Italian palace" in Boston, Massachusetts, created, not inherited, by Mrs. John L. Gardner.

Here we have a splendid example to illustrate the point we are trying to make; namely, regardless of its dimensions, make your home home-like and like you, its owner.

Never allow any one, professional or amateur, to persuade you to put anything in it which you do not like yourself; but if an expert advises against a thing, give careful consideration to the advice before rejecting it.

Mrs. Gardner's house is unique among the great houses of America as having that quality of the intimate palaces abroad, a subtle mellowness which in the old world took time and generations of cultivated lovers of the rare and beautiful, to create.

Adequate means, innate art appreciation, experience and the knowledge, which comes from keeping in touch with experts, account for the intrinsic value of Mrs. Gardner's collection; but the subtle quality of harmony and vitality is her own personal touch. The color scheme is so wisely chosen that it actually does unite all periods and
Countries. One is surprised to note how perfectly at home even the modern paintings appear in this version of an Old Italian palace.

Be sure that you aim at the same combination of beauty, usefulness, and harmony between color scheme and objets d'art. It is in color scheme that we feel the personality of our host or hostess, therefore give attention to this point.

Always have a color scheme sympathetic to you. Make your rooms take on the air of being your abode. It is really very simple. What has been done with vast wealth can be just as easily done by the man of one room and a bath. Know what you want, and buy the best you can afford; by best, meaning useful things, indisputably beautiful in line and color.

Use your Colonial furniture; but if you find a wonderful Empire desk, with beautiful brass mounts and like it, buy it.

They are of the same period in point of date, as it happens, and your Louis XVI bronze candlesticks will add a touch of grace. The writer recalls a simple room which was really a milestone in the development of taste, for it was so completely harmonious in coloring, arrangement of furniture, and placing of ornaments.

Built for a painter's studio, with top light, it was used, at the time of which we speak, for music, as a Steinway grand indicated. The room was large, the floors painted black and covered with faded Oriental rugs; woodwork and walls were dark-green, as we’re the long, low, open bookcases, above which a large foliage tapestry was hung.

On the other walls were modern paintings with antique frames of dulled gold, while a Louis XVI inlaid desk stood across one corner, and there was an old Italian oval table of black wood, with great, gold birds, as pedestal and legs, at which we dined simply, using fine old silver and foreign pottery. This room was responsible for starting more than one person on the pursuit of the antique, for pervading it was a magic atmosphere, that wizard touch which comes of knowing, loving and demanding beautiful things, and then treating them very humanly.

Use your lovely vases for your flowers. Hang your modern painting; but let its link with the faded tapestry be the dull, old frame. To be explicit, use lusterless frames and faded colors with old furniture and tapestry. Your grandmother wears mauves and grays not bright red.

If your taste is for modern painted furniture and vivid Bakst colors in cushions and hangings, take your lovely old tapestry away. Speaking of tapestries, do not imagine that they can never be used in small rooms and narrow halls.

Plate XIV shows an illustration of a hall in an old-fashioned country house that was so narrow that it aroused despair. We call attention to the fact that it gains greatly in width from the perspective shown in the tapestry, one of the rare, old, painted kind, which depicts distance, wide vistas and a scene flooded with light. (An architectural picture can often be used with equally good results.)

To increase size of this hall, the woodwork, walls and carpets were kept the same shade of pale-grey. The landscape paper in our Colonial houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, often large in design, pushed back the walls to the same amazing degree.




















CHAPTER XIV,

PERIODS IN FURNITURE

PERIODS in furniture are amazingly interesting if one plunges into the story, not with tense nerves, but gaily, for mere amusement, and then floats gently, in a drifting mood. One gathers in this way many sparkling historical anecdotes, and much substantial data really not so cumbersome as some imagine!

To know anything at all about a subject one must begin at the beginning, and to make the long run seems a mere spin in an auto, let us at once remind you that the whole fascinating tale lies between the covers of one delightful book, the "Illustrated History of Furniture," by Frederick Litchfield, published by Truslove et Han-son, London, and by John Lane, New York.

There are other books many of them but first exhaust Litchfield and apply what he tells you as you wander through public and private collections of furniture.

If you care for furniture at all, this book, which tells all that is known of its history, will prove highly instructive.

One cannot speak of the gradual development of furniture and furnishing; it is more a case of waves of types, and the story begins on the crest of a wave in Assyria, about 3000 years before Christ! Yes, seriously, interior decoration was an art back in that period and can be traced without any lost links in the chain of evidence.

From Assyria we turn to Egypt and learn from the frescoes and bas-reliefs on walls of ruined tombs, that about that same time, 3000 B. C., rooms on the banks of the Nile were decorated more or less as they are today.

The cultured classes had beautiful ceilings, gilded furniture, cushions and mattresses of dyed linen and wools, stuffed with downy feathers taken from water fowl, curtains that were suspended between columns, and, what is still more interesting to the lover of furniture, we find that the style known as Empire when revived by Napoleon I was at that time in vogue.

Even more remarkable is the fact that parts of legs and rails of furniture were turned as perfectly (I quote Litchfield) as if by a modern lathe. The variety of beautiful woods used by the Egyptians for furniture included ebony, cedar, sycamore and acacia. Marquetry was employed as well as wonderful inlaying with ivory, from both the elephant and hippopotamus. Footstools had little feet made like lion's claws or bull's hoofs. According to Austin Leyard, the very earliest Assyrian chairs, as well as those of Egypt, had the legs terminating in the same lion's feet or bull's hoofs, which reappear in the Greek, Roman, Empire and even Sheraton furniture of England (eighteenth century).

The first Assyrian chairs were made without backs and of beautifully wrought gold and bronze, an art highly developed at that time.

In Egypt we find the heads of animals capping the backs of chairs in the way that we now see done on Spanish chairs.

The pilasters shown on the Empire furniture, Plate XVI, capped by women's heads with little gold feet at base, and caryatides of a kind, were souvenirs of the Egyptian throne seats, which rested on the backs of slaves possibly prisoners of war.

These chairs were wonderful works of art in gold or bronze. We fancy we can see those interiors, the chairs and beds covered with woven materials in rich colors and leopard skins thrown over chairs, the carpets of a woven palm-fiber and mats of the same, which were used as seats.

Early Egyptian rooms were beautiful in line because simple; never crowded with superfluous furnishings. It is amusing to see on the very earliest bas-reliefs Egyptian belles and beaux reclining against what we know to-day as Empire rolls, seen also on beds in old French prints of the fourteenth century. Who knows, even with the Egyptians this may have been a revived style!

One talks of new notes in color scheme. The Bakst thing was being done in Assyria, 700 B.C.! Sir George Green proved it when he opened up six rooms of a king's palace and found the walls all done in horizontal stripes of red, yellow and green! Also, he states that each entrance had the same number of pilasters. Oh wise Assyrian King and truly neutral, if as is supposed, those rooms were for his six wives!

In furniture, the epoch-making styles have been those showing line, and if decorated, then only with such decorations as were subservient to line; pure Greek and purest Roman, Gothic and early Renaissance, the best of the Louis, Directoire and First Empire, Chippendale, Adam, Sheraton and Heppelwhite.

The bad styles are those where ornamentations envelop and conceal line as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco (baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and XV and the Victorian all examples of the same thing, i. e.: perfect line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the bad in extravagant exuberance of over-ornamentation.

There is a psychic connection between the outline of furniture and the inline of man.

Perfect line, chaste ornamentation, the elimination of the superfluous was the result of the Greek idea of restraint self-control in all things and in all expression. The immense authority of the lawmakers enforced simple austerity as the right and only setting for the daily life of an Athenian, worthy of the name.

There were exceptions, but as a rule all citizens, regardless of their wealth and station, had impressed upon them the civic obligation to express their taste for the beautiful, in the erecting of public buildings in their city of Athens, monuments of perfect art, by God-like artists, Phidias, Apelles, and Praxiteles.




















CHAPTER XV

CONTINUATION OF PERIODS IN FURNITURE

FROM Greece, culture, born on the wings of the arts, moved on to Rome, and at first, Roman architecture and decoration reproduced only the classic Greek types; but, as Rome grew, her arts took on another and very different outline, showing how the history of decorative art is to a fascinating degree the history of customs and manners.

Rome became prosperous, greedy, powerful and imperious, enslaving the civilized world, and, not having the restraining laws of Greece, waxed luxurious and licentious, and chafed, in consequence, at the austere rigidity of the Greek style of furnishing.

We know that in the time of Augustus Caesar the Romans had wonderful furniture of the most costly kind, made from cedar, pine, elm, olive, ash, ilex, beach and maple, carved to represent the legs, feet, hoofs and heads of animals, as in earlier days was the fashion in Assyria, Egypt and Greece, while intricate carvings in relief, showed Greek subjects taken from mythology and legend. Caesar, it is related, owned a table costing a million sectaries ($40,000).

But gradually the pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, and had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, it’s warm, glowing colors, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury that the new Roman craved.

The effect of this misalliance upon all Art, including interior decoration, was to cause its immediate decline. Elaboration and banal designs, too much splendor of gold and silver and ivory inlaid with gold, resulted in a decadent art, which reflected a decadent race and Rome, fell! Not all at once; it took five hundred years for the neighboring races to crush her power, but continuous hectoring did it, in 476 A. D. Then began the Dark Ages merging into the Middle Ages (fifth to fifteenth centuries).

Dark they were, but what picturesque and productive darkness! Rome fell, but the Car-loving Ian family arose, and with it the great nations of Western Europe, to give us, especially in France, another supreme flowering of interior decoration.

Britain was torn from the grasp of Rome by the Saxons, Danes and Normans, and as a result the great Anglo-Saxon race was born to create art periods. Mahomet appeared and scored as an epoch-maker, recording a remarkable life and a spiritual cycle.

The Moors conquered Spain, but in so doing enriched her arts a thousand fold, leaving the Alhambra as a beacon-light through the ages. Finally the crusades united all warring races against the infidels.

Blood was shed, but at the same time routes were opened up, by which the arts, as well as the commerce, of the Orient, reached Europe.

And so the Byzantine continued to contend with Gothic art that art which preceded from the Christian Church and stretched like a canopy over Western Europe, all through the Middle Ages. It was in the churches and monasteries that Christian art, driven from pillar to post by wars, was obliged to take refuge, and there produced that marvelous development known as the Gothic style, of the Church, for the Church, by the Church, perfected in countless Gothic cathedrals, crystallized glories lifting their manifold spires to heaven, ethereal monuments of an intrepid Faith which gave material form to its adoration, its fasting and prayer, in an unrivalled art.

There is one early Gothic chair, which has come down to us, Charlemagne's, made of gilt-bronze and preserved in the Louvre, at Paris. Any knowledge beyond this one piece, as to what Carlovingian furniture was like (the eighth century) we get only from old manuscripts which show it to have been the pseudo-classic, that is, the classic modified by Byzantine influence, and very like the Empire style of Napoleon I.

Here is the reason for the type. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Empire, when in 726 A. D., Emperor Leo III prohibited image worship, and the artists and artisans of his part of the world, in order to earn a livelihood, scattered over Europe, settling in the various capitals, where they were eagerly welcomed and employed.

Even so late as the tenth to fourteenth centuries the knowledge we have of Gothic furniture still comes from illustrated manuscripts and missals preserved in museums or in the national libraries.

Rome fell as an empire in the fifth century. In the eighth century, Venice asserted herself, later becoming the great, wealthy, Merchant City of Eastern Europe, the golden gate between Byzantium and the West (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). Her merchants visiting every country naturally carried home all art expressions, but, so far as we know, her own chief artistic output in very early days, was in the nature of richly carved wooden furniture, no specimens of which remain.






































CHAPTER XVI

THE GOTHIC PERIOD

THE Gothic Period is the pointed period, and dominated the art of Europe, from about the tenth to the fifteenth century. Its origin was Teutonic, its development and perfection French.

At first, the house of a feudal lord meant one large hall with a raised dais, curtained off for him and his immediate family, and subdivided into sleeping apartments for the women. On this dais a table ran crossways, at which the lord and his family with their guests, ate, while a few steps lower, at a long table running lengthwise of the hall, sat the retainers.

The hall was, also, the living room for all within the walls of the castle. Sand was strewn on the stone floor and the dogs of the knights ate what was thrown to them, gnawing the bones at their leisure. Wonderful tapestries hung from the walls surrounded this rude scene: woman’s record of man's deeds.

Later, we read of stairs and of another room known as the Parlor or talking-room, and here begins the sub-division of homes, which in democratic America has arrived at a point where more than 200 rooms are often sheltered under one private roof!

Oak chests figured prominently among the furnishings of a Gothic home, because the possessions of those feudal lords, who were constantly at war with one another, often had to be moved in haste.

As men's lives became more settled, their possessions gradually multiplied; but even at the end of the eleventh century bedsteads were provided only for the nobility, probably on account of expense, as they were very grand affairs, carved and draped. To that time and later belong the wonderfully carved presses or wardrobes.

Carved wood paneling was an important addition to interior decoration during the reign of Henry III (1216-72).

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England with Flanders led in the production of mediaeval art.

Hallmarks of the Gothic period are animals and reptiles carved to ornament the structural parts of furniture and to ornament panels. Favorite subjects with the wood carvers of that time were scenes from the lives of the saints (the Church dominated the State) and from the romances, chanted by the minstrels.









































CHAPTER XVII

THE RENAISSANCE

FOLLOWING the Gothic Period came the Renaissance of Greek art which began in Italy under the leadership of Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael, who, rejecting the existing types of degraded decorative art, in Italy a combination of the Byzantine and Gothic turned to the antique, the purest Greek styles of Pedicles' time. The result was another period of perfect line and proportion, called the Italian Renaissance, a great wave of art which swept over all Europe, gaining impetus from the wise patronage of the ruling Medicis. One of them (Pope Leo X with the co-operation of Italy's reigning dukes and princes) employed and so developed the extraordinary powers of Michael Angelo, Titian, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and Correggio.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Classic Greek art was engrossing the mind of Western Europe, classical literature was becoming the fashion and there was even an attempt to make Latin the popular language.

It was during the Renaissance that Palladio rebuilt the palaces of Italy, beautiful beyond words, and that Benvenuto Cellini designed in gold, silver and bronze in a manner never since equaled. From that same period dates the world-famous Majolica of Urbino, Pesaro and Gubbio, shown in our museums. So far as house furnishing went, aside from palaces, there was but little that was appropriate for intimate domestic life.

The early Renaissance furniture was palatial, architectural in outline and, one might almost say, in proportions. The tables were impossibly high; the chairs were stiff, and the cabinets immense and formal in outline. It had, however, much stately beauty, and very lovely are certain old pieces of carved and gilded wood where the gilt, put on over a red preparation and highly burnished, has rubbed off with time, and shows a soft glow of color through the gold.

But as always, the curse of over-elaboration to please perverted minds, was resorted to by cabinetmakers who copied mosaics with their inlaying, and invented that form known as pietra-durapolished bits of marble, agates, pebbles and lapis lazuli.

Ivory was carved and used as bas-reliefs and ivory and tortoise shell, brass and mother-of-pearl used as inlay. Elaborate Arabesque designs inlaid were souvenirs of the Orient, and where the cabinetmakers saw left a line, the cuts were filled in with black wood or stained glue, which brought out the design and so gave an added decorative effect.

Skilled artisans had other designs bitten into wood by acids, and shading was managed by pouring hot sand on the surface of the wood. Hallmarks of the Renaissance are designs, which were taken from Greek and Roman mythology, and allegories representing the elements, seasons, months and virtues.

Also, battle scenes and triumphal marches. i. The insatiable love for decoration found still another expression in silver and gold plaques of the highest artistic quality, embossed and engraved for those princes of Florence, Urbino, Ferrara, Rome, Venice and Naples, who vied with one another in extravagance until the inevitable reaction came.

Edmund Bonneffe says that in the latter part of the Renaissance, while the effort of the Italians seems to have been to disguise wood, French cabinetmakers emphasized its value an interesting point to bear in mind.

If we trace the Renaissance movement in Germany we find that it was Albrech Diirer who led it. Then, as always, the Germans were foremost in woodcarving; with Holland and Belgium they are responsible for much of the antique oak furniture on Renaissance lines. The Scandinavians have also done wonderful woodcarving, which is easily confused with the early wood carving of the Russians, for the reason that the Swedes settled Finland, and Russia's Ruric rulers (before the Romanoff house, sixteenth century) were from Finland.

