LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN HOUSE

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

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

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

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

By letting it go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUITABILITY, SIMPLICITY AND PROPORTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE OLD WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TREATMENT OF WALLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF COLOR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OF DOORS, AND WINDOWS, AND CHINTZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PROBLEM OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HALLS AND STAIRCASES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DRAWING-ROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LIVING-ROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SITTING-ROOM AND BOUDOIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A LIGHT, GAY DINING-ROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BEDROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are so many inspirations for bedrooms nowadays that one finds it most difficult to decide on any one scheme. One of my greatest joys in planning the Colony Club was that I had opportunity to furnish so many bedrooms. And they were small, pleasant rooms, too, not the usual impersonal boxes that are usually planned for club houses and hotels. I worked out the plan of each bedroom as if I were to live in it myself, and while they all differed in decorative schemes the essentials were the same in each room: a comfortable bed, with a small table beside it to hold a reading light, a clock, and a telephone; a chaise-longue for resting; a long mirror somewhere; a dressing table with proper lights and a glass covered top; a writing table, carefully equipped, and the necessary chairs and stools. Some of the bedrooms had no connecting baths, and these were given wash stands with bowls and pitchers of clear glass. Most of these bedrooms were fitted with mahogany four post beds, pie crust tables, colonial highboys, gay chintzes, and such, but there were several rooms of entirely different scheme.

Perhaps the most fascinating of them all is the bird room. The walls are covered with an Oriental paper patterned with marvelous blue and green birds, birds of paradise and paroquets perched on flowering branches. The black lacquer furniture was especially designed for the room. The rug and the hangings are of jade green. I wonder how this seems to read of—I can only say it is a very gay and happy room to live in!

There is another bedroom in pink and white, which would be an adorable room for a young girl. The bed is of my own design, a simple white painted metal bed. There is a chaise-longue, upholstered in the pink and white striped chintz of the room. The same chintz is used for window hangings, bed spread, and so forth. There is a little spindle legged table of mahogany, and another table at the head of the bed which contains the reading light. There is also a little white stool, with a cushion of the chintz, beside the bed. The dressing-table is so simple that any girl might copy it—it is a chintz-hung box with a sheet of plate glass on top, and a white framed mirror hung above it. The electric lights in this room are cleverly made into candlesticks which are painted to match the chintz. The writing-table is white, with a mahogany chair in front of it.

Be wary of hanging many pictures in your bedroom. I give this advice cheerfully, because I know you will hang them anyway (I do) but I warn you you will spoil your room if you aren't very stern with yourself. Somehow the pictures we most love, small prints and photographs and things, look spotty on our walls. We must group them to get a pleasant effect. Keep the framed photographs on the writing table, the dressing table, the mantel, etc., but do not hang them on your walls. If you have small prints that you feel you must have, hang them flat on the wall, well within the line of vision. They should be low enough to be examined, because usually such pictures are not decorative in effect, but exquisite in detail. The fewer pictures the better, and in the guest-room fewer still!

Another guest room was done in gentian blue and white, with a little buff and rose-color in small things. This room was planned for the guests of the daughter of the house, so the furnishings were naively and adorably feminine. The dressing-table was made of a long, low box, with a glass top and a valance so crisp and flouncing that it suggested a young lady in crinoline. The valance was of chintz in gentian blue and white. The white mirror frame was decorated with little blue lines and tendrils. Surely any girl would grow pretty with dressing before such an enchanting affair! And simple—why, she could hinge the mirrors together, and make the chintz ruffle, and enamel the shelves white, and do every bit of it except cut the plate glass. Of course the glass is very clean and nice, but an enameled surface with a white linen cover would be very pleasant.

The same blue and white chintz was used for the hangings and bed coverings. Everything else in the room was white except the thick cream rug with its border of blue and rose and buff, and the candlesticks and appliques which repeated those colors.

When we are fortunate enough to inherit great old houses, of course we will give them proper furniture—if we can find it.

I remember a house in New Orleans that had a full dozen spacious bedrooms, square, closetless chambers that opened into small dressing-rooms. One of them, I remember, was absolutely bare of wall and floor, with a great Napoleon bed set squarely in the center of it. There was the inevitable mosquito net canopy, here somehow endowed with an unexpected dignity. One felt the room had been made for sleeping, and nothing but sleeping, and while the bed was placed in the middle of the floor to get all the air possible, its placing was a master stroke of decoration in that great white walled room. It was as impressive as a royal bed on a dais.