In the sixteenth century metal work in steel, iron and brass reached its height in Germany and Italy. It is supposed that the elaborate mounts in furniture which were later perfected in France had their origin in iron corners and hinge-plates used, at first, merely to strengthen, but as the men who worked in metals became more and more skilful, the mounts were made with the intent of mere decoration and to draw attention to the beauty of the wood itself.










An Example of Perfect Balance and Beauty in Mantel Arrangement

An example of good mantel decoration. The vases and clock are Empire, the chairs Directoire, and footstools Louis XV.

A low bowl of modern green Venetian glass holds flowers.








Before Diirer turned Germany's mind toward the Greek revival of Art, the craftsmen of his country had been following Dutch models. This was natural enough, for Charles V was king at that time, of Holland, Germany and Spain, and the arts of the three countries, as well as their commerce were interchangeable. In fact it was the Dutch painter, Van Eyck, who took the Renaissance into Spain when called there to paint royalty. Sculptors, tapestry weavers, books on art, etc., followed.

That was the Spanish awakening, but the art of Spain during the sixteenth century shows that the two most powerful influences were Moorish and Italian. The most characteristically Spanish furniture of that period are those cabinets,"Vargueos" made of wood ornamented on the outside with wrought iron, while inside are little columns made of fine bone, painted and gilded. Much of the Old Spanish furniture reproduces German and Italian styles.

Embossed leather put on with heavy nails has always been characteristic of Spain, and in the seventeenth century very fine Spanish mahogany and chestnut were decorated with tortoise shell inlaid with ivory, so as to make elaborate pictures in the Italian style. (See Baron Davillier on Spanish Furniture.)























CHAPTER XVIII

FRENCH FURNITURE

THE classic periods in French furniture were those known as Francis I, Henry II and the three Louis,XIV, XV, and XVI. One can get an idea of all French periods in furnishing by visiting the collection in Paris belonging to the government, "Mobilier National," in the new wing of the Louvre.

It is always necessary to consult political history in order to understand artistic invasions. Turn to it now and you will find that Charles VIII of France held Naples for two years (1495-6), and when he went home took with him Italian artists to decorate his palaces. Read on and find that later Henry II married Catherine de Medici and loved Diane de Poitiers, and that, fortunately for France, both his queen and his mistress were patronesses of the arts. So France bloomed in the sunshine of royal favor and Greek influence, as few countries ever had.

Fontainebleau (begun by Francis I) was the first of a chain of French royal palaces, all monuments without and within, to a picturesque system of monarchy, Kings who could do no wrong, wafting scepters over powerless subjects, whose toil produced Art in the form of architecture, cabinetmaking, tapestry weaving, mural decoration, unrivalled porcelain, exquisitely wrought silver and gold plate, silks, lovely as flower gardens (showing the "pomegranate" and "vase" patterns) and velvets like the skies! And for what? Did these things represent the wise planning of wise monarchs for dependent subjects?

We know better, for it is only in modern times that simple living and small incomes have achieved surroundings of artistic beauty and comfort. The marvels of interior decoration during the classic French periods were created for kings and their queens, mistresses and favored courtiers.

Diane de Poitiers wished perhaps only dreamed and an epoch-making art project was born. Madame du Barry admired and made her own the since famous du Barry rose color, and the Sevres porcelain factories reproduced it for her. But how to produce this particular illusive shade of deep, purplish-pink became a forgotten art, when the seductive person of the king's mistress was no more.

If you would learn all there is to know concerning the sixteenth century furnishings in France read Edmund Bonneffe's "Sixteenth Century Furniture."

It was the Henry II interior decoration and architecture which first showed the Renaissance of pure line and classic proportion, followed by the never-failing reaction from the simple line to the undulating over-ornate when decoration repeated the elaboration of the most luxurious, licentious periods of the past.

One has but to walk through the royal palaces of France to see French history beguilingly illustrated, in a series of volumes open to all, the pages of which are vibrant with the names and personalities of men and women who will always live in history as products of an age of great culture and art.

The Louis XIV, XV and XVI periods in furniture are all related. Rare brocades, flowered and in stripes, bronze mounts as garlands, bow-
Knots and rosettes, on intricate inlaying, mark their common relationship. The story of these periods is that gradually decoration becomes over-elaborated and in the end dominates the Greek outline,

The three Louis mark a succession of great periods. Louis XIV, though beautiful at its best, is of the three the most ornate and is characterized in its worst stage by the extremely bowed (cabriole) legs of the furniture, ludicrously suggestive of certain debauched courtiers who surrounded the Grande Monarch.

Louis XV legs show a curve, also, but no longer the stodgy, squat cabriole of the overfed gallant. Instead we are entranced by an ethereal grace and lightness of movement in every line and decoration. Here cabriole means but a courtly knee swiftly bending to salute some beauty's hand. So subtly waving is the curving outline of this furniture that one scarcely knows where it begins or ends, and it is the same with the decorations exquisitely delicate waving traceries of vines and flora, gold on gold, inlay, or paint in delicate tones.

All this gives to the Louis XV period supremacy over Louis XVI, whose round, grooved, tapering straight legs, one tires of more quickly, although fine gold and lovely paint make this type winning and beloved.





Corner of a Drawing Room, Furniture Showing Directoire influence

A delightful bit of a room. The furniture, in line, shows a Directoire influence. The striped French satin on sofa and one chair is blue, yellow and faun, the Brussels tapestry in faded blues, fauns and grays. Over a charmingly painted table is a Louis XV gilt appliqué, the screen is dark in tone and has painted panels.

The rug, done in cross-stitch, black ground and design in colors, was discovered in a forgotten corner of a shop, its condition so dingy from the dust of ages that only an expert would have recognized its possibilities.



From Louis XVI we pass to the Directoire, when, following the Revolution, the voice of the populace decried all ostentation and everything savoring of the superfluous. The Great Napoleon in his first period affected simplicity and there were no longer bronze mounts, in rosettes, garlands and bow-knots, elaborate inlaying, nor painted furniture with lovely flowering surfaces; in the most severe examples not even fluted legs! Instead, simple but delicately proportioned furniture with slender, squarely cut, chastely tapering legs, arms and backs, was the fashion.

In fact, the Directoire type is one of ideal proportions, graceful outlines with a flowing movement and the decoration when present, kept well within bounds, entirely subservient to the main structural material. One feels an almost Quaker-like quality about the Directoire, whether of natural wood or plain painted surface.

With Napoleon's assumption of regal power and habits, we get the Empire (he had been to Rome and Egypt), pseudo-classic in outline and richly ornamented with mounts in ormoulu characteristic of the Louis.

The Empire period in furniture was dethroned by the succeeding regime.

When we see old French chairs with leather seats and backs, sometimes embossed, in the Portuguese style, with small regular design, put on with heavy nails and twisted or straight stretchers (pieces of wood extending between legs of chairs), we know that they belong to the time of Henry IV or Louis XIII. Some of the large chairs show the shell design in their broad, elaborate stretchers.

The beautiful small side tables of the Louis and First Empire called consoles, were made for the display of their marvelously wrought pieces of silver, hammered and chiseled by hand, "museum pieces," indeed, and lucky is the collector who chances upon any specimen adrift.








CHAPTER XIX

THE PERIODS OF THE THREE LOUIS

THE only way to learn how to distinguish the three Louis is to study these periods in collections of furniture and objects of art, or, where this is impossible, to go through books showing interiors of those periods. In this way one learns to visualize the salient features of any period and gradually to acquire a feeling for them, that subtle sense which is not dependent wholly upon outline, decoration, nor color, but upon the combined result.

French writers who specialize along the lines of interior decoration often refer to the three types as follows:

Period of Louis XIV heavily, stolidly masculine;

Period of Louis XV coquettishly feminine;

Period of Louis XVI lightly, alertly masculine,

One soon sees why, for Louis XIV furniture does suggest masculinity by its weight and size. It is squarely made, straight (classic) in line, equally balanced, heavily ponderous and magnificent. Over its surface, masses of decoration immobile as stone carving, are evenly dispersed, and contribute a grandiose air to all this furniture.

There was impressive gallantry to the Louis XIV style, a ceremonious masculine gallantry, while Louis XV furniture the period dominated by women when "poetry and sculpture sang of love" and life revolved about the boudoir shows a type entirely in time, sinuously, lightly, gracefully, coquettishly feminine, bending and curtseying, with no fixed outline, no equal balance of proportions. Louis XV was the period when outline and decoration were merged in one and the shell, which figured in Louis XIV merely as an ornament, gave its form (in a curved outline) and its name "rococo" (Italian for shell) to the style.

As a reaction from this we get the Louis XVI period, again masculine in its straight rigidity of line, its perfectly poised proportions, the directness of its appeal to the eye, a "reflection of the more serious mental attitude of the nation."

Louis XVI had an aristocratic sobriety and was masculine in a light, alert, mental way, if one can so express it, which stimulates the imagination, in direct contrast to the material and literal type of Louis XIV which, as we have said, was masculine in its ponderous magnificence, and unyielding over-ornamentation.

So much for outline. Now for the decoration of the three periods.

Remember that the Louis XIV, XV and XVI periods took their ideas for decoration from the Greeks, via Italy, and the extreme Orient

A national touch was added by means of their Sevres porcelain medallions set into furniture, and the finely chiseled bronzes known as or-moulu, a superior alloy of metals of a rich gold color. The subjects for these chiseled bronzes were taken from Greek and Roman mythology; gods, goddesses, and cupids the insignia of which were torches, quivers, arrows, and tridents.

There were, also, wreaths, garlands, festoons and draperies, as well as rosettes, ribbons, bowknots, medallion heads, and the shell and acanthus leaf.

One finds these in various combinations or as individual motives on the furniture of the Louis.

The backgrounds for these mounts were the woods finely inlaid with ivory shell and brass in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Oriental lacquer and painted furniture, at that time heavily gilded.

The legs of chairs, sofas and tables of the Louis XIV period were cabrioles (curved outward) a development of the animal legs of carved wood, bronze or gold, used by the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians and Greeks as supports for tables and chairs. Square grooved legs also appeared in this type.

The same grooves are found on round tapering legs of Louis XVPs time. In fact that type of leg is far more typical of the Louis XVI period than the cabriole or square legs grooved, but one sees all three styles.

Other hallmarks of the Louis XVI period are the straight outlines, perfectly balanced proportions, the rosettes, ribbon and bowknot with torch and arrows in chiseled bronze.






Shows the red-tiled entrance hall of a duplex apartment in New York.

On the walls are two Italian mirrors (Louis XVI), a side table (console) of
The same epoch, and two Italian carved chairs.





That all "painting and sculpture sang of love" is as true of Louis XVI as of Louis XV. In both reigns the coloring was that of spring tender greens, pale blossoms, the grey of mists, sky-blues, and yellows of sunshine.

During Louis XV's time soft cushions fitted into the sinuous lines of the furniture, and as some Frenchman has put it, "a vague, discreet perfume pervaded the whole period, in contrast to the heavier odor of the First Empire."

The walls and ceilings of the three Louis were richly decorated in accordance with a scheme, surpassing in magnificence any other period.

An intricate system of moldings (to master which, students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, must devote years) encrusted sidewalls and ceilings, forming panels and medallions, over-doors and chimney-pieces, into which were let paintings by the great masters of the time, whose subjects reflected the moods and interests of each period. The Louis XV and XVI paintings are tender and vague as to subject and the colors veiled in a grayish tone, full of sentiment.

That was the great period of tapestry weaving Beauvais, Arras and Gobelin, and these filled panels or hung before doors.

It may be said that the period of Louis XVI profited by antiquity, but continued French traditions; it was a renaissance of line and decoration kept alive, while the First Empire was classic form inanimate, because an abrupt innovation rather than an influence and a development. One may go farther and quote the French claim that the color scheme of Louis XVI was intensely suggestive and personal, while the Empire coloring was literal and impersonal.

Under Louis XVI furniture was all but lost in a crowd of other articles, tapestry, draperies of velvet, flowered silks, little objects of art in porcelain, more or less useless, silver and ormoulu, exquisitely decorated with a precious intricacy of chiseled designs.

The Louis XVI period was rigid in its aristocratic sobriety, for although torch and arrows figured, as did love-birds, in decoration (souvenirs of the painter Boucher), everything was set and decorous, even the arrow was often the warrior's not cupid's; in the same way the torch was that of the ancients, and when a medallion showed a pastoral subject, its frame of straight lines linked it to the period.
Even if Cupid appeared, he was decorously framed or pedestaled.

To be sure, Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at farming in the Park of the Petite Train on, at Versailles; but they wore silk gowns and powdered wigs. To be rustic was the fad of the day (there was a cult for gardening in England) ; but shepherdesses were confined to tapestries, and, while the aristocracy held the stage, it played the game of life in gloves.

There was about the interior decoration of Louis XVI, as about the lives of aristocratic society of that time, a "penetrating perfume of love and gallantry," to which all admirers of the beautiful must ever return for refreshment and standards of beauty and grace.

Speaking generally of the three Louis one can say that on a background of a great variety of wonderful inlaid woods, ivory, shell, mother-of-pearl and brass, or woods painted and gilded, following the Italian Renaissance, or lacquered in the manner of the Orient, were ormoulu wrought and finely chiseled, showing Greek mythological subjects; gods, goddesses and their insignia, with garlands, wreaths, festoons, draperies, ribbons, bow-knots, rosettes and medallions of cameo, Sevres porcelain, or Wedgwood paste. Among the lost arts of that time are inlaying as done by. Boule and the finish known as Vernis Martin.

Tapestries and mural paintings were framed by a marvelous system of moldings, which covered ceilings and sidewalls.

The color scheme was such as would naturally be dictated by the general mood of artificiality in an age when dreams were lived and the ruling classes obsessed by a passion for amusements, invented to divert the mind from actualities. This color scheme was beautifully light in tone and harmoniously gay, whether in tapestries, draperies and upholstery of velvets, or flowered silks, frescoes or painted furniture. It had the appearance of being intended to act as a soporific upon society, whose aim it was to ignore those jarring contrasts, which lay beneath the surface of every age.









Combination of Studio and Living Room in a New York Duplex Apartment

This large studio is a marked example of comfort and interest where the laws of appropriateness, practical ness, proportion and balance are so observed as to communicate at once a sense of restfulness.

Here the comfortable antiques and beautifully proportioned modern furniture make an ideal combination of living room and painter's studio.











































CHAPTER XXI

THE MAHOGANY PERIOD

JT is interesting to note that the Great Fire of London started the importation of foreign woods from across the Baltic, as great quantities were needed at once for the purpose of rebuilding. These soft woods aroused the invention of the cabinetmakers, and were especially useful for inlaying; so we find in addition to oak, that mahogany, pear and lime woods were used in fine furniture, it being lime-wood that Grinling Gibbons carved when working with Sir Christopher Wren, the famous architect (seventeenth century).

During the early Georgian period the oak carvings were merely poor imitations of Elizabethan and Stuart designs. There seemed to have been no artist wood-carvers with originality, which may have been partly due to a lack of stimulus, as the fashion in the decoration of furniture turned toward inlaying.

THE PERIOD OF WILLIAM III AND QUEEN MARY AND EARLY GEORGIAN
Are characterized by turned work, giving way to flattened forms, and the disappearance of the elaborate front stretcher on Charles II chairs.

The coming of mahogany into England and its great popularity there gives its name to that period when Chippendale, Heppelwhite, Sheraton and the Adam Brothers were the great creative cabinet-makers. The entire period is often called CHIPPENDALE, because Chippendale's books on furniture, written to stimulate trade by arousing good taste and educating his public, are considered the best of that time. There were three editions: 1754, 1759, and 1762.

The work was entitled "The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director and Useful Designs of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste" (and there was still more to the title!).

Chippendale's genius lay in taking the best wherever he found it and blending the whole into a type so graceful, beautiful, perfectly proportioned, light in weight and appearance, and so singularly suited to the uses for which it was intended, that it amounted to creation.

The "Chinese Craze" in England was partly due to a book so called, written by Sir William Chambers, architect, who went to China and not only studied, but sketched, the furniture, he saw there.

Thomas Sheraton, we are assured, was the most cultivated of this group of cabinet-makers. The three men made both good and bad styles. The work of the three men can be distinguished one from the other and, also, it can be very easily confused. To read up a period helps; but to really know any type of furniture with certainty, one must become familiar with its various and varying characteristics.

The houses and furniture designed and made by the Adam brothers were an epoch in them. These creations were the result of the co-operation of a little band of artists, consisting of Michael Angelo Pergolesi, who published in 1777, "Designs for Various Ornaments"; Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, two artist-painters who decorated the walls, ceilings, woodwork and furniture designed by the Adam brothers; and another colleague, the great Josiah Wedgwood, whose medallions and plaques, cameo-like creations in his Jasper paste, showed both classic form and spirit

The Adam brothers' creations were rare exotics, with no forerunners and no imitators, like nothing the world had ever seen yet reflecting the purest Greek period in line and design.

One of the characteristics of the Mahogany Period was the cabriole leg, which is, also, associated with Italian and French furniture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a matter of fact this form of leg is as old as the Romans and is really the same as the animal legs of wood or bronze, used as supports for tripods and tables by Assyrians, Egyptians and Greeks. The cabriole leg may be defined as "a convex curve above a concave one, with the point of junction smoothed away. On Italian console tables and French commodes we see the two simple curves disguised by terminal figures."

The rocaille (shell) ornament on the Chippendale as well as the cabriole leg copied from Italy and France, and the Dutch foot from Holland, substantiate our claim that Chippendale used what he found wherever he found it irrespective of the stigma of plagiarism.

There is a beautiful book by F. S. Robinson in which the entire subject of English furniture is treated in a most charming fashion.

Now let us return a moment to the Jacobean period. It was under Charles I that couches and settles became prominent pieces of furniture. Some of the Jacobean chairs are like those made in Italy, in the seventeenth century, with crossed legs, backs and seats covered with red velvet Other Jacobean chairs had scrollwork carved and pierced, with central panel in the back of embroidery, while the seat was of cane.

Some of the Jacobean cabinets had panels of ebony, the other parts inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory.

The silver Jacobean furniture is interesting and the best examples of this type are said to be those belonging to Lord Sackville. They are of ebony with silver mountings.

Yorkshire is noted for its Jacobean furniture, but some famous rooms done in this style are at Langleys, in Essex, the seats of Col. Tufnell, where the ceilings and mantels are especially fine and the library boasts interesting paneled walls, once enlivened by stained glass windows, when this room was used as a private chapel for the family.

Jacobean carving was never ornate.

Twenty years later came the Queen Anne period. Queen Anne chairs show a solid splat, sometimes vase-shaped, and strap-work arabesques. Most of the legs were cabriole, instead of the twisted turnings (on Stuart lines), which had been supports for chairs, cabinets and tables. The Queen Anne chair legs terminated when cabriole, in claws and balls or simple balls. Settees for two were then called "love seats," and "pole-screens" belonged to this period, tall, slender poles with small, sliding screens.

Queen Anne hangings were of rich damasks, silks and velvets, and
The wainscot of rooms was painted some pale color as an effective background to set off the dark, turned walnut or gorgeous lacquer made in red, green or black, and ornamented with gold. Some of the Queen Anne pieces of this variety had hinges and lock-plates of chased brass. Another variety was of oak, veneered with walnut and inlaid.

The very high ceilings of the Queen Anne period led to the use of "tall boys" or family bureaus, those many-storied conveniences, which comprised a bookcase above, writing desk in the middle, and drawers below.

Lockwood says in giving the history of chairs, in his "Cabinet Makers from 1750 to 1840": "Extravagance of taste and fluctuation of fashion had reached high water mark due to increase of wealth in England and her colonies. From the plain, stately pieces of Queen Anne the public turned to the rococo French designs of early Chippendale, then tiring of that, veered back to classic lines, as done by the Adam brothers, and so on, from heavy Chippendale to the over light and perishable Heppelwhite. Then public taste turned to the gaudily painted Sheraton and finally, took to copying the French Empire."

The American Revolutionary War stopped the exportation of furniture to America, with the result that cabinet-makers in the United States copied Chippendale and neglected all other later artists. When America began again to import models, Sheraton was an established and not a transitional type. Beautiful specimens are shown in the Nichols house, at Salem, Mass., furnished in 1783. The furniture used by George Washington when President of the United States in 1789, and now in the City Hall, New York, is pure Sheraton. (See Colonial Furniture, Luke Vincent Lockwood.)

Sir Christopher Wren, architect, with Grinling Gibbons, designer and wood-carver, were chiefly responsible for the beautifully elaborate moldings on ceilings and walls, carved from oak and used for forming large panels with wide bevels, into which were sometimes set tapestries.

The Italian stucco moldings were also used at that time. The fashion for elaborate ceilings and sidewalls had come to England via Italy and France. The most elaborate ones of those times were executed under Charles II and William III, the ceilings rivaling those of Louis XIV.

William and Mary (1687-1702) brought over with them from Holland, Dutch cabinetmakers, which accounts for the marked Dutch influence on the Mahogany Period, an influence that shows in a Dutch style of inlaying, cabriole legs and the tulip design. A sure sign of the William and Mary period is the presence of jasmine, as designed for inlaying in bone, ivory or Hollywood.

Lacquer came to England via Holland, the Dutch having imported Chinese workmen.

The entire Mahogany Period, including the Adam brothers, used the shell as a design and the backs of settees resembled several chair backs places side by side.

A feature of the Mahogany Period were the knife-boxes and cases for bottles, made of mahogany and often inlaid, which stood upon pedestals constructed for the purpose, at each side of the sideboard. Later the pedestals became a part of the sideboard. The urn-shaped knife-boxes were extremely graceful as made by Adam, Chippendale and Heppelwhite.

It is impossible to clearly define all of the work of the cabinet-makers of the mahogany or any other period, for reasons already stated. So one must be prepared to find Chippendale sofas which show the shapes^ originated by him and, also, at times, show Louis XVI legs and Louis XV outline.

Chippendale's contemporaries were quite as apt to vary their types, and it is only by experience that one can learn to distinguish between the different artists, to appreciate the hall marks of creative individuality.

The early Chippendale was almost identical with Queen Anne furniture and continued the use of cabriole leg and claw and ball feet. The top of the Chippendale chairs were bow-shaped with ends extending beyond’ the sides of the back and usually turned up.

If turned down they never rounded into the sides, as in the case of Queen Anne chairs. The splats have an upward movement and were joined to chair seats, and not to a cross-rail. They were pierced and showed elaborate ribbon and other designs in carving. There were, also, "ladder backs," and the Chinese Chippendale chairs, with latticework open carved and extending over entire backs. The characteristic Chippendale leg is cabriole with claw and ball foot.

The setting for Chippendale furniture was a paneled dado, classic mantelpiece, architraves and frieze, and stretched over sidewalks, above dado, was silk or paper showing a large pattern harmonizing with the furniture. The Chinese craze brought about a fashion for Chinese wall papers with Chinese designs. This Chinese fashion continued for fifty years.

Chippendale carved the posts of his bedsteads, and so the bed curtains were drawn back and only a short valance was used around the top, whereas in the time of William and Mary bed curtains enveloped all the woodwork. Still earlier in the Elizabethan period bedposts were elaborately carved.

In the eighteenth century it was the fashion to embroider the bed curtains.

The Chippendale china-cabinets with glass fronts were the outcome of the fad for collecting Chinese and French porcelain, and excellent taste was displayed in collecting these small articles within definite and appropriate limits. Cabinets with glass doors were also used as receptacles for silverware.

Thomas Sheraton (1760-1786), another great name in the Mahogany Period, admired Louis XV and Louis XVI and one can easily trace French influence in the "light, rhythmic style" he originated. Sheraton's contribution to interior decoration was furniture. His rooms, walls, ceilings, over-doors, windows and chimney pieces, are considered very poor; which accounts for the fact that Sheraton furniture as; well as Heppelwhite was used in Adam rooms.

Sheraton made a specialty of pieces of furniture designed to serve several purposes, and therefore adapted for use in small rooms; such as dressing tables with folding mirrors, library stepladders convertible into tables, etc.

The backs of Sheraton chairs had straight tops and several small splats joined to a cross-rail, and not to the seat. The legs were straight

Sheraton introduced the use of turned work on the legs and outer supports of the backs of chairs, and produced fine examples of painted furniture, especially painted satinwood. He, also, did some very fine inlaying and used cane in the seats and backs of chairs, which he painted black and gold. Among those who decorated for him was Angelica Kauffman.

Heppelwhite chairs are unmistakable on account of their shield, heart or oval backs and open splats, which were not joined to the seat in the centre of backs. The most beautiful were those with carved Prince of Wales feathers, held together by a bowknot delicately carved. They were sometimes painted. The legs of Heppelwhite furniture were straight

We see in the book published by A. Heppelwhite ET Co., a curious statement to the effect that cabriole chairs were those having stuffed backs. This idea must have arisen from the fact that many chairs of the eighteenth century with cabriole legs, did have stuffed backs.

Robert Adam, born in 1785, was an architect and decorative artist The Adam rooms, walls, ceilings, mantels, etc., are the most perfect of the period; beautiful classic moldings encrust ceilings and sidewalls, forming panels into which were let paintings, while in drawing-rooms the side panels were either recessed so as to hold statuary in the antique style, or were covered with damask or tapestry. It is stated that damask and tapestry were never used on the walls of Adam dining rooms. James Adam, a brother, worked with Robert.

Every period had its own weak points, so we find the Adam brothers at times making wall-brackets which were too heavy with ram's heads, garlands, etc., and the Adam chairs were undoubtedly bad. They had backs with straight tops, rather like Sheraton chairs, and Sheraton and Heppelwhite improved upon several small splats joining top rail to seat the bad chairs by Adam. The legs of Adam furniture were straight.

The ideal eighteenth century interior in England was undoubtedly an Adam room with Heppelwhite or Sheraton furniture.

Sir John Soane, architect, had one of the last good house interiors, for the ugly Georgian style came on the scene about 1812. Grinling Gibbons' carvings of heavy fruits and flowers, festoons and masks made to be used architecturally we now see used on furniture, and often heavily gilded.

William Morris was an epoch maker in English interior decoration, for he stood out for the "great, simple note" in furnishings. The pre-

Raphaelites worked successfully to the same end, reviving classic simplicity and establishing the value of elimination. The good, modern furniture of to day, designed with reference to meeting the demands of modern conditions, undoubtedly received a great impetus from that reaction to the simple and harmonious.














CHAPTER XXII

THE COLONIAL PERIOD

THE furniture made in America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was reproduced from English models and shows the influence of Chippendale, Sheraton, Heppelwhite and the Adam brothers.

For those interested in these early types of American output, the Sage and other collections in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, give a delightful object lesson, and there have been much written on the subject in case any data is desired.

If some of our readers own heirlooms and plan reproducing Colonial interiors of the finest type, we would advise making an effort to see some of the beautiful New England or Virginia homes, which remain quite as they were in the old days; fine square rooms with hand-carved woodwork, painted white, their walls paneled in wood and painted the same white. Into these panels were set hand-painted wallpaper.

The authors saw some made for a house in Peabody, near Salem, Massachusetts, some time between 1760 and 1800, and were amazed to find that the colors were as vivid as when first put on.

Here let us say that the study of interior decoration throws a strong light on the history of walls. In Gothic days the stone or wood of the feudal hall was partially concealed by tapestries, the needlework of the women of the household, a record of the gallant deeds of men used as interior decoration. Later of course, the making of tapestries became a great industry in Italy, France and Belgium, an industry patronized by kings and the nobility, and subsidized by governments.

Next we have walls sheathed with wood paneling. Then during the late Renaissance, painted portraits were let into these panels and became a part of the walls. Later, the upper half, or two-thirds of the paneling, was left off, and only a low paneling, or "dado," remained. This, too, disappeared in time.

Landscape paper was the bridge between the paneled walls with pictures built into them, and the painted or papered walls with
Pictures hung on them. The paper, which we have already referred
To, is one of the finest examples of its kind, and while there is only enough for one side of a room, it is valued at $5,000. The design is eight feet high, each strip 22 inches wide, and there are eighteen of the original twenty strips. Two breaks occur, numbers 16 and 18. The owner believes that the Puritan attitude of her ancestors caused them to destroy the panels, which showed nude figures, engaged in battle. This paper is now the property of Mrs. Eliza Brown of Salem, Massachusetts. It was found in her grandfather's attic in Gloucester, and was given to Mrs. Brown by her grandmother. It was in an army chest belonging to Judith Baldwin, a Colonel of Engineers in the Revolutionary Army, who laid out the forts in Boston Harbour.

Kate Sanborn, in her book on "Old Wall Papers" speaks of this particular paper. "Paper from the Ham House at Peabody, Massachusetts, now occupied by Dr. Worcester. Shows tropical scenes.

These scenes are quite similar to those of the Pizarro paper and may
Has been the work of the same designer." (The so-called "Pizarro in Peru" paper is shown in plate 34 and 35 of the same book, and is in Duxbury, Mass.) PizarroY invasion of Peru was in 1531. The coloring of Mrs. Brown's paper is white background with foliage in vivid greens, while figures of Peruvians wear costumes of brilliant blues and vermilion reds, a striking contrast to their soft, brown skins.

This paper is now in the market, but let us hope it may finally rest in a museum.



















CHAPTER XXIII

THE REVIVAL OF DIRECTOIRE AND EMPIRE FURNITURE

THE revival of Directoire and Empire furniture within the past few years, is attributed by some, to that highly artistic, and altogether illuminating publication, the Gazette dn Bon Ton Arts, Modes and Frivolities published in Paris by the Libraries Central des Beaux Arts, 13 rue Lafayette and contributed to by the leading artists of Paris the ultra moderns.

There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, when one could buy Empire furniture at very low figures, for in those days there was many a chance to pick up such pieces. To day, a genuine antique or a hand-made reproduction of an antique made sixty years ago, will command a large price, and even in Paris one has difficulty in finding them in the shops at any price.

Empire furniture ceased to be admired in America when the public got "fed up" on this type by its indiscriminate use in hotels and other public buildings.

The best designers of modern painted furniture are partly responsible for the revived interest in both Empire and Directoire. From their reproductions of the beautiful simple outlines, we, as a people, are once more beginning to feel line and to recognize it as an intrinsic part of beauty.

A Victorian group in a small portion of a very large parlor, 70x40 feet, one of the few remaining, if not the last, of the old Victorian mansions in New York City, very interesting as a specimen of the most elegant style of furnishing in the first half of the nineteenth century.

We would call attention to the heavy moulding of ceilings, the walls painted in panels (painted panels or wall paper to represent panels, is a Victorian hallmark), beautifully hand-carved woodwork, elaboration of design and colors in carpet, woven in one piece for the room; in fact the characteristic richness of elaboration everywhere: pictures in gilded carved frames, hung on double silk cords with tassels, heavily carved furniture made in England, showing fruits, flowers and medallion heads, and a similar elaboration and combination of flora and figures on bronze gas fixtures.

Heavy curtains of satin damask hung at the windows, ' held back by great cords and tassels, from enormous brass cornices in the form of gigantic flowers.

Also of the period is an immense glass case of stuffed birds, standing in the corner of the large dining room.

This interior was at the height of its glory at the time of the Civil War, and one is told of wonderful parties when the uniforms of the Northern officers decorated the stately rooms and large shaded gardens adjoining the house.

As things go in New York it may be but. A matter of months before this picturesque landmark is swept away by relentless Progress.


Part of a Victorian Parlor in One of the Few Remaining New York Victorian Mansions











CHAPTER XXIV,

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

GRADUALLY architecture and interior decoration drew apart, becoming two distinct professions, until during the Victorian era the two were unrelated with the result that the period of Victorian furniture is one of the worst on record.

There were two reasons for this divorce of the arts, which for centuries had been one in origin and spirit; first, the application of steam to machinery (1815) leading to machine-made furniture, and second, the invention of wall-paper which gradually took the place of wood paneling and shut off the architects from all jurisdiction over the decoration of the home.

With the advent of machine-made furniture came cheap imitations of antiques and the rapid decadence of this art. Hand-made reproductions are quite another thing. Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection, London) is said to have given $40,000 for a reproduction of the 'bureau du Louvre.

Fortunately, of late years a tide has set in which favors simple, well made furniture, designed with fine lines and having special reference to the purposes for which each piece is intended, and to-day our houses can be beautiful even if only very simple and inexpensive furniture is used.

In the Victorian prime, even the carved furniture, so much of which was made in England both for that country and the United States (see Plate XXI), was not of the finest workmanship, compared with carvings of the same time in Belgium, France, Germany and Austria.