If your house is clean and you intend to keep it so, a wooden bed that has some relation to the rest of your furniture is the best bed possible. Otherwise, a white painted metal one. There is never an excuse for a brass one. Indeed, I think the three most glaring errors we Americans make are rocking-chairs, lace curtains, and brass beds.

THE DRESSING-ROOM AND THE BATH

Dressing-rooms and closets should be necessities, not luxuries, but alas! our architects' ideas of the importance of large bedrooms have made it almost impossible to incorporate the proper closets and dressing-places a woman really requires.

In the foregoing chapter on bedrooms I advised the division of a large bedroom into several smaller rooms: ante-chamber, sitting-room, sleeping-room, dressing-room and bath. The necessary closets may be built along the walls of all these little rooms, or, if there is sufficient space, one long, airy closet may serve for all one's personal belongings. Of course, such a suite of rooms is possible only in large houses. But even in simple houses a small dressing-room can be built into the corner of an average-sized bedroom.

I think the first thing to be considered about a dressing-room is its utility. Here no particular scheme of decoration or over-elaboration of color is in place. Everything should be very simple, very clean and very hygienic. The floors should not be of wood, but may be of marble or mosaic cement or clean white tiles, with a possible touch of color. If the dressing-room is bathroom also, there should be as large a bath as is compatible with the size of the room. The combination of dressing-room and bathroom is successful only in those large houses where each bedroom has its bath. I have seen such rooms in modern American houses that were quite as large as bedrooms, with the supreme luxury of open fireplaces. Think of the comfort of having one's bath and of making one's toilet before an open fire! This is an outgrowth of our passion for bedrooms that are so be-windowed they become sleeping-porches, and we may leave their chill air for the comfortable warmth of luxurious dressing-rooms.

Have your mirrors so arranged that you get a good strong light by day, and have plenty of electric lights all around the dressing-mirrors for night use. In other words, know the worst before you go out! In my own dressing-room the lights are arranged just as I used to have them long ago in my theater dressing-room when I was on the stage. I can see myself back, front and sides before I go out. Really, it is a comfort to be on friendly terms with your own back hair! I lay great stress on the mirrors and plenty of lights, and yet more lights. Oh, the joy, the blessing of electric light! I think every woman would like to dress always by a blaze of electric light, and be seen only in the soft luminosity of candle light—how lovely we would all look, to be sure! It is a great thing to know the worst before one goes out, so that even the terrors of the arc lights before our theaters will be powerless to dismay us.

If there is room in the dressing-room, there should be a sofa with a slip cover of some washable fabric that can be taken off when necessary. This sofa may be the simplest wooden frame, with a soft pad, or it may be a chaise-longue of elegant lines. The chaise-longue is suitable for bedroom or dressing-room, but it is an especially luxurious lounging-place when you are having your hair done.

A man came to me just before Christmas, and said, "Do tell me something to give my wife. I cannot think of a thing in the world she hasn't already." I asked, "Is she a lady of habits?" "What!" he said, astonished. "Does she enjoy being comfortable?" I asked. "Well, rather!" he smiled. And so I suggested a couvre-pieds for her chaise-longue. Now I am telling you of the couvre pieds because I know all women love exquisite things, and surely nothing could be more delicious than my couvre-pieds. Literally, it is a "cover for the feet," a sort of glorified and diminutive coverlet, made of the palest of pink silk, lined with the soft long-haired white fur known as mountain tibet, and interlined with down. The coverlet is bordered with a puffing of French lace, and the top of it is encrusted with little flowers made of tiny French picot ribbons, and quillings of the narrowest of lace. It is supposed to be thrown over your feet, fur side down, when you are resting or having your hair done.

Of course the most important thing in the dressing-room is the dressing-table. I place my dressing-tables against a group of windows, not near them, whenever it is possible. I have used plate glass tops on many of them, and mirrors for tops on others, for you can't have too many mirrors or too strong a light for dressing. We must see ourselves as others will see us.

My own dressing-table contains many drawers, one of which is fitted with an ink-well, a tray for pens and pencils, and a sliding shelf on which I write. This obviates going into another room to answer hurried notes when one is dressing. Beside the dressing-table stands the tall hat-stand for the hat I may be wearing that day.