Today Victorian cross-stitch and bead work in chairs, screens, footstools and bell-pulls, artificial flowers of wax and linen, and stuffed birds, as well as Bristol glass in blue, green and violet, are brought out from their hiding places and serve as touches of color to give some of the notes of variety which good interior decoration demands.

To be fascinating, a person must not be too rigidly one type. There must be moments of relaxation, of light and shade in mood, or one is not charmed even by great beauty.

So your perfect room must not be kept too rigidly in one style. To have attraction it must have variety in both line and color, and reflect the taste of generations of home lovers. The contents of dusty garrets may add piquancy to modern decorations, giving a touch of the unusual which is very charming.








































CHAPTER XXV

PAINTED FURNITURE

PAINTED furniture is, at present, the vogue, so if you own a piece made by the Adam brothers of England, decorated by the hand of Angelica Kauffman, or Pergolesi, from Greek designs, now is the moment to "star" it.

Different in decoration, but equal in charm, is the seventeenth and eighteenth century painted lacquers of Italy, France, China and Japan. In those days great masters labored at cabinet making and decorating, while distinguished artists carved the woodwork of rooms, and painted the ceilings and walls of even private dwellings.

To day we have reproductions (good and bad) of the veteran types, and some commendable inventions, more or less classic in line, and original in coloring and style of decoration.

At times, one wishes there was less evident effort to be original. We long for the repose of classic color schemes and classic line. In art, the line and the combination of colors, which have continued most popular throughout the ages, are very apt to be those with which one cans livelongest and not tire. For this reason, a frank copy of an antique piece of painted furniture is generally more satisfactory than a modern original.

If you are using dull colored carpets and hangings, have your modern reproductions antiqued. If you prefer gay, cheering tones, let the painted furniture be bright. These schemes are equally interesting in different ways. It is stupid to decry new things, since every grey antique had its frivolous, vivid youth.

One American decorator has succeeded in making the stolid, uncompromising square ness of mission furniture take on a certain lightness and charm by painting it black and discreetly lining it with yellow and red. Yellow velour is used for the seat pads and heavy hangings, thin yellow silk curtains are hung at the windows, and the black woodwork is set off by Japanese gold paper.

In a large house, or in a summer home where there are young people coming and going, a room decorated in this fashion is both gay and charming and makes a pleasant contrast to darker rooms. Then, too, yellow is a lovely setting for all flowers, the effect being to intensify their beauty, as when flooded by sunshine.

Another clever treatment of the mission type, which we include under the heading Painted Furniture, is to have it stained a rich dark brown, instead of the usual dark green. Give your dealer time to order your furniture unfinished from the factory, and have stained to your own liking; or, should you by any chance be planning to use mission in one of those cottages so often built in Maine, for summer occupancy, where the walls are of unplastered, unstained, dove-tailed boards, and the floors are unstained and covered with matting rugs, try using this furniture in its natural color unfinished. The effect is delightfully harmonious and artistic and quite Japanese in feeling.

In such a cottage, the living room has a raftered ceiling, the sidewalls, woodwork, settles the fireplaces, open bookcases and floor, stain all dark walnut. The floor color is very dark, the sidewalls, woodwork and bookshelves are a trifle lighter, and the ceiling boards still lighter between the almost black, heavy rafters.

The mission furniture is dark brown, the hangings and cushions are of mahogany-colored corduroy, and the floor is strewn with skins of animals. There are no pictures, the idea being to avoid jarring notes in another key. Instead, copper and brass bowls contribute a note of variety, as well as large jars filled with great branches of flowers, gathered in the nearby woods. The chimney is exposed. It and the large open fireplace are of rough, dark mottled brick.

A room of this character would be utterly spoiled by introducing white as ornaments, table covers, window curtains or picture-mats; it is a color scheme of dull wood-browns, old reds and greens in various tones. If you want your friends photographs about you in such a room, congregate them on one or two shelves above your books.












CHAPTER XXVI

TREATMENT OF AN INEXPENSIVE BEDROOM

THE experience of the author is that the most attractive, inexpensive furniture is that made by the Leavens factory in Boston. This furniture is so popular with all interior decorators that it needs no further advertising. Order for each single iron bed two-foot boards, instead of a head and a footboard.

This the factory will supply upon demand. Then have your bed painted one of the colors you have chosen as in the color scheme for your room. Say, the prevailing note of your chintz.

Have two rolls made, to use at the head and foot (which are now of equal height) and cover these and the bed with chintz, or, if preferred, with sun-proof material in one of the other colors in your chintz. By this treatment your cheap iron bed of ungainly proportions, has attained the quality of an interesting, as well as unique, "day-bed."

The most attractive cheap bureau is one ordered "in the plain" from the factory, and painted like the bed. If you would entirely remove the factory look, have the mirror taken off the bureau and hang it on the wall over what, by your operation, has become a chest of drawers.

If you want a long mirror in your rooms, the cheapest variety is mirror glass, fastened to the back of doors with picture moulding to match woodwork.

This is also the cheapest variety of over-mantel mirrors. We have seen it used with great success, let into walls of narrow halls and bedrooms and framed with a dull-gold moulding in the style of room.

For chairs, use the straight wooden ones, which are made to match the bureau, and paint them like the bed and bureau.

For comfortable armchairs, wicker ones with chintz-covered pads for seat and back are best for the price, and these can also be painted.

Cheap tables, which match the bureau, when painted will do nicely as a small writing-table or a night table for water, clock, book, etc.




Two Styles of Day beds

Two designs for day beds, which are done in colors to suit the scheme of any room.

These beds are fitted with box springs and a luxurious mattress of feathers or down, covered with silk or chintz, coverlet and cushions of similar material, in colors harmonizing with beds. If desired, these lounges can be made higher from the floor.

If the floors are new and have hard wood, wax them and use a square of plain velvet carpet in a dark tone of your dominant color. Or if economy is your aim, use attractive rag rugs, which are very cheap and will wash.

If your floors are old and you intend using a large velvet square, paint the edges of the floor white, or some pale shade to match the color of the walls. Or, use filling all over the floor. If you cannot afford either and must use small rugs, stain or paint your floors a dark color, to be practical, and use only necessary rugs; that is, one before bed, bureau and fireplace.

Sofas are always expensive. That is one reason for advising that beds be treated like "day-beds."

Wall papers, at ten cents a roll, come in charming colors and designs, and with a few cheap French colored prints, framed in passé partout, your room is attractive at once.

If your prints are black and white use broad passé partout in same color as the wallpaper, only a tone deeper. If you use favorite photographs, suppress all margins and frame with narrow black passé partout.

For curtains use one of the sixty- or seventy-cent chintzes which come in attractive designs and colors, or what is still cheaper, sun-proof material, fifty inches wide (from $1.10 to $1.50 a yard), and split it in half for curtains, edging them with a narrow fringe of a contrasting color which appears in the chintz of chair-pads.

Another variety of cheap curtains is heavy cream scrim with straps (for looping back) and valance of chintz. These come cheaper than all chintz curtains and are very effective, suggesting the now popular and expensive combination of plain toned taffetas combined with chintz.

Use for sash curtains plain scrim or marquisette.

Let your lamps be made of inexpensive one-toned pottery vases, choosing for these still another color, which appears in the chintz. The lampshades can be made of a pretty near silk, in a plain color, with a fringe made up of one, two or three of the colors in the chintz.

If you happen to have your heart set on deep rose walls and your bedroom furniture is mahogany, find a chintz with rose and French blue, and then cover your arm-chair pads and bed with chintz, but make your curtains of blue sun proof material, having a narrow fringe of rose, and use a deep rose carpet, or rugs, or if preferred, a dull brown carpet to harmonize with the furniture.

A plain red Wilton carpet will dye an artistic deep mulberry brown. They are often bought in the red and dyed to get this shade of brown.

For attractive cheap dining-room furniture, buy simple shapes, unfinished, and have the table, sideboard and chairs painted dark or light, as you prefer.

In your dining-room and halls, if the house is old and floors bad, and economy necessary, use a solid dark linoleum, either deep blue or red, and have it waxed, as an economical measure as well as to improve its appearance.

In a small home, where no great formality is observed, well-chosen doilies may be used on all occasions, instead of tablecloths. By this expedient you suppress one large item on the laundry bill, the care of the doilies in such cases falling to the waitress.

To make comfortable, convenient and therefore livable, a part of a house, formerly an attic, or an extension with small rooms and low ceilings, seems to be the special province of a certain type of mind, which works best when there is a tax on the imagination.

When reclaiming attic rooms, one of the problems is how to get wall space, especially if there are dormer windows and very slanting ceilings. One way is to place a dressing table in the dormer, under windows, covering the sides of the dormer recess with mirror glass, edged with narrow moulding. The dressing table is not stationary; therefore a maid can easily move it, when the rooms are cleaned.










CHAPTER XXVII

TREATMENT OF A GUEST ROOM (Where economy is not an item of importance)

HERE we can indulge our tastes for beautiful quality of materials and fine workmanship, as well as good line and color, so we describe a room which has elegant distinction and atmosphere, yet is not a so-called period room rather a modern room, in the sense that it combines beautiful lines and exquisite coloring with every modern development for genuine comfort and convenience.

The walls are paneled and painted a soft taupe there are no pictures; simply one very beautiful mirror in a dull-gold frame, a Louis XVI reproduction.

The carpet made of dark taupe velvet covers the entire floor. The furniture is Louis XV, of the wonderful painted sort, the beautiful bed with its low head and foot boards exactly the same height, curving backward; the edges a waved line, the ground-color a lovely pistachio green, and the decoration gay old-fashioned garden flowers in every possible shade.

The bureau has three or four drawers and a bowed front with clambering flowers. These two pieces, and a delightful night table are exact copies of the Clyde Fitch set in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, at New York; the originals are genuine antiques, and their color soft from age. A graceful dressing table with winged mirrors, has been designed to go with this set, and is painted like the bureau. The glass is a modern reproduction of the lovely old eighteenth century mirror glass which has designs cut into it, forming a frame.

For chairs, all-over upholstered ones are used, of good lines and proportions; two or three for comfort, and a low slipper-chair for convenience. These are covered in a chintz with a light green ground, like the furniture, and flowered in roses and violets, green foliage and lovely blue sprays.

The window curtains are of soft, apple-green taffeta, trimmed with a broad puffing of the same silk, edged on each side by black moss-trimming, two inches wide. These curtains hang from dull-gold cornices of wood, with open carving, through which one gets glimpses of the green taffeta of the curtains.

In another suite we have a boudoir done in sage greens and soft browns. The curtains of taffeta, in stripes of the two colors. Two tiers of crème net form sash curtains.

The carpet is a rich mulberry brown, day-bed a reproduction of an antique, painted in faded greens with pannier fleur design on back, in lovely faded colors, taffeta cushions of sage green and an occasional note about the room of mulberry and dull blue. Electric light shades are of decorated parchment paper.

Really an enchanting nest, and as it is in a New York apartment, and occasionally used as a bedroom, a piece of furniture has been designed for it similar to the wardrobe shown in picture, only not so high. The glass door, when open, discloses a toilet table, completely fitted out, the presence of which one would never suspect.

Boudoir in New York Apartment. Painted Furniture, Antique and Reproductions



The sash-curtains are of the very finest cream net, and the window shades are of glazed linen, a deep cream ground, with a pattern showing a green lattice over which climb pink roses. The shades are edged at the bottom with a narrow pink fringe.

The bed has a cover of green taffeta exactly like curtains, with the same trimming of puffed taffeta, edged with a black moss trimming.

The mantelpiece is true to artistic standards and realizes the responsibility of its position as keynote to the room. Placed upon it are a beautiful old clock and two vases, correct as to line and color.

Always be careful not to spoil a beautiful mantel or beautiful ornaments by having them out of proportion one with the other. Plate XXIV shows a mantel which fails as a composition because the bust, an original by Behest, beautiful in itself, is too heavy for the mantel it
Stands on and too large for the mirror, which reflects it and serves as its background.

Keep everything in correct proportion to the whole. We have in mind the instance of some rarely beautiful walls taken from an ancient monastery in Parma, Italy. They were ideal in their original setting, but since they have been transported to America, no setting seems right. They belonged in a building where there was a succession of small rooms with low ceilings, each room perfect like so many pearls on a string. Here in America their only suitable place would be a museum, or to frame the tiny "devotional" of some precious Flower of Modernity.

















CHAPTER XXVIII

A MODERN HOUSE IN, WHICH GENUINE JACOBEAN FURNITURE IS APPROPRIATELY SET

A woman whose hobby is illuminating recently carried out AN original scheme for a dining room in a country House in England. It will appeal to experts in the advance guard of interior decoration. The woman in question was stimulated for her task by coming into possession of some interesting Jacobean pieces of furniture, of oak, squarely and solidly made, with flat carvings, characteristic of the period.

The large Jacobean chest happened to be lined, as many of those old chests were, with quaint figured paper, showing a coat-of-arms alternating with another design in large squares of black and grey. This paper, the owner had reproduced to cover the walls of her dining-room, and then she stained her woodwork black (giving the effect of old black oak), also, the four corner cupboards, but the inside of these cupboards doors and all she made a rich Pompeian red and lacquered it.

The doors are left open and one sees on the shelves of the corner cupboards a wonderful collection of old china, much of it done in rich gold. At night the whole is illuminated with invisible electric bulbs. The gleaming effect is quite marvelous.

The seat-pads on chairs are made of hides, gilded all over, and on the gilt the owner has painted large baskets holding fruit and flowers done in gay colors. The long Jacobean bench has a golden cushion with baskets painted on it in gay colors.

A part of the wonderful gold china is used at every meal, and the rest of it being left on the shelves of the four cupboards with their Pompeian red lining, when lit up, forms part of the glowing blaze of color, concentrated in all four corners of this unique room.

The Jacobean library in this house has the same black oak effect for paneling and at the windows, hangs long, red silk curtains, with deep borders of gold on which are painted gay flowers. This blaze of color is truly Jacobean and recalls the bedroom at Knole, occupied by James I where the bed-curtains were of red silk embroidered in gorgeous gold, and the high post bedstead heavily carved, covered with gold and silver tissue, lined with red silk, its head-board carved and gilded.



Example of Lack of Balance in Mantel Arrangement

A beautiful mantel, a beautiful mirror, beautiful ornaments, and a rare and beautiful marble bust by Behne, but because the bust is too large for both mantel and reflecting mirror, the composition is poor.

Another room at Knole was known as the "Spangle" bedroom. James I gave the furniture in it to Lionel, Earl of Middlesex. Bed curtains, as well as the seats of chairs and stools, are of crimson, heavily embroidered in gold and silver.








































CHAPTER XXIX

UNCONVENTIONAL BREAKFAST-ROOMS AND SPORTS BALCONIES

"SUN-rooms" are now a feature of country and some town houses. One of the first we remember was in Madrid, at the home of Canovas del Castillo, Prime Minister during the Regency. Dejeuner used to be served at one end of the conservatory, in the shadow of tall palms, while fountains played, birds with gay plumage sang, and the air was as fragrant as the tropics. For comfort, deep red rugs were put down on the white marble floors. Which reminds us that in many Spanish handmade rugs, what is known as "Isabella white" figures conspicuously. The term arises from the following story. It seems that Queen Isabella during the progress of some war, vowed she would not have her linen washed until her army returned victorious. The war was long, hence the term!

In furnishing a conservatory or porch breakfast room, it is best to use some variety of informal tables and chairs, such as painted furniture, willow or bamboo, and colored, not white, table cloths, doilies and napkins, to avoid the glare from the reflection of strong light Also, informal chi'na, glass, etc.

Screens, if necessary, should have frames to accord with the furniture, and the panels should be of wood, or some simple material such as sacking or rough linen, which comes in lovely vivid, out-of-door colors.

The bizarre and fascinating sports balconies overlooking squash courts, tennis courts, golf links, croquet grounds, etc., are among the newest inventions of the decorator. Furnished porches we have all grown accustomed to, and when made so as to be enclosed by glass, in inclement weather, they may be treated like inside rooms in the way of comforts and conveniences.

The smart porch-room is furnished with only such chairs, tables, sofas and rugs as are appropriate to a place not thoroughly protected from the elements, for while glass is provided for protection, a summer shower can outstrip a slow-footed servant and valuable articles made for indoors cannot long brave the effect of rain and hot sun.





In this case the house stood so near the road that there was no privacy, so the ingenious architect-decorator became landscape-gardener and by making a high but ornamental fence and numerous arbors, carried the eye to the green trees beyond and back to the refreshing tangle of shrubs and flowers in the immediate foreground, until the illusion of being secluded was so complete that the nearby road was forgotten.


Treatment of Ground Lying Between House and Much Traveled Country Road









For this reason furnish your porch with colors which do not fade, and with wicker furniture which knows how to contract and expand to order!

The same rule applies to rugs. Put your Oriental rugs indoors, and use inexpensive, effective porch rugs, which, with a light heart, you can renew, each season, if necessary.

The sports balcony is fitted out with special reference to the comfort of those who figure as audience for sports, and as a lounge between games, and each hostess vies with her friends in the originality and completeness of equipment, as well as in the costumes she dons in her commendable desire to make of herself a part of her scheme of decoration.

A country place which affords tennis courts, golf links, cricket and polo grounds or has made arrangements for the exercise of any sports, usually makes special provision for the comfort of those engaging in them, more or less as a country club does. There is a large porch for lounging and tea, and a kitchenette where tea, cooling drinks and sandwiches are easily and quickly prepared, without interfering with the routine of the kitchens. There are hot and cold plunge baths, showers, a swimming pool, dressing rooms with every convenience known to man or woman, and a room given over to racks which hold implements used in the various sports, as well as lockers for sweaters, change of linen, socks, etc., belonging to those stopping in the house.

Where sports are a main issue, an entire building is often devoted to the comfort of the participants. We have in mind the commodious and exceptionally delightful arrangements made for the comfort and pleasure of those playing court tennis in a large and architecturally fine building erected for the purpose on the estate of the Neville Lyttons, Crabbet Park, Poundhill, England.

If sport balconies overlook tennis courts or golf links, they are fitted out with light-weight, easily moved, stiff chairs for the audience, and easy, cushioned arm-chairs and sofas of upholstered wicker, for the participants to lounge in between matches.

Card tables are provided, as well as small tea tables, to seat two, three or four, while there is always one oblong table at which a sociable crowd of young people may gather for chatter and tea!

If you use rail-boxes, or window-boxes, holding growing plants, be sure that the flowers are harmonious in color when seen from the lawn, road or street, against their background of house and the awnings and chintzes, used on the porch.

The flowers in window boxes and on porch-rails must first of all decorate the outside of your house. Therefore, before you buy your chintz for porches, decide as to whether the color of your house, and its awnings, demands red, pink, white, blue, yellow or mauve flowers, and then choose your chintz and porch rugs as well as porch table-linen, to harmonize.

In selecting porch chairs remember that women want the backs of most of the chairs only as high as their shoulders, on account of wearing hats*






























CHAPTER XXX

SUNROOMS

THERE are countless fascinating schemes for arranging sunrooms. One, which we have recently seen near Philadelphia, was the result of enclosing a large piazza, projecting from an immense house situated in the midst of lawns and groves.

The walls are painted orange and striped with pale yellow; the floors are covered with the new variety of matting, which imitates tiles, and shows large squares of color, blocked off by black. The chintzes used are in vivid orange, yellow and green, in a stunning design; the wicker chairs are painted orange and black, and from the immense iridescent globes of electric light hang long, orange silk tassels.

Iron fountains, wonderful designs in black and gold, throw water over gold and silver fish, or gay water plants; while, in black and gold cages, vivid parrots and orange-colored canaries gleam through the bars. Iron vases of black and gold on tall pedestals, are filled with trailing ivy and bright colored plants. Along the walls are wicker sofas, painted orange and black, luxuriously comfortable with down cushions covered, as are some of the chair cushions, in soft lemon, sun-proofed twills.

Here one finds card-tables, tea-tables and smoking-tables, a writing-desk fully equipped, and at one end, a wardrobe of black and gold, hung with an assortment of silk wraps and "wooleys"for an un-provided and chilly guest, in early spring, when the steam heat is off and the glass front open.

Even on a grey, winter day, this orange and gold room seems flooded with sun, and gives one a distinctly cheerful sensation when entering it from the house.

Of course, if your porch-room is mainly for mid-summer use and your house in a warm region, then we commend instead of sun-producing colors, cool tones of green, grey or blue. If your porch floor is bad, cover it with dark-red linoleum and wax it. The effect is like a cool, tiled floor. On this you can use a few porch rugs.

Black and white awnings or awnings in broad, green-and-white stripes, or plain green awnings, are deliciously cool-looking, and rail-boxes filled with green and white or blue and pale pink flowers are refreshing on a summer day.


An Extension Roof in New York Converted into a Balcony

Shows how to utilize and make really very attractive an extension roof, by converting it into a balcony.

An awning of broad green and white stripes protect this one in winter as well as summer, and by using artificial ivy, made of tin and painted to exactly imitate nature, one gets, as you see, a charming effect.
By the sea, where the air is bracing, and it is not necessary to trick the senses with a pretence at coolness, nothing is more satisfactory or gay than scarlet geraniums; but if they are used, care must be taken that they harmonize with the color of the awnings and the chintz on the porch.

Speaking of rail-boxes reminds us that in making over a small summer house and converting a cheap affair into one of some pretensions, remember that one of the most telling points is the character of your porch railing. So at once remove the cheap one with its small, upright slats and the insignificant and frail top rail, and have a solid porch railing (or porch fence) built with broad, top rail.

Then place all around porch, resting on iron brackets, rail-flower boxes, the tops of these level with the top of the rail, and paint the boxes the color of the house trimmings. Filled with running vines and gay flowers, nothing could be more charming.

Window boxes make any house lovely and are a large part of that charm which appeals to us, whether the house is a mansion in Mayfair or a Bavarian farmhouse. Americans are learning this.

The window and rail-boxes of a house look best when all are planted with the same variety of flowers.

Having given a certain air of distinction to your porch railing, add another touch to the appearance of your small, remodeled house by having the shutters hung from the top of the windows, instead of from the sides.

A charming variety of awning or sun-shades, to keep the sun and glare out of rooms, is the old English idea of a straw-thatching, woven in and out until it makes a broad, long mat which is suspended from the top of windows, on the outside of the house, being held out and permanently in place, at the customary angle of awnings.

We first saw this picturesque kind of rustic awnings used on little cottages of a large estate in Vermont, cottages once owned and lived in by laborers, but bought and put in comfortable condition to be used as overflow rooms for guests, in connection with the large family mansion (once the picturesque village inn).

The art of making these straw awnings is not generally understood in America. In the case to which we refer, one of the gardeners employed on the estate, chanced to be an old Englishman who had woven the straw window awnings for farmhouses in his own country.

The straw awnings, with window boxes planted with bright geraniums and vines, make an inland cottage delightfully picturesque and are practical, although the sea might destroy the straw awnings by high winds.





































CHAPTER XXXI

TREATMENT OF A WOMAN'S DRESSING ROOM

EVERY house, or flat, which is at all pretentious, should arrange a Vanity Room for the use of guests, in which there are full-length mirrors, a completely equipped dressing-table with every conceivable article to assist a lady in making her toilet, slipper-chairs and chairs to rest in, and a completely equipped lavatory adjoining.

The woman who takes her personal appearance seriously, just as any artist takes her art (and when dressing is not an art it is not worth discussion) can have her dressing-room so arranged with mirrors, black walls and strong, cleverly reflected, electric lights, that she stands out with a clean-cut outline, like a cameo, the minutest detail of her toilet disclosed. With such a dressing room, it is quite impossible to suffer at the hands of a careless maid, and one can use the black walls as a background for vivid chair covers, sofa cushions and lampshades.

Off this dressing-room should be another, given over to clothes, with closets equipped with hooks and shelves, glass cabinets for shoes and slippers, and the "show-case" for jewels to be placed in by the maid that the owner may make her selection.At the time of the Louis, knights and courtiers had large rooms devoted to the care and display of their wardrobes, and even to-day there are men who are serious connoisseurs in the art of clothes.

The dressing table should be constructed of material in harmony with the rest of your furniture. It may be of mahogany, walnut, rose wood, satin wood, or some painted variety, or, as is the fashion now, made of silk, a seventeenth and eighteenth century style (in vogue during the time of the Louis).

These are made of taffeta with lace covers on top, and in outline are exactly like the simple dotted-Swiss dressing-tables with which every one is familiar, the usual variety, so easily made by placing a wooden packing box on its side, In this case have your carpenter put shelves inside for boots, shoes and slippers. The entire top is covered with felt or flannel, over which is stretched silk or sateen, in any color, which may harmonize with the room.





Common Place Barn Made Interesting

Interior decoration not infrequently leads to a desire to chic the appearance of one's "out-of-doors." We give an example of a perfectly commonplace barn made interesting by adding green latticework, a small iron balcony, an ornamental gate and setting out a few decorative evergreens. Behold a transformation!




A flounce, as deep as the box is high, is made of the same material as the top, and tacked to the edges of the tabletop. Cover the whole with dotted or plain Swiss. A piece of glass, cut to exactly fit the top of the table, is a practical precaution. A large mirror, hung above yet resting on the table, is canopied in the old style, with the same material with which you cover your dressing table.

If the table is made of the beautiful taffeta, now so popular for this purpose, as well as for curtains, it is, of course, not covered with Swiss or lace, except the top, on which is used a fine, handmade cover, of real lace and hand embroidery, in soft creams, cream from age, or a judicious bath in weak tea. The glass top laid over this cover protects the lace.

If the table has drawers, each can be neatly covered with the taffeta, as can the frame of any table. A good, up-to-date cabinet-maker understands this work as so much of it is now done.
























CHAPTER XXXII

THE TREATMENT OF CLOSETS

THE modern architect turns out his closets so complete as to comfort and convenience, that he leaves but little to be done by the professional or amateur decorator. Each perfectly equipped bedroom suite calls for, at least, two closets: one supplied with hooks, padded hangers for coats, and covered hangers for skirts, if the closet is for a woman; or, if it is for a man, with such special requirements as he may desire.

In the case of a woman's suite, one closet should consist entirely of shelves. Paint all the closets to harmonize with the suite, and let the paint on the shelves have a second coat of enamel, so that they may be easily wiped off. Supply your shelves with large and small boxes for hats, blouses, laces, veils, etc., neatly covered with paper, or chintz, to harmonize with the room.

Those who dislike too many mirrors in a room may have full-length mirrors on the inside of the closet doors.

Either devote certain shelves to your boots, shoes and slippers, or have a separate shallow closet for these shallow because it is most convenient to have but one row on a shelf.

Where economy is not an item of importance, see that electric lights are placed in all the closets, which are turned on with the action of opening the door.

The elaboration of closets, those with drawers of all sizes and depths, cedar closets for furs, etc., is merely a matter of the architect's planning to meet the specific needs of the occupants of any house.











CHAPTER XXXIII

TREATMENT OF A NARROW HALL

A LONG, narrow hall in a house, or apartment, is difficult to arrange, but there are methods of treating them which partially corrects their defects. One method is shown on Plate XIV.

The best furnishing is a very narrow console (table) with a stiff, high-backed chair on either side of it, and on the wall, over console, a tapestry, an architectural picture or a family portrait. On the console is placed merely a silver card tray.

Have a closet for wraps if possible, or arrange hooks and a table, out of sight, for this purpose.

Keep your walls and woodwork light in color and in the same tone.

An interesting treatment of a long narrow hall is to break its length with latticework, which has an open arch, wide enough for one or two
People to pass through, the arch surmounted by an urn in which ivy is planted.

The latticework has lines running up and down not crossed, as is the usual way. It is on hinges so that trunks or furniture may be carried through the hall, if necessary. The whole is kept in the same color scheme as the hall.


















Narrow Entrance Hall of a Nezv York Antique Shop

An idea for treatment of a narrow hall, where the practical and beautiful are combined. The hall table and candlesticks are an example of the renaissance of iron, elaborately wrought after classic designs.

The mirror over table is framed in green glass; the ornaments are of dull gold (iron gilded).

The Venetian glass jar is in opalescent green, made to hold dried rose leaves, and used here purely as an ornament which catches and reflects the light, important, as the hall is dark.

The iron of table is black touched with gold, and the marble slab dark-green veined with white.
CHAPTER XXXIV

TREATMENT OF A VERY SHADED LIVING ROOM

BY introducing plenty of yellow and orange you can bring sunshine into a dark living room. If your house is in a part of the country where the heat is great, a dark living room in summer is sometimes a distinct advantage, so keep the colorings subdued in tone, and, therefore, cool looking. If, on the contrary, the living-room is in a cool house on the ocean, or a shaded mountainside, and the sun is cut off by broad porches, you will cheer up your room, and immensely improve it, by using sun-producing colors in chintzes and silks; while cut flowers or growing plants, which reproduce the same coloring, will intensify the illusion of sunshine.

Sash curtains of thin silk, in bright yellows, are always sun-producing, but if you intend using yellows in a room, be careful to do so in combination with browns, greens, grays, or carefully chosen blues, not with reds or magentas.

Try not to mix warm and cold colors when planning your walls. Grey walls call for dull blue or green curtains; white walls for red or green curtains; cream walls for yellow, brown buff or apple green curtains. If your room is too cold, warm it up by making your accessories, such as lampshades, and sofa pillows, of rose or yellow material.



















CHAPTER XXXV

SERVANTS' ROOMS/GUEST

WHETHER you expect to arrange for one servant or a dozen, keep in mind the fact that efficiency is dependent upon the conditions under which your manor maid-servant rests as well as works, and that it is as important that the bedroom be attractive as that it be comfortable.

For servants' rooms it is advised that the matter of furnishing and decorating be a scheme, which includes comfort, daintiness and effectiveness on the simplest, least expensive basis, no matter how elaborate the house. There is a moral principle involved here. In the case of more than one servant the color scheme alone needs to be varied, for similar furniture will prevent jealousy among the servants, while at the same time the task of inventing is reduced to the mere multiplying of one room; even the wall paper and chintz being alike in pattern, if different in color.

The simplest iron beds, or wooden furniture can be painted white or any color, which may be considered more durable.

In maids' rooms for summer use, a vase provided for flowers is sometimes an incentive to personally contribute a touch of beauty. That sense of beauty once awakened in a maid does far more than any words on the subject of order and daintiness in her own room or in those of her employer.