When the maid prepares the dress that is to be worn, she puts the hat that goes with the toilette on the tall single stand. Another idea is the little hollow table on casters that can easily be slipped under the dressing-table, where it is out of the way. All the little ugly things that make one lovely can be kept in this table, which can have a lid if desired, and even a lock and key. I frequently make them with a glass bottom, as they do not get stained or soiled, and can be washed.

A closet is absolutely necessary in the dressing-room, and if space is precious every inch of its interior may be fitted with shelves and drawers and hooks, so that no space is wasted. The outside of the closet door may be fitted with a mirror, and narrow shelves just deep enough to hold one's bottles, may be fitted on the inside of the door. If the closet is very shallow, the inner shelves should be hollowed out to admit the bottle shelves when the door is closed. Otherwise the bottles will be smashed the first time a careless maid slams the door. This bottle closet has been one of my great successes in small apartments, where bathroom and dressing-room are one, and where much must be accomplished in a small space.

In the more modern apartments the tub is placed in a recess in the wall of the bathroom, leaving more space for dressing purposes. This sort of combination dressing-room should have waterproof floor and wall, and no fripperies. There should be a screen large enough to conceal the tub, and a folding chair that may be placed in the small closet when it is not in use.

The straightaway bathroom that one finds in apartments and small houses is difficult to make beautiful, but may be made airy and clean-looking, which is more important. I had to make such a bathroom a little more attractive recently, and it was a very pleasant job. I covered the walls with a waterproof stuff of white, figured with a small black polkadot. The woodwork and the ceiling were painted white. All around the door and window frames I used a two-inch border of ivy leaves, also of waterproof paper, and although I usually abominate borders I loved this one. A plain white framed mirror was also painted with green ivy leaves, and a glass shelf above the wash bowl was fitted with glass bottles and dishes with labels and lines of clear green. White muslin curtains were hung at the window, and a small white stool was given a cushion covered with green and white ivy patterned chintz. The floor was painted white, and a solid green rug was used. The towels were cross-stitched with the name of the owner in the same bright green. The room, when finished, was cool and refreshing, and had cost very little in money, and not so very much in time and labor.

The washstand itself is not such a problem. A pair of dressing-tables may be bought, and one fitted up as a washstand, and the other left to its usual use.

In the Colony Club there are a number of bathrooms, but there are also washstands in those rooms that have no private bath. Each bathroom has its fittings planned to harmonize with the connecting bedroom, and the clear glass bottles are all marked in the color prevailing in the bedroom. Each bathroom has a full-length mirror, and all the conveniences of a bathroom in a private house. In addition to these rooms there is a long hall filled with small cabinets de toilette which some clever woman dubbed "prinkeries." These are small rooms fitted with dressing-tables, where out-of-town members may freshen their toilets for an occasion. These little prinkeries would be excellent in large country houses, where there are so many motoring guests who come for a few hours only, dust-laden and travel-stained, only to find that all the bedrooms and dressing-rooms in the house are being used by the family and the house guests.

THE SMALL APARTMENT

Of course, many of us who live in apartments either have a little house or a big one in the country for the summer months, or we plan for one some day! So hard does habit die—we cannot entirely divorce our ideas of Home from gardens and trees and green grass. But I honestly think there is a reward for living in a slice of a house: women who have lived long in the country sometimes take the beauty of it for granted, but the woman who has been hedged in by city walls gets the fine joy of out-of-doors when she is out of doors, and a pot of geraniums means more to her than a whole garden means to a woman who has been denied the privilege of watching things grow.

The modern apartment is an amazing illustration of the rapid development of an idea. The larger ones are quite as magnificent as any houses could be. I have recently furnished a Chicago apartment that included large and small salons, a huge conservatory, and a great group of superb rooms that are worthy of a palace. There are apartment houses in New York that offer suites of fifteen to twenty rooms, with from five to ten baths, at yearly rentals that approximate wealth to the average man, but these apartments are for the few, and there are hundreds of thousands of apartments for the many that have the same essential conveniences.