CHAPTER XXXVI

THE BABY'S ROOMS: THE DAY BOOM, THE NIGHT ROOM
THE modern baby has been catered to until it really seems that every one of his thousand moods by day and night is met with some invention, which exactly satisfies the need. Whether the result of all this convenience is going to produce a superior type of human remains to be proved, but the fond attendant of the babe certainly profits by the many easily moved, quickly packed and sanitary necessities.
Not so many years ago it was only the baby born with a silver, or perhaps gold, spoon in its mouth, who could have an ideal nursery. To day there is neither need of great wealth nor much forethought on the part of parents. Every conceivable and many not before imagined articles of furniture for the baby's comfort are on sale in many shops in all of our cities and towns.
Before you furnish it is necessary to decide upon the situation of your baby's room or rooms. Remember that both child and grown-ups will be happier if the little one is not where every one disturbs it if sleeping, and, if awake, its cries or merry shouts ring out to arouse a slumbering elder.
Keep all rooms used for babies very simple and therefore airy looking. Put nothing into them, which will hold dust or look as if it could not be washed or easily cleaned. In placing the crib see that no draught reaches it. Have a light which if needed can be turned directly on the crib. One must be prepared for a hurry call when there may be no time to readjust the light.
In the room where the baby is to sleep by day or night have dark shades at the windows. The room for sleeping must have windows admitting lots of fresh air. So stuffy curtains or those, which cannot be easily put aside, is a real danger to the child's well being.
If you live in a house a small elevator, built so as to carry food and other things from kitchen floor to the baby's room, saves many steps and avoids the constant desertion of the child by the nurse.
The room in which the baby passes the day should, if possible, be flooded with sunshine. And all nursery windows should be protected with bars for the safety of children. Whether one or two rooms are devoted to the baby there are a certain number of necessities in the way of furniture to be bought. The wisest because the most economical way to furnish nurseries is to buy not very expensive furniture but always a reliable quality. Keep some of your money for rather frequent repainting when the furniture gets disfigured, as it surely wills if the babies are old enough to creep or crawl about.
One advantage of having white enamel or some pretty pale pink, blue or yellow instead of a never-show-dirt, dark color is that it always delights the nurse and brings out in her a pride in keeping the room or rooms looking spotless. Simple, washable curtains f or windows are easily made. An attractive kind is white dotted or barred muslin, tied back two sets so that there will be no excuse for not keeping the windows snowy white. If you want to have some color at your nursery windows let the window shades be of gay chintz the glazed kind if you can get it because it is thin and very smooth and rolls up and down easily. You can perfectly well make window shades yourself if you have kept the old rollers and the stick at the bottom of each shade, used to hold it out straight.
On the floor use a large, washable, wool rug. The chairs usually match bureau, bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe and chest for baby's extra blankets and carriage robes. A way of getting more color into the nursery is to make chintz slips for the tops of the backs of the chairs, and extending a third of the length of back. On one or two really comfortable armchairs, for those who care for the children, have cushions covered with a jolly chintz corresponding with color scheme of room. The tiny chairs and table for the use of babies are kept strictly in the color scheme of the larger furniture. Chintz or cretonnes come as cheap as twenty-five cents a yard and are good enough for a nursery where it is well to use inexpensive fabrics so as to renew them frequently. Solid colors or checked ginghams look well. Let both colors -and patterns be baby-like.
For walls choose a plain tinted wash or a paper with a dainty strip or little, bright flower pattern. Do not over-do decorations of funny animals. They are often appropriate, but fatiguing if allowed to caper all over the walls, rugs and furniture! So do not get furniture with animals painted on it. You will surely tire of it. Choose plain white enamel or some delicate shade of an attractive color and with a slight decoration flowers or simple lines in another color, look best. If you can paint, here is a little job for you!
Modern cribs for babies come to fit every fancy and purse. One of the simplest kind is made like the rubber bathtubs. That is, canvas suspended from uprights, which fold together like a campstool, for stowing away or traveling. These come with canopies and can be made to look dainty and baby like with dotted or plain Swiss over pink or blue for canopy and deep frill reaching from rim of crib to floor.
"Kiddies Koops" and similar makes are well known to most of the mothers. The sides, head and foot are made in one and can be moved up and down to suit the need of the moment. In some styles only the sides are movable. When the baby is very young it is only of importance to have the "fence" of crib a height convenient for mother or nurse, but as the child grows and be-gins to pull itself up and lean over sides of crib, it is possible to lift this "fence" and have a perfect enclosure in which it may be left to amuse itself.
Besides the rubber bathtub familiar to most mothers, there is a combination of bath and baby's rubber dressing table. This table comes not attached to a tub, and in either case is a great convenience, as it is padded and therefore comfortable for the child. Pockets hanging at the sides hold safety pins, etc. Its height is 30 inches from the floor, which means the one dressing the baby need not bend over to any great extent. The tub and table combined are made so as to fit over an adult bathtub. In small apartments these are especially convenient. If any but a rubber tub is used, have a rubber mat to prevent the child's slipping under the water.
In bureaus and wardrobes the baby's trousseau is as carefully provided for as is his elders.
The play hours are filled with forms and colors invented by artist-craftsmen. They even insert into fences surrounding the baby *s '* play grounds" highly decorative but familiar animals, such as illumine the pages of every nursery book. For the child of six months or less, one can get amusing animal chairs in which he sits alone and plays with his toys. The little backs have to be encouraged to grow strong by being used, and these chairs for wee babes serve this purpose. In the old days babies were propped up with pillows, and some stash use a clothes basket with great success, In fact it is possible to buy a glorified clothes basket (exactly the same shape) mounted on wheels and to use in various ways. With the very young, as with old people, it is actual comfort that we aim at giving them.
Each mother or nurse has her own ideas as to the proper way to arrange the furniture in the nursery. If there are two rooms, one for day and one for night, put very little in the sleeping room beside the crib. Into the day room can go the other furniture? Always keep the sunny room for the day, if only one has the sun.
Large Toy Boxes on wheels are good for teaching a child to put its own toys away after playing with them. It is not an exaggeration to say that no child is too young to begin training it.






CHAPTER XXXVII

ROOMS FOR THE ELDERLY
Many families have elderly people and they too have their likes and dislikes as to furnishings. There is no use in trying to tell them that a " newfangled" wicker chair stained some artistic color and fitted with chintz-covered cushions, feels as comfortable as their beloved old upholstered rocker. They know better; they know what the aged bones and trembling flesh find most endurable. So here again we have marshaled facts to help those who would make grandmothers or grandfather's room exactly what she or he would like. Remember, old people, like little children, are elemental; they want what they want and not what we of another age think they should want.
Give your old people chairs with high backs, against which they may rest their heads, tired with the weight of years. Let the chairs have well-upholstered backs, seats and sides, and see to it that the seat is low but not too low nor too deep or your old people will be unable to get out of the chair unaided. Beds, too, are best if rather low, provided the old people are still active, if, however, maids or nurses are required to be in attendance, high beds will save their backs when leaning over the patient?
You will find old eyes touchingly grateful for carefully shaded lights and dark blue or green window shades to be drawn down, or blinds to close in, so as to modify the sunlight.
Next the bed has a solidly made and not easily upset table for all the comforting little things, which shorten wakeful nights and the resting hours. Close to the big arm-chair (a rocker, over-upholstered "wing" chair or some other enfolding type with arms) draw up another table for paper, eyeglasses and knitting.
Don't forget a footstool for old ladies and a cushioned leg-rest for old men.
You can make the rug or silk quilted foot covering which keeps draughts from the aged limbs correspond in color with curtains or some other of the fabrics used in the room.
Old people like bright, happy colors. The bright colors reach their receding sight as bright colors reach the arriving sight of our babies. Always use "warm"-colors, the deep, dignified reds, soft pinks, sunny yellows and a real apple greet as reminders of the spring of the year and life. A rich blue, one with "life" in it, can be used to advantage in rooms for old people. And. flowery chintzes for old ladies. These furnish a mild diversion as with children. So use the chintzes with rather literal designs, not the indefinite and more "artistic" ones.
Here, as in any room, sofa pillows give opportunities for cheering. Bits of color. Make them not too large and very soft, to be tucked into the "small" of the tired back or under a rheumatic arm or knee.
Many old people like something alive, as a growing plant, a bird, or globe of gold fish as diversion. The flowering plant, the cage and color of bird, the red-gold of fish and blue or green or amber glass balls put in bottom of the globe contribute very decidedly to the color-scheme of the room.
If you paint the birdcage be sure that the color will not poison the bird if he picks it off and swallows it. Also use a color to set off the bird's plumage. In other words, let your emphasis be on the object of interest the bird rather than the cage. It is not necessary to use a pure white bowl for gold fish. They can be found in colors. Furniture for the rooms of old people pleases them if it is a style they know something, which recalls old days of youthful activity. If, by reason of moving about or the breaking up and division of old homes, it is necessary to buy new furniture you have only to discover what is the favorite type of bed and bureau, arm-chair and desk or work-table. Today, all the old styles may be had in reproductions.
A room, which has given endless comfort and entertainment to a beloved old lady, is absolutely youthful in its sunny gayness. We describe it because it is a case of necessities made beautiful without any extra outlay of money.
Here you will see a readily old-fashioned room of the Early American style. The old lady who occupies it inherited everything in it from her grandmother, who furnished it with things of the latest fashion in her time! Some old ladies like modern "improvements/' but not this one! She loves the old styles and her family carry out every wish even to making for her hand-worked bedspreads of the variety called "Colonial." You all know these lovely spreads; perhaps some have seen the unusually beautiful one genuinely antique, which is shown on a bed in the Thomas Bailey Aldrieh Homestead, at Portsmouth, N. H. This one is heavy white linen with a very beautiful design grapevine, garlands, and vase of flowers in center of spread, all wonderfully embroidered.
When you come across furniture of the type we show in this plate be sure that it is Early American of English ancestry. Whether in a family attic or at a country auction seize upon any such lovely old treasures. If you do not like them to use many others do and such pieces command good prices.
The impression one gets on entering this room is of a lovely soft gray background sprinkled over with garden flowers of the sort one associates with old ladies. The reds were a hollyhock shade; the blues had a purplish tone and the pinks a tinge of blue. Lovely cheerful colors but with a suggestion of the olden time.
It is a south room therefore it was possible to use a light gray paper with a rough crepe finish. Had it been a north room the paper would have been warm in color, pink or yellow. There is no border, merely a neat picture molding, and the ceiling is a faint pearl gray.
The woodwork exactly matches the gray of the walls. This is one way of making a room appear larger than it really is. It adds a certain restful-ness, too, not to continually cut up your background with woodwork in another color.
The carpet is a soft Wilton rug, large enough to cover all but about three inches of the floor all around. It is a gray much darker than the walls, with a border of still darker tone.
The chintzes used have a gray background like the walls, and the reds and bluish purples and soft pinks appear as flowers, with soft greens as leaves.
The curtains are chintz and so is the big armchair of the "wing" variety beloved of the old, for once in the depths of such a chair one is secure from -draughts and ready for "forty winks." Here the most punctilious old lady can doze should the book being read aloud prove dull!
The bedspread is chintz, but the broad low sofa for frequent naps is in hollyhock red (blue would do also) and so are the chair-pads on cane bottom chairs and the cushions in two willow chairs stained gray. The sofa pillows are of chintz.
In choosing flowers for such a room the prevailing soft shades are repeated and flaming scarlet and geranium red or other clashing tones avoided.
In cases where old people own furniture and their once fashionable shapes have ceased to please the eye, put your mind to it and see if there is not some way of altering the best of what they have and supplementing these with some more modern and really convenient pieces.
If you happen to own good rosewood beds with absurdly high headboards it is not always necessary to discard these. We know of many that have been made rather attractive by having a carpenter lower the headboard to something approaching the standard of to day.
Our old people are quite right to have respect for beautiful woods and fine workmanship. Some of the Victorian furniture was less ugly than others, but as a "period" it surpasses all in its departure from beautiful line and ornament.
Did you ever see a room that so suggested an old gentleman who has a love of comfort and happy hours with books, newspapers and his cigar or pipe? This is a room the entire family like to visit, for the chairs and sofa are comfy, the fire always lighted, the lamps the sort one can read by and nothing here very easily harmed, for "grandfather" insists that no one shall ever say "donV* to any of Ms young visitors! There are interesting books and some old-time engravings the owner bought years ago and can tell you all about. This is a room with associations. You know the sort! Look at it and gather ideas for the room you want to arrange for the grandfather in some happy home.
In recent years we have seen far too little of fine woods. But the day of fine woods is returning and an era of fine workmanship will record itself on the minds of the young people of to day. The good old bits of furniture which have been preserved in our own and other lands have kept up the standards of taste and the good woods of the much decried Victorian age will be respected by the knowing. So make use of the best of this type, the large bureaus had convenient bureau drawers, often beautifully lined with satinwood.
If mirrors are ugly, discard all but the glass itself and reframe this to hang above the bureau proper.
Various meaningless ornaments can be amputated, and by so doing you will add much to the simplicity of the furniture and in some cases the despised "horror" becomes a dignified object to greet the eye.
So if "Grandmother" owns things she is loath to part with and without which she will not be happy, here is an idea, which may serve as a compromise.
Old gentlemen like big chairs and sofas that are not perishable as to coverings, for if they smoke, the ashes will fall, and feeble eyes cannot be responsible. There was solid comfort and much sound sense in the one-time popularity of leather covering for men's sofas and reading chairs, especially when the men were old men.
Desks must be where the light falls on the letter to be written and all unnecessary articles should be kept off the desk of any man, old or young. The great exception to this wise rule is intimate photographs. Most men like a few of these near them.
Do not forget the bookcase or shelves for the old gentleman you are trying to make happy. Even if he cans no longer use his tired eyes to read he generally wants to have his books where he can take them out at will, to be read to him. To plan and then create a room in which our old people feel at home is indeed an achievement!
CHAPTER XXXVIII

A YOUNG GIRL'S ROOM
Young girls usually like furniture with straight, slender lines made of some light-colored wood or painted one of the soft, silvery grays, blues or lavenders. Blush-pink is sometimes used on youthful furniture and apple-green delights young girls if you are sure to give them as curtains pink gingham, linen, or taffeta, with pure white net or scrim against the sashay apple blossom effect! We know daffodil rooms in which a lovely yellow and stem green are combined. In fact one mother with half a dozen daughters, in the. Spring of their years, has taken a flower for each prom and the family always say, "You will find it in the Primrose Room," meaning Kath-erine's, or "It is in the Rose Room," meaning Belle's.
One modern girl ultra modern, whose room is much discussed, has used colors of a more sophisticated sort than those above. She goes in for crimson, royal purple, orange and emerald green, and shades her lamps with plain natural colored parchment paper, over which she drops squares of chiffon hole cut out in the center. These "veils" are of every rich Oriental shade and weighted with gold fringe or balls sewn to the corners. Her walls are covered with Japanese fiber paper in dull gold, and at her windows hang curtains of a very thin, rope color material found as theatrical gauze. This she has bound with emerald green satin ribbon. The valance at the top and the bands, which loop back, the curtains are of cretonne having a purple ground with birds as design, in most of the colors used over lampshades.
Every young girl likes a three-winged mirror on her dressing table. We think her very wise. The hair most carefully arranged is going to look the most attractive and the hat put on at an angle to accentuate the special charm of the girl who is inspecting herself, is the hat one will call a "winner." Your young girl knows!
As to the wood of which her furniture is made, that is a question of the style of the season. This sounds, and is, very expensive unless your young girl is the clever, up-to-date, self-helping sort who can do things herself. There are many girls of fifteen and sixteen who paint their own furniture and do it very well. They get their brother or some friend, expert with the saw, to amputate unbeautiful knobs and other fancy excrescence, once the fashion, but compared with modern creations patterned after classic shapes, offensive to ^her eye. Any girl with a keen intelligence can educate her taste by studying the furniture displayed by the leading dealers.
The young girl's room must be what she, not your mature woman, calls attractive. So consult each girl in turn. Young girls as a rule like bright and spring like colors. One should feel on entering that some happy girl calls it her very own. Hangings and furniture covers can be of solid colors, pink, yellow or pale blue with dancing, frilly white sash curtains. If. Preferred, lovely chintz and cretonne to suit each style of furniture come at all prices.
Dear to the heart of your young girl is a dressing table with a three-winged mirror. They sound an extravagance, but remember you can pay a great deal for one; a moderate sum, or you can even make one yourself! If you are blessed with plenty of this world's goods and can satisfy your heart's desire we would suggest furniture of the Louis XVI style made in some light glossy wood or painted. This style with cane let into wood is very girlish and charming. But do not be discouraged; if you are possessed of more taste than money, use your wits. Buy what you can and make the rest! We have in mind an ingenious woman who made for a young girl friend a fascinating three-winged mirror in fact the whole table by reconstructing an old-fashioned washstand that had one drawer and two doors below. The doors were removed and became the side wings of mirror. Sides and back of stand were also taken away and the back lifted to form back of center mirror. Mirror glass was then fastened to center and wings and framed with picture molding. Sides and back with doors having been removed, the four corner uprights figured as the four legs of a slender dressing table. The whole was painted and enameled white. A clever girl can make almost anything!
One young woman we know bought up many kinds of old tables, chairs, bureaus and beds at auctions in her town, and these she stored in her father's barn to make over on rainy afternoons after school hours. This resulted in her refurnishing their home, and then, that turned out so alluring, she drifted into decorating the homes of friends. To day, five years after she painted her first piece of furniture, she has become a full-fledged decorator, with her sign out! She loves doing rooms for young girls and says "Give your girl, as well as your older woman, a sofa in her room and on the foot of each sofa a dainty, soft and warm coverlet to draw up over the feet and limbs if she wants to steal a nap after lunch or before dinner. Let this coverlet be one of the bright colors used for lampshades or sofa pillows. Give your young girl gay colors and graceful shapes; plenty of mirrors and windows, lots of windows! Youth would have light and life."
Your young girl needs a writing desk in her room and so placed that the light falls over her left shoulder. If it is comfortable to write, she will be far more apt to answer letters and not put off the "bread and butter" sort! Start her with a generous supply of paper, pens, ink, stamps and blotters. After that she is the one to see that her equipment is kept up so that the desk of some grown-up is not resorted to for necessities.
As much a necessity as her desk is her worktable. And when your young girl moves into her beautiful and complete new room, she is of tea so fascinated by the convenience of silks and cottons to match all her belongings that the task of repairing ceases to be a burden and things get done as a matter of course. It is all taken as one of the items "in the day's work" or program.
Those who live with young people of either sex know that half the battle of teaching order is won when a place has been provided for everything. By this method "house-keeping" is reduced to its simplest form and the actual cost of service kept down. All youth has its untidy moments not to be taken too seriously, but the chronic habit of untidiness, if not checked, gets into the character.





