Fortunately, although it is a far cry financially from the duplex apartment to the tidy three-room flat of the model tenements, the "modern improvements" are very much the same. The model tenement offers compact domestic machinery, and cleanliness, and sanitary comforts at a few dollars a week that are not to be had at any price in many of the fine old houses of Europe. The peasant who has lived on the plane of the animals with no thought of cleanliness, or indeed of anything but food and drink and shelter, comes over here and enjoys improvements that our stately ancestors of a few generations ago would have believed magical. Enjoys them—they do say he puts his coal in the bath tub, but his grandchildren will be different, perhaps!

Before you sign your lease, be sure that the neighborhood is not too noisy. Be sure that you will have plenty of light and air and heat. You can interview the other tenants, and find out about many things you haven't time or the experience to anticipate. Be sure that your landlord is a reasonable human being who will consent to certain changes, if necessary, who will be willing for you to build in certain things, who will co-operate with you in improving his property, if you go about it tactfully.

Having found just the combination of rooms that suggests a real home to you, go slowly about your decorating.

It is almost imperative that the woodwork and walls should have the same finish throughout the apartment, unless you wish to find yourself living in a crazy-quilt of unfriendly colors. I have seen four room apartments in which every room had a different wall paper and different woodwork. The "parlor" was papered with poisonous-looking green paper, with imitation mahogany woodwork; the dining-room had walls covered with red burlap and near-oak woodwork; the bedroom was done in pink satin finished paper and bird's-eye maple woodwork, and the kitchen was bilious as to woodwork, with bleak gray walls. Could anything be more mistaken?

You may have a certain license in the papering of your bedrooms, of course, but the living-rooms—hall, dining-room, living-room, drawing-room, and so forth—should be pulled together with walls of one color. In no other way can you achieve an effect of spaciousness—and spaciousness is the thing of all other things most desirable in the crowded city. You must have a place where you can breathe and fling your arms about!

When you have it really ready for furnishing, get the essentials first; do with a bed and a chest of drawers and a table and a few chairs, and add things gradually, as the rooms call for them.

Make the best of the opportunities offered for built-in furniture before you buy another thing. If you have a built-in china closet in your dining-room, you can plan a graceful built-in console-table to serve as a buffet or serving-table, and you will require only a good table—not too heavily built—and a few chairs for this room. There is rarely a room that would not be improved by built-in shelves and inset mirrors.

Few apartments have fireplaces, and if you are fortunate enough to find one with a real fireplace and a simple mantel shelf you will be far on the way toward making a home of your group of rooms. Of course your apartment is heated by steam, or hot air, or something, but an open fire of coal or wood will be very pleasant on chilly days, and more important still your home will have a point of departure—the Hearth.

If the mantel shelf is surmounted by one of those dreadful monstrosities made up of gingerbread woodwork and distressing bits of mirrors, convince your landlord that it will not be injured in the removing, and store it during your residence here. Have the space above the mantel papered like the rest of the walls, and hang one good picture, or a good mirror, or some such thing above your mantel shelf, and you will have offered up your homage to the Spirit of the Hearth.

When you do begin to buy furniture, buy compactly, buy carefully. Remember that you will not require the furniture your mother had in a sixteen-room house. You will have no hall or piazza furnishings to buy, for instance, and therefore you many put a little more into your living-room things. The living-room is the nucleus of the modern apartment. Sometimes it is studio, living-room and dining-room in one. Sometimes living-room, library and guest-room, by the grace of a comfortable sleeping-couch and a certain amount of drawer or closet space. At any rate, it will be more surely a living-room than a similar room in a large house, and therefore everything in it should count for something. Do not admit an unnecessary rug, or chair, or picture, lest you lose the spaciousness, the dignity of the room. An over-stuffed chair will fill a room more obviously than a grand piano—if the piano is properly, and the chair improperly placed.

In one of the illustrations of this chapter you will observe a small sitting-room in which there are dozens of things, and yet the effect is quiet and uncrowded. The secretary against the plain wall serves as a cabinet for the display of a small collection of fine old china, and the drawers serve the chance guest—for while this is library and sitting-room, it has a most comfortable couch bed, and may be used as a guest-room as well.

I think it unwise to try to work out a cut-and-dried color plan in a small apartment. If your floors and walls are neutral in tone you can introduce dozens of soft colors into your rooms.

If you have mahogany things, you will require a little mahogany table at the head of the couch to hold a reading-lamp—a sewing-table would be excellent. A pie-crust or turn top table for tea, or possibly a "nest" of three small mahogany tables. A writing table or book table built on very simple lines will be needed also. If you happen to have a conventional writing-desk, a gate-leg table would be charming for books and things.

The wing chair and willow chairs, and the hour-glass Chinese chairs, will go beautifully with mahogany things or with oak things. If most of your furniture is to be oak, be sure and select well-made pieces stained a soft brown and waxed. Oak furniture is delightful when it isn't too heavy. A large gate-leg table of dark brown oak is one of the most beautiful tables in the world. With it you would need a bench of oak, with cane or rush seat; a small octagonal, or butterfly oak table for your couch end, and one or two Windsor chairs. Oak demands simple, wholesome surroundings, just as mahogany permits a certain feminine elegance. Oak furniture invites printed linens and books and brass and copper and pewter and gay china. While mahogany may be successfully used with such things, it may also be used with brocade and fragile china and carved chairs.

The apartment hall is most difficult, usually long and narrow and uninteresting. Don't try to have furniture in a hall of this kind. A small table near the front door, a good tile for umbrellas, etc., a good mirror—that is all. Perhaps a place for coats and hats, but some halls are too narrow for a card table.

However, if you have a real dining-room in your apartment, do try to have chairs that will be comfortable, for you can't afford to have uncomfortable things in so small a space! Windsor chairs and rush bottom chairs are best of all for a simple dining-room, I think, though the revival of painted furniture has brought about a new interest in the old flare-back chairs, painted with dull, soft colored posies on a ground of dull green or gray or black. These chairs would be charming in a small cottage dining-room, but they might not "wear well" in a city apartment.

Use your bedrooms as sleeping-and dressing-rooms, and nothing more. Do not keep your sewing things there—a big sewing-basket will add to the homelike quality of your living-room. Keep the bedroom floor bare, except for a bedside rug, and possibly one or two other rugs. This, of course, does not apply to the large bedroom—I am prescribing for the usual small one. Place your bed against the side wall, so that the morning light will not be directly in your eyes. A folding screen covered with chintz or linen will prove a God-send.

Perhaps you will have a guest-room, but I doubt it. Most women find it more satisfactory and less expensive to send their guests to a nearby hotel than to keep an extra room for a guest. The guest room is impractical in a small apartment, but you can arrange to take care of an over-night guest by planning your living-room wisely.

As for the kitchen—that is another story. It is impossible to go into that subject. And anyway, you will find the essentials supplied for you by the landlord. You won't need my advice when you need a broom or a coffee pot or a saucepan—you'll go buy it!

REPRODUCTIONS OF ANTIQUE FURNITURE AND OBJECTS OF ART

One must have preserved many naïve illusions if one may believe in all the "antiques" that are offered in the marketplaces of the world to-day. Even the greatest connoisseurs are caught napping sometimes, as in the case of the famous crown supposedly dating to the Fifth Century, B.C., which was for a brief period one of the treasures of the Louvre. Its origin was finally discovered, and great was the outcry! It had been traced to a Viennese artisan, a worker in the arts and crafts.

Italy is, I think, the greatest workshop of fraudulent reproductions. It has an output that all Europe and America can never exhaust. Little children on the streets of Naples still find simpletons of ardent faith who will buy scraps of old plaster and bits of paving stones that are alleged to have been excavated in Pompeii.

In writing about antiques it is not easy to be consistent, and any general conclusion is impossible. Certain reproductions are objectionable, and yet they are certainly better than poor originals, after all. The simplest advice is the best and easiest to follow: The less a copy suggests an attempt at "artistic reproduction," the more literal and mechanical it is in its copy of the original, the better it is. A good photograph of a fine old painting is superior to the average copy in oils or watercolors. A chair honestly copied from a worm eaten original is better for domestic purpose than the original. The original, the moment its usefulness is past, belongs in a museum. A plaster cast of a great bust is better than the same object copied in marble or bronze by an average sculptor. And so it goes. Think it out for yourself.

The collection and association of antiques and reproductions should be determined by the collector's sense of fitness, it seems to me. Every man should depend on whatever instinct for rightness, for suitability, he may possess. If he finds that he dare not risk his individual opinion, then let him be content with the things he knows to be both beautiful and useful, and leave the subtler decisions for someone else. For instance, there are certain objects that are obviously the better for age, the objects that are softened and refined by a bloom that comes from usage.