CHAPTER XXXIX

THE YOUNG BOY'S ROOM
The young boy's room we show is equally suitable for some other members of the family. We have seen a boy immensely happy in it and likewise girls in their early teens. In one home it was used for a "paying-guest" and it looked very well indeed in a small suburban house where nothing was more elaborate.
It is in appearance "young" and has no special gender. This is why a boy likes it. Another point in its favor with the boy is that it is not "fussy." like, or in keeping with, the chief pieces of furniture. One small table will be for the telephone; another at the bedside; a third for his smokes, tobacco, cigars and pipes, matches and ashtray. If your man likes his tobacco "just so" get him a humidor. This will keep the tobacco moist.
As to styles of furniture most comfortable for men, we would advise one of those with straight lines and strongly built. It is an easy matter to choose furniture for a man's room if you will ask yourself the question "does this look like a man?"
As for color scheme it depends upon what each man likes. If he has no preferences yet seems to Totowa what he does not like, grasp at any clew he may drop when commenting on other homes. As a rule men like a simple room which not only has the comforts but looks comfortable. To the eye of the man not trained in the art of furnishing so as to get subtle beauty, you will find clear, rather strong colors are most satisfactory. Try shades of red, attractive deep blues, browns and greens. Avoid what we call half-tones mauves, lavender, old rose, petunia, etc. There are men who like these shades, but we are talking about the average man.
Your figured materials for curtains and furniture coverings will depend, as to pattern and coloring, upon the style of the furniture; not absolutely, but there are distinctly suitable and un-suitable colors and designs when considered in relation to certain shapes. (See chapter on Periods in Color Schemes.)
Make the sash curtains of some thin white or cream washable material and arrange them on the rods so that if the man wants to push them back and let in all the light of heaven he can do so and not upset the housekeeper!
The floor covering should be one of the darkest tones of your color scheme; the curtains if of a figured material should be more serious in character than curtains you would choose for a woman's room. If you make sofa pillows let them be large and "masculine" looking, not of many colors and frilly. Follow the rules for making lampshades in the chapter devoted to that subject. They are to be attractive notes of color in your room to cheer it up as flowers can. But remember that the average man cares more for comfort and convenience than he does for effect, so give him these things in lamp shades as well as in bed and bureau.






































CHAPTER XXXX

TABLE DECORATION

FOR the young and inexperienced we state a few rules for table decoration. If you have furnished your dining-room to accord not only with your taste, but the scale upon which you intend living, be careful that the dining-table never strikes a false note, never "gets out of the picture" by becoming too important as to setting or menu. You may live very formally in your town house and very simply, without any ostentation, in the country, but be sure that in all of your experimenting with table decoration you observe above all the law of appropriateness.

Your decoration, flowers, fruit, character of bowl or dish which holds them, or objet d'art used in place of either; linen or lace, china, glass and silver, each and all must be in keeping. The money value has nothing whatever to do with this question of appropriateness, when considered by an artist decorator.

Remember that in decorating, things are classified according to their color value, their lines and the purpose for which they are intended. The dining table is to eat at, therefore it should primarily hold only such things as are required for the serving of the meal. So your real decoration should be your silver, glass and china, with its background of linen or lace. The central decoration, if of flowers or fruit, must be in a bowl or dish decorative in the same sense that the rest of the tableware is.

Flowers should be kept in the same key as your room. One may do this and yet have infinite variety. Tall stately lilies, American Beauty roses, great bowl of gardenias and orchids are for stately rooms. Your small house, flat or bungalow require modest garden flowers such as daffodils, jonquils, tulips, lilies-of-the-valley, snapdragons, one long-stemmed rose in a vase, or a cluster of shy moss-buds or nodding tea-roses.

A table set with art in the key of a small ménage and on a scale of simple living, often strikes the note of perfection from the expert's point of view because perfect of its kind and suitable for the occasion. This appropriateness is what makes your "smart" table quite as it makes your "smart" woman.

Wedgwood cream color ware "C. C." is beautiful and always good form. For those wanting color, the same famous makers of England have an infinite variety, showing lovely designs.

Unless you are a collector in the museum sense, press into service all of your beautiful possessions. If you have to go without them, let it be when you no longer own them, and not because they are hoarded out of sight. You know the story of the man who bought a barrel of apples and each day carefully selected and ate those that were rotten, feeling the necessity of not being wasteful.

When the barrel was empty he realized that he had deliberately wasted all his good apples by not eating one! Let this be a warning to him who would save his treasures.

If you love antiques and have joyously hunted them down and, perhaps, denied yourself other things to obtain them, you are the person to use them, even though the joy be transient and they perish at the hand of a careless man or maidservant Remember, posterity will have its own "fads" and prefer adding the pleasure of pursuit to that of mere ownership. So bring out your treasures and use them!

As there are many kinds of dining rooms, each good if planned and worked out with an art instinct, so there are many kinds of tables. The usual sort is the round, or square, extension table, laid with fine damask and set with conventional china, glass and silver, rare in quality and distinguished in design.

For those who prefer the unusual there are oblong, squarely built Jacobean and Italian refectory tables. With these one makes a point of showing the rich color of the time-worn wood and carving, for the old Italian tables often have the beveled edge and legs carved. When this style of table is used, the wood instead of a cloth is our background, and a "runner" with doilies of Old Italian lace takes the place of linen.

In Feudal Days, when an entire household, master and retainers, sat in the baronial hall "above and below the salt," tables were made of great length. When used out of their original setting, they must be cut down to suit modern conditions.

In Krakau, Poland, the writer often dined at one of these feudal boards, which had been in our hostess's family for several hundred years. To get it into her dining room a large piece had been cut out at the centre and the two ends pushed together.

For those who live informally, delightfully decorative china can be had at low prices. It was once made only for the peasants, and comes to us from Italy, France, Germany and England. This fact reminds us that when we were traveling in Southern Hungary and were asked to dine with a Magyar farmer, out on the windy Piista, instead of their usual highly colored pottery, gay with crude, but decorative flowers, they honored us by covering the table with American ironstone china! The Hungarian crockery resembles the Brittany and Italian ware, and some of it is most attractive when rightly set

When once the passion to depart from beaten paths seizes us it is very easy to make mistakes. Therefore to the housekeeper, accustomed to conventional china, but weary of it, we would commend as a safe departure, modern Wedgwood and Italian reproductions of classic models, which come in exquisite shapes and in a delicious soft cream tone. If one prefers, it is possible to get these varieties decorated with charming designs in artistic colorings, as previously stated.

For eating meals out of doors, or in "sun-rooms," where the light is strong, the dark peasant pottery, like Brittany, Italian and Hungarian, is very effective on dull-blue linen, heavy cream linen or coarse lace, such as the peasants make.

Copper luster, with its dark metallic surface, is enchanting on dark wood or colored linen of the right tone.

Your table must be a picture composed on artistic lines. That is, it must combine harmony of line and color and above all, appropriateness. Gradually one acquires skill in inventing unusual effects; but only the adept can go against established rules of art and yet produce a pleasing ensemble.

We can all recall exceptions to this rule for simplicity, beautiful, artistic tables, covered with rare and entrancing objects, irrelevant, but delighting the eye. Some will instantly recall Clyde Fitch's dinners in this connection, but here let us emphasize the dictum that for a great master of the art of decoration there need be no laws.

A careful study of the Japanese principles of decoration is an ideal way of learning the art of simplicity. It is impossible to deny the immense decorative value of a single objet d'art, as one flower in a simple vase, provided it is given the correct background.

Background in decoration is like a pedal point in music; it must support the whole fabric, whether you are planning a house, a room
Or a table.

Example of a Charming Hall Spoiled by Too Pronounced a Rug

Shows how a too pronounced rug which is out of character, though a valuable Chinese antique, can destroy the harmony of a composition even where the stage is set with treasures; Louis XV chairs, antique fount with growing plants, candelabra, rare tapestry, reflected by mirror, and a graceful console and a settee with grey-green brocade cushions.








CHAPTER XXXXI

WHAT TO AVOID IN INTERIOR DECORATION: RULES FOR BEGINNERS

|E all know the saying that it is only those who have mastered the steps in dancing who can afford to forget them. It is the same in every art. Therefore let us state at once, that all rules may be broken by the educated the masters of their respective arts. For beginners we give the following rules as a guide, until they get their bearings in this fascinating game of making pictures by manipulating lines and colors, as expressed in necessary furnishings.

Avoid crowding your rooms, walls or tables, for in creating a home one must produce the quality of restfulness by order and space.

As to walls, do not use a cold color in a north or shaded room. Make your ceilings lighter in tone than the sidewalls, using a very pale shade of the same color as the sidewalls.

Do not put a spotted (figured) surface on other spotted (figured) surfaces. A plain wallpaper is the proper, because most effective, background for pictures.

Avoid the mistake of forgetting that table decoration includes all china, glass, silver and linen used in serving any meal.

In attempting the decoration of your dining-room table avoid anything inappropriate to the particular meal to be served and the scale of service. Do not have too many flowers on your table, or flowers not in harmony with the rest of the setting, in variety or color.

Do not use peasant china, no matter how decorative in itself, on fine damask or rare lace. By so doing you strike a false note. The background it demands is crash or peasant lace.

Avoid crowding your dining table or giving it an air of confusion by the number of things on it, thus destroying the laws of simplicity, line and balance in decoration.

Avoid using on your walls as mere decorations articles such as rugs or priests' vestments primarily intended for other purposes.

Avoid the misuse of anything in furnishing.
It needs only knowledge and patience to find the correct thing for each need. Better do without than employ a makeshift in decorating.

Inappropriateness and elaboration can defeat artistic beauty but intelligent elimination never can.

Beware of having about too many vases, or china meant for domestic use. The proper place for table china, no matter how rare it is, is in the dining room. If very valuable, one can keep it in cabinets.

Useless bric-a-brac in a dining room looks worse than it does anywhere else.

Your dining room is the best place for any brasses, copper or pewter you may own.

If sitting room and dining-room connect by a wide opening, keep the same color scheme in both, or, in any case, the same depth of color. This gives an effect of space. It is not uncommon when a house is very small, to keep all of the walls and woodwork, and all of the carpets, in exactly the same color and tone. If variety in the color-scheme is desired, it may be introduced by means of cretonnes or silks used for hangings and furniture covers.

Avoid the use of thin, old silks on sofas or chair seats.

Avoid too cheap materials for curtains or chair covers, as they will surely fade.

Avoid too many small rugs in a room. This gives an impression of restless disorder and interferes with the architect's lines. Do not place your rugs at strange angles; but let them follow the lines of the walls.

Avoid placing ornaments or photographs on a piano, which is in sufficiently good condition to be used.

Avoid the chance of ludicrous effects. For example, keep a plain background behind your piano. Make sure that, when listening to music you are not distracted by seeing a bewildering section of a picture above the pianist's head, or a silly little vase dodging, as he moves, in front of, above, or below his nose!

Avoid placing vases, or a clock, against a chimneypiece already elaborately decorated by the architect, as a part of his scheme in using the moulding of panel to frame a painting over the mantel. In the old palaces one sees that a bit of undecorated background is provided between mantel and the architect's decoration.

If your room has a long wall space, furnish it with a large cabinet or console, or a sofa and two chairs.

Avoid blotting out your architect's cleverest points by thoughtlessly misplacing hangings. Whoever decorates should always keep the architect's intention in mind.

Avoid having an antique clock, which does not go, and is used merely as an ornament. Make your rooms alive by having all the clocks running. This is one of the subtleties, which marks the difference between an antique shop, or museum, and a home.

Avoid the desecration of the few good antiques you own, by the use of a too modern color scheme. Have the necessary modern pieces you have bought to supplement your treasures, stained or painted a dull dark color in harmony with the antiques, and then use dull colors in the floor coverings, curtains and cushions.

If you have no good old ornaments, try to get a few good shapes and colors in inexpensive reproductions of the period to which your antiques belong.

Avoid the mistake of forgetting that every room is a "stage setting," and must be a becoming and harmonious background for its OCCUT pants.

Avoid arranging a Louis XVI bedroom, with fragile antiques and delicate tones, for your husband of athletic proportions and elemental tastes. He will not only feel, but also look out of place. If he happens to be fond of artistic things, give him these in durable shades and shapes.

Avoid the omission of a thoroughly masculine sitting room, library, smoking-room or billiard-room for the man, or men, of the house.

Avoid the use of white linen when eating out of doors. Saxes-blue, red or taupe linen are restful to the eyes. In fact, after one has used colored linen, white seems glaring and unsympathetic even indoors, and one instinctively chooses the old deep-cream laces. Granting this to be a bit precious, we must admit that the traditional white damask, under crystal and silver, or gold plate with rare porcelains, has its place and its distinction in certain houses, and with certain people.


A Man's Library

Shows a man's library, masculine gender written all over it strength, comfort, usefulness and simplicity.

The mantel is arranged in accordance with rules already stated. It will be noticed that the ornaments on mantel in no way interfere with design of the large architectural picture.










Avoid in a studio, bungalow or a small flat, where the living room and dining room are the same, all evidences of dining-room (china, silver and glass for use). Let the table be covered with a piece of old or modern brocade when not set for use. A lamp and books further emphasizes the note of living room.

Avoid the use of light-absorbing colors in wall papers if you are anxious to create sympathetic cheerfulness in your rooms, and an appearance of winning comfort Almost all dark colors are light-absorbing; greens, dull reds, dark grays and mahogany browns will make a room dull in character no matter how much sunlight comes in, or how many electric lights you use. Perhaps the only dark color, which is not light absorbing, is a dark yellow.

Avoid the permanent tea table. We are glad to record that one seldom happens upon one, these days. How the English used to revile them! In the simplest homes it is always possible at the tea hour, to have a table placed before whoever is to "pour" and a tray on which are cups, tea, cream, sugar, lemon, toast, cake or what you will, brought in from the pantry or kitchen. There was a time when in America, one shuddered at the possibility of dusty cups and those countless faults of a seldom-rehearsed tea table!

Avoid serving a lunch in an artificially lighted room. This, like a permanent tea table, is an almost extinct fashion. Neither was sensible, because inappropriate, and therefore bad form. The only possible reason for shutting out God's sunlight and using artificial lights, is when the function is to begin by daylight and continue until after nightfall.

If in doubt as to what is good, go often to museums and compare what you own, or have seen and think of owning, with objects in museum collections.













CHAPTER XXXXII

FADS IN COLLECTING

IN a New York home one room is devoted to a so-called panler fleuri collection which in this case means that each article shows the design of a basket holding flowers or fruit The collection is today so unique and therefore so valuable, that it has been willed to a museum, but its creation as a collection, was entirely a chance occurrence. The design of a basket trimmed with flowers happened to appeal to the owner, and if we are not mistaken, the now large collection had its beginning in the casual purchase of a little old pendant found in a forgotten corner of Europe.

The owner wore it, her friends saw it, and gradually associated the panler fleuri with her, which resulted in many beautiful specimens of this design being sought out for her by wanderers at home and abroad. Today this collection includes old silks, laces,
Jewellery, wax pictures, old prints, some pieces of antique furniture, snuffboxes and ornaments in glass, china, silver, etc.

Every museum is the result of fads in collecting, and when one considers this heading, which sounds so trifling and unimportant to the layman, means all that it will not seem strange that we strongly recommend it as a dissipation!

At first, quite naturally, the collector makes mistakes; but it is through his mistakes that he learns, and absolutely nothing gives such a zest to a stroll in the city, a tramp in the country, or an unexpected delay in an out-of-the-way town, as to have this collecting bee in your bonnet.

How often when traveling we have rejoiced when the loss of a train or a mistake in timetable, meant an unexpected opportunity to explore for junk in some old shop, or, perhaps, to bargain with a pretty peasant girl who hoarded a beloved heirloom, of entrancing interest to us (and worth a pile of money really), while she lived happily on cider and cheese!

It is doubtless the experience of every lover of the old and the curious, that one never regrets the expenses incurred in this quest of the antique, but one does eternally regret one's economies.

The writer suffers now, after years have elapsed, in some cases, at the memory of treasures resisted when chanced upon in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia where not! Always one says, "Oh, well, I shall come back again!" But there are so many "pastures green," and it is often difficult to retrace one's steps.

Then, too, these fads open our eyes and ears, so that in passing along a street on foot, in a cab or on a bus, or in glancing through a book, or, perhaps, in an odd corner of an otherwise colorless town, where fate has taken us, we find "grist for our mill” just the right piece of furniture for the waiting place!

Know what you want, really want it, and you will find it some time, somewhere, somehow!

As a stimulus to beginners in collecting, as well as an illustration of that perseverance required of every keen collector, we cite the case of running down an Empire dressing table.

It was our desire to complete a small collection of Empire furniture for a suite of rooms, by adding to it as a supplement to the bureau, a certain type of Empire dressing table. It is no exaggeration to say that Paris was dragged for what we wanted the large well-known antique shops and the smaller ones of the Latin Quarter being both ransacked.

Time was flying, the date of our sailing was approaching, and as yet the coveted piece had not been found. Three days before we left, a fat, red-faced, jolly cabby, after making a vain tour of the junk shops in his quarter, demanded to know exactly what it was we sought. When told, he looked triumphant, bade us get into his cab, lashed his horse and after several rapidly made turns, dashed into an out-of-the-way street and drew up before a sort of junk store-house, full of rickety, dusty odds and ends of furniture, presided over by a stupid old woman who sat outside the door, knitting, wrapped head and all in a shawl.

We entered and, there, to our immense relief, stood the dressing table! It was grey with dust, the original Empire green silk, a rusty grey and hanging in shreds on the back of the original glass. There was a marble top set into the wood and grooved in a curious way. The whole was intact except for a loose back leg, which gave it a swaying, tottering appearance.

We passed it in silence being experienced traders! Then, after buying several little old picture frames, while Madame continued her knitting, we wandered close to the coveted table and asked what was wanted for that broken bit "of no use as it stands."
"Thirty francs" (six dollars) was the answer. Later a well-known New York dealer offered seventy-five dollars for the table in the condition in which we found it, and repaired as it is to-day it would easily bring a hundred and fifty, anywhere!

As it happened, the money we went out with had been spent on unexpected finds, and neither our good-natured cabby nor we were in possession of thirty francs! In fact, cabby was rather staggered to hear the price, having offered to advance what we needed. He suggested sending it home "collect" but Madame would not even consider such an idea.

However, at last our resourceful juju came to the rescue. If the ladies would seat themselves in the cab, he could place the table in front of them, with the cover of the cab raised, and Madame of the shop could lock her door and mounting the box by the side of our cocker, she might drive with us to our destination and collect the money herself! He promised to bring her home safely again!

As we had only the next day for boxing and shipping, there was no alternative. Before we had even taken in our grotesque appearance, the horse was galloping, as only a Paris cab horse can gallop, toward our abode in Avenue Henri Martin, past carriages and autos returning from the Bois, while inside the cab we sat, elated by our success and in that whirl of triumphant absorbing joy which only the real collector knows.

This same modest little Empire collection had a treasure recently added to it, found by chance, in an antique shop in Pennsylvania. It was a mirror. The dealer, an Italian, said that he had got it from an old house in Bordentown, New Jersey.

"It's genuine English," he said, certain he was playing his winning card.

It has the original glass and a heavy, squarely made, mahogany frame. Strange to say it corresponds exactly with the bed and bureau in the collection, having pilasters surmounted by women’s heads of gilded wood with small gilded feet showing at base.

As the brother of the great Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain and Rome, passed many years of his self-imposed exile in Borden-town, in a house made beautiful with furnishings he brought from France, it is possible this old mirror has an interesting story, if only it could talk! Then, too, it was Bordentown that sheltered a Prince Murat, the relative of Joseph Bonaparte. If it was he who conveyed our mirror to these shores, a very different, but as highly romantic a tale might unfold!


A Collection Of Empire Furniture, Ornaments and China

An end of a room containing genuine Empire furniture, Empire ornaments and a rare collection of Empire cups, which appear in a marine seen near the dull-blue brocade curtains drawn over windows.

We would especially call attention to the mantelpiece, which was originally the Empire frame of a mirror, and to a bookshelf made interesting by having the upper shelf supported by a charming pair of antique bronze cupids.

This plate is reproduced to show as many Empire pieces as possible; it is not an ideal example of arrangement, either as to furniture in room or certain details. There is too much crowding.




For fear the precious ancient glass should be broken or the frame destroyed, we bribed a Pullman-car porter to let us bring its six by four feet of antiquity with us, in the train!

When you see a find always take it with you, or the next man may, and above all, always be on the lookout.

It was from a French novel by one of the living French writers that we first got a clue to a certain obscure Etruscan museum, hidden away in the Carrara Mountains, in Italy. That wonderful little museum and its adjacent potteries, which cover the face of Italy like anthills, are to-day contributors to innumerable beautiful interiors in every part of America.

We recall a dining-room in Governor Square, London, where a world-renowned collection of "powder-blue" vases (the property of Mr. J. B. Joel) is made to contribute to a decorative scheme by placing the almost priceless vases of old Chinese blue and white porcelain, in niches made for them, high up on the black oak paneling. There are no pictures nor other decorations on the walls, hence each vase has the distinction it deserves, placed as it were, in a shrine.

In the Peter Hewitt Museum, New York, you may see an antique Italian china cabinet, made of gilded carved wood, which shows on its undulating front, row after row of small niches, lined with red velvet. When each deep niche held its porcelain chef d'etuvre, the effect must have been that of a gold screen set with gems!

Speaking of red velvet backgrounds, in the same museum, standing near the Italian cabinet, is an ancient Spanish one; its elaborate steel
Hinges, locks and ornaments have each a bit of red velvet between them and the oak of the cabinet. One sees this on Gothic chests in England and occasionally on the antique furniture of other countries.

The red material stretched back of the metal fret-work, is said to be a souvenir of the gruesome custom prevailing in ancient times, of warning off invaders by posting on the doors of public buildings, the skin of prisoners of war, and holding it in place with openwork metal, through which the red skin was plainly seen!

At Cornwall Lodge, in Regents Park, London, the town house of Lady de Bathe (Lily Lang-try) the dining-room ceiling is a deep sky-blue, while the sidewalls of black, serve as a background for her valuable collection of old, colored glass, for the most part English. The collection is the result of the owner's eternal vigilance, when traveling or at home.

A well-known Paris collector, now dead, found in Spain a bust, which had been painted black. Its good lines led him to buy it, and, when cleaned, it proved to be a genuine Canova, and was sold by this dealer, a reliable expert, to an American for five thousand dollars! It had been painted during a Revolution, to save it from destruction.

The same dealer on another occasion, when in Spain, found an old silk gown of lovely flowered brocade, but with one breadth missing. Several years later, in an antique shop in Italy, he found that missing gore and had it put back in the gown, thus completing the treasure, which some ruthless hand had destroyed.






























CHAPTER XXXXIII

WEDGWOOD POTTERY, OLD AND MODERN

MANY of our museums have interesting collections of old Wedgwood. Altogether the most complete collection we have ever seen is in the museum adjoining the Wedgwood factories in Stafford shire, England. The curator there, an old man of about seventy, loves to tell the story of its founding and growth. He began as a laborer in the potteries and has worked his way up to be guardian of the veterans in perfected types.

Many of the rare and beautiful specimens he has himself dug up in the grounds, where from time to time, since 1750, they were thrown out as broken, useless debris. The recovery of these bits, their preservation and classification, together with valuable donations made by English families who have inherited rare specimens, have not only placed at the disposal of those interested, the fascinating history of Wedgwood, in a thrilling object lesson, but has made the modern Wedgwood what it is: one of the most beautiful varieties of tableware in the market to-day.

Josiah Wedgwood is said to have been the first English potter, counting from the Roman time to the first quarter of the eighteenth century, who made vases to be used for mere decoration. Chelsea, Worcester and Derby were just then beginning to make fine porcelain. In Wedgwood's day it was the rule for young men of title and wealth to go abroad, and the souvenirs, which they brought back with them, such as pictures and vases, helped to form a taste for the antique, in England.

Then, too, English travelers were writing books on Greek art. Josiah Wedgwood had a natural bent for the pure line and classic subjects, but he was, also, possessed with the keen businessman's intuition as to what his particular market demanded.

So he sat about copying the line and decorations of the antique Greek vases. He reproduced lines and designs in decoration, but invented the "bodies," that is to say, the materials from which the potters molded his wares. He is said to have invented in all, twenty varieties.

We say that he reproduced Greek designs, and so he did, but John Flax man, his chief decorator, who lived in Rome, where he had a studio and clever assistants, studied the classics, imbibed their spirit and originated the large majority of Wedgwood's so-called "Greek" designs, those exquisite cameo-like compositions in white, on backgrounds of pastel colors, which appeared as miniatures mounted for Jewellery, medallions let into wall panels, and on furniture and Carrara marble mantelpieces, wonderful works of art wrought of his "Jasper" paste, which make Josiah Wedgwood outrank any producer of ceramics who has ever lived in any age.

Wedgwood's first vases were for use, although they were ornamental, too. Those were the pots he made in which to grow bulbs or roots, and the "bough pots" which were filled with cut flowers and used to ornament the hearth in summer.

Mr. Frederick Rathbone, compiler of the Wedgwood catalogue in 1909, a memorial to Josiah Wedgwood made possible by his great-granddaughter, says that during his thirty-five years' study of Wedgwood's work, he had yet to learn of a single vase which was ever made by him, or sent out from his factory at Etruria, which was lacking in grace or beauty.

The Etrurian Museum, Stafford shire, shows Josiah Wedgwood's life work from the early Whieldon ware to his perfected Jasper paste. Josiah's "trials" or experiments, are the most interesting specimens in the museum, and prove that the effort of his life was "converting a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant art and an important part of national commerce."

Yet, although he is acknowledged by all the world to have been the greatest artist in ceramics of his or any period, remember pottery was only one of his interests. He was by no means a man who concentrated day and night on one line of production. He occupied himself with politics, and planned and carried through great engineering feats and was, also, deeply interested in the education of his children.

When Wedgwood began his work, all tea and coffee pots were "salt-glazed," plain, or, if decorated, copies of Oriental patterns, which were the only available models, imported for the use of the rich. Wedgwood invented in turn his tortoise shell, agate, mottled and other colored wares, and finally his beautiful pale-cream, known as "Queen's" ware, in honor of Queen Charlotte, his patron.

It is the "C. C." (Cream color) which is so popular to day, either plain or decorated. He invented colors, as well as bodies, for the manufacture of his earthenware, both for use and for decoration, and built up a business employing 15,000 persons in his factories, and 30,000 in all the branches of his business.

In 1896 the census showed 45,914 persons employed in the factories, and at that time the annual amount paid in wages was over two million pounds (ten million dollars).

We must remember that in 1760, the only way of transporting goods to and from the Wedgwood factory was by means of packhorses. Therefore Josiah Wedgwood had to turn his attention to the construction of roads and canals.

As Mr. Gladstone put it in his address at the opening of the Wedgwood Institute at Burslem, Stafford shire, "Wedgwood made the raw material of his industry abundant and cheap, which supplied a vent for the manufactured article and which opened for it materially a way to what we may term the conquest of the outer world." Yet he never traveled outside his own country; always employed English workmen to carry out his ideas, and succeeded entirely by his own efforts, unaided by the state.

His first patroness was Catherine II of Russia, for whom he made a wonderful table service, and his best customers were the court and aristocracy of France, during that country's greatest art periods (Louis XV and XVI). In fact Wedgwood ware became so fashionable in Paris that the Sevres, Royal Porcelain factory, copied the color and relief of his Jasper plaques and vases.

It is claimed by connoisseurs, that the Wedgwood useful decorative pottery is the only ceramic art in which England is supreme and unassailable.

It has been said at the Wedgwood works, and with great pride, that the copying of Wedgwood by the Sevres factories, and the preservation of many rare examples of his work to-day, in French museums, to serve as models for French designers and craftsman, is a neat compliment to the English "those rude islanders with three hundred religions and only one sauce ".








Italian Reproductions in Pottery after Classic Models

In the illustration five of the four vases, four with covers and one without, are reproductions of old pharmacy jars, once used by all Italian druggists to keep their drugs in.

The really old ones with artistic worth are vanishing from the open market into knowing dealers' or collectors' hands, or the museums have them, but with true Latin perspicuity, when the supply ceased to meet the demand, the great modern Italian potters turned out lovely reproductions, so lovely that they bring high prices in Italy as well as abroad, and are frequently offered to collectors when in Italy as genuine antiques.









CHAPTER XXXXIV

ITALIAN POTTERY

ABOUT nine years ago, an American connoisseur, automobile from Paris to Vienna, the route which lies through Northern Italy, quite by chance, happened to see some statuettes in the window of a hopeful, but unknown, potter's little shop, on a wonderful, ancient, covered bridge.

You, too, may have seen that rarely beautiful bridge spanning the River Brenta, and have looked out through broad arches which occur at intervals, on views, so extraordinary that one feels they must be on a Gothic tapestry, or the journey just a dream! One cannot forget the wild, rushing river of purplish-blues, and the pines, in deep greens, which climb up, past ruined castles, perched on jutting rocks, toward snow-capped mountain peaks.

The views were beautiful, but so were the statuettes which had caught our collector's eye. He bought some, made inquiries as to facilities for reproduction at these potteries, and exchanged addresses. The result was that to-day, that humble potter directs several large factories, which are busy reviving classic designs, which may be found on sale everywhere in Italy and in many other countries as well as America.




















CHAPTER XXXXV

VENETIAN GLASS, OLD AND MODERN

|F you have been in Venice then you know the Murano Museum and its beguiling collection of Venetian glass, that old glass so vastly more beautiful in line and decoration than the modern type of, say, fifteen years ago, when colors had become bad mixtures, and decorations meaningless excrescences.

A bit of inside information given out to some one really interested, led to a revival of pure line and lovely, simple coloring, with appropriate decorations or none at all. You may already know that romantic bit of history. It seems that when the museum was first started, about four hundred years ago, the glass blowers agreed to donate specimens of their work, provided their descendants should be allowed access to the museum for models.

This contract made it a simple matter for a connoisseur to get reproduced exactly what was wanted, and what was not in the market. Elegance, distinguished simplicity in shapes, done in glass of a single color, or in one color with a simple edge in a contrasting shade, or in one color with a whole nosegay of colors to set it off, appearing literally as flowers or fruit to surmount the stopper of a bottle, the top of a jar, or as decorations on candlesticks.

It was in the Museo Civico of Venice that we saw and fell victims to an enchanting antique table decorations formal Italian garden, in blown glass, once the property of a great Venetian family and redolent of those golden days when Venice was the playground of princes, and feasting their especial joy; days when visiting royalty and the world's greatest folk could have no higher honor bestowed upon them than a gift of Venetian glass, often real marvels mounted in silver and gold.

We never tired of looking at that fairy garden with its delicate copings, balustrades and vases of glass, all abloom with exquisite posies in every conceivable shade, wrought of glass a veritable dream thing.






Finally, nothing would do but we must know if it had ever been copied. The curator said that he believed it had, and an address was given us. How it all comes back! We arose at dawn, as time was precious, took our coffee in haste and then came that gliding trip in the gondola, through countless canals, to a quarter quite unknown to us, where at work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden.

This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jeweled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens have their faithful devotees, as is proved by the continuous procession of the dainty wonders, ever moving toward our sturdy shores.





























IN CONCLUSION

IN bringing our book to an end we would reiterate four fundamental principles of Interior Decoration (and all decoration):

Good lines.

Correct proportions.

Harmonious color scheme (which includes the question of background) and

Appropriateness.

Observe these four laws and any house, all interior decoration, and any lawn or garden, will be beautiful and satisfying, regardless of type and choice of colors.

Whether or not you remain content with your achievement depends upon your mental makeup. Really know what you want as a home, want it, and you can work out any scheme, provided you have intelligence, patience and perseverance.

To learn what is meant by good line, one must educate oneself by making a point of seeing beautiful furniture and furnishings. Visit museums, all collections that boast the stamp of approval of experts; buy at the best modern and antique shops, and compare what you get with the finest examples in the museums. This is the way that connoisseurs are made.
















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