An old rug has a softness that a new one cannot imitate. An old copper kettle has an uneven quality that has come from years of use. A new kettle may be quite as useful, but age has given the old one a certain quality that hanging and pounding cannot reproduce. A pewter platter that has been used for generations is dulled and softened to a glow that a new platter cannot rival.

What charm is to a woman, the vague thing called quality is to an object of art. We feel it, though we may not be able to explain it. An old Etruscan jar may be reproduced in form, but it would be silly to attempt the reproduction of the crudenesses that gave the old jar its real beauty. In short, objects that depend on form and fine workmanship for their beauty may be successfully reproduced, but objects that depend on imperfections of workmanship, on the crudeness of primitive fabrics, on the fading of vegetable dyes, on the bloom that age alone can give, should not be imitated. We may introduce a reproduction of a fine bust into our rooms, but an imitation of a Persian tile or a Venetian vase is absurd on the face of it.

It goes without saying that only a very small part of it can be really old. As for it having been made by the men whose names it bears, that is something no reputable dealer would affirm. The Chippendales, father, son and grandson, published books of designs which were used by all the furniture-makers of their day.

No one can swear to a piece of furniture having been made in the workshops of the Chippendales. Even the pieces in the Metropolitan Museum are marked "Chippendale Style" or "In the Sheraton manner," or some such way. If the furniture is in the style of these makers, and if it is really old, you will pay a small fortune for it. But even then you cannot hope to get more than you pay for, and you would be very silly to pay for a name! After all, Chippendale is a sort of god among amateur collectors of American furniture, but among more seasoned collectors he is not by any means placed first. He adapted and borrowed and produced some wonderful things, but he also produced some monstrosities, as you will see if you visit the English museums.

The serious amateur will fight shy of miracles. If he admires the beauty of line of a fine old Heppelwhite bed or Sheraton sideboard, he will have reproductions made by an expert cabinet-maker. The new piece will not have the soft darkness of the old, but the owner will be planning that soft darkness for his grandchildren, and in the meantime he will have a beautiful thing to live with. The age of a piece of furniture is of great value to a museum, but for domestic purposes, use and beauty will do. How fine your home will be if all the things within it have those qualities!

There is a graceful Louis XV sofa in the Petit Trianon that I have copied many times. The copy is as beautiful as the original, because this sort of furniture depends upon exquisite design and perfect workmanship for its beauty. It is possible that a modern craftsman might not have achieved so graceful a design, but the perfection of his workmanship cannot be gainsaid. The frame of the sofa must be carved and then painted and guilded many times before it is ready for the brocade covering, and the cost of three hundred dollars for the finished sofa is not too much. The original could not be purchased at any price.

Then there is the Chinese lacquer furniture of the Chippendale period that we are using so much now. The process of lacquering is as tedious to-day as it ever was, and the reproductions sell for goodly sums. A tall secretary of black and gold lacquer may cost six hundred dollars. You can imagine what an Eighteenth Century piece would cost!

I fancy the furniture of the mid-Victorian era will never be coveted by collectors, unless someone should build a museum for the freakish objects of house furnishing. America could contribute much to such a collection, for surely the black walnut era of the Nineteenth Century will never be surpassed in ugliness and bad taste, unless—rare fortune—there should be a sudden epidemic of appreciation among cabinet-makers, which would result in their taking the beautiful wood in the black walnut beds and wardrobes and such and make it over into worth-while things. It would be a fine thing to release the mistreated, velvety wood from its grotesqueries, and give it a renaissance in graceful cabinets, small tables, footstools, and the many small things that could be so easily made from huge unwieldy wardrobes and beds and bureaux.

I have no quarrel with the honest dealers who are making fine and sincere copies of such furniture, and selling them as copies. There is no deception here, we must respect these men as we respect the workers of the Eighteenth Century: we give them respect for their masterly workmanship, their appreciation of the best things, and their fidelity to the masterpieces they reproduce.

Not so long ago the New York papers published the experience of a gentleman who bought a very beautiful divan in a European furniture shop. He paid for it—you may be sure of that!—and he could hardly wait for its arrival to show it to his less fortunate neighbors. Within a few months something happened to the lining of the divan, and he discovered on the inside of the frame the maker's name and address. Imagine his chagrin when he found that the divan had been made at a furniture factory in his own country. You can't be sorry for him, you feel that it served him right.

This is an excellent example of the vain collector who cannot judge for himself, but will not admit it. He has not developed his sense of beauty, his instinct for excellence of workmanship. He thinks that because he has the money to pay for the treasure, the treasure must be genuine—hasn't he chosen it?

I can quite understand the pleasure that goes with furnishing a really old house with objects of the period in which the house was built. A New England farmhouse, for instance, may be an inspiration to the owner, and you can understand her quest of old fashioned rush bottomed chairs and painted settles and quaint mirrors and blue homespun coverlets. You can understand the man who falls heir to a good, square old Colonial house who wishes to keep his furnishings true to the period, but you cannot understand the crying need for Eighteenth Century furniture in a modern shingle house, or the desire for old spinning wheels and battered kitchen utensils in a Spanish stucco house, or Chippendale furniture in a forest bungalow.

The soft brown of oak is a pleasure after the over-polished mahogany of a thousand rooms. I do not wish to condemn Colonial mahogany furniture, you understand. I simply wish to remind you that there are other woods and models available. French furniture of the best type represents the supreme art of the cabinet-maker, and is incomparable for formal rooms, but I am afraid the time will never come when French furniture will be interchangeable with the oak and mahogany of England and America.

In short, the whole thing should be a matter of taste and suitability. If you have a few fine old things that have come to you from your ancestors—a grandfather's clock, an old portrait or two—you are quite justified in bringing good reproductions of similar things into your home. The effect is the thing you are after, isn't it? Then, too, you will escape the awful fever that makes any antique seem desirable, and in buying reproductions you can select really comfortable furniture. You will be independent of the dreadful vases and candelabra and steel engravings "of the period," and will feel free to use modern prints and Chinese porcelains and willow chairs and anything that fits into your home. I can think of no slavery more deadly to one's sense of humor than collecting antiques indiscriminately!

THE ART OF TRELLIAGE

When I planned the trellis room of the Colony Club in New York I had hard work finding workmen who could appreciate the importance of crossing and recrossing little strips of green wood, of arranging them to form a mural decoration architectural in treatment. This trellis room was, I believe, the first in America to be so considered, though the use of trellis is as old as architecture in Japan, China, Arabia, Egypt, Italy, France and Spain.

The earliest examples of trellis work shown are in certain Roman frescoes. In Pompeii the mural paintings give us a very good idea of what some of the Roman gardens were like. In the entrance hall of the house of Sallust is represented a garden with trellised niches and bubbling fountains. Representations that have come down to us in documents show that China and Japan both employed the trellis in their decorative schemes. You will find a most daring example on your old blue willow plate, if you will look closely enough. The bridge over which the flying princess goes to her lover is a good model, and could be built in many gardens. Even a tiny modern garden, yours or mine, might hold this fairy bridge.

Almost all Arabian decorations have their basis in trellis design or arabesques filled in with the intricate tracery that covers all their buildings. If we examine the details of the most famous of the old Moorish buildings that remain to us, the mosque at Cordova and the Alhambra at Granada, we shall find them full of endless trellis suggestions. Indeed, there are many documents still extant showing how admirably trellis decoration lends itself to the decoration of gardens and interiors. There are dozens of examples of niches built to hold fine busts. Pavilions and summer houses, the quaint gazebos of old England, the graceful screens of trellis that terminate a long garden path, the arching gateways crowned with vines—all these may be reproduced quite easily in American gardens.

A knowledge of the history of trelliage and an appreciation of its practical application to modern needs is a conjurer's wand—you can wave it and create all sorts of ephemeral constructions that will last your time and pleasure. You may give your trellis any poetic shape your vision may take. You may dream and realize enchanting gardens, with clipped hedges and trellis walls. You may transform a commonplace porch into a gay garden room, with a few screens of trellis and many flower boxes of shrubs and vines. Here indeed is a delightful medium for your fancy!

Trelliage and lattice work are often used as interchangeable terms, but mistakenly, for any carpenter who has the gift of precision can build a good lattice, but a trellis must have architectural character. Trellis work is not necessarily flimsy construction; the light chestnut laths that were used by the old Frenchmen and still remain to us prove that.

We can bring back much of the charm of the old-time gardens by a judicious use of trellis. It is suitable for every form of outdoor construction. A new garden can be subdivided and made livable in a few months with trellis screens, where hedges, even of the quick growing privet, would take years to grow. The entrance to the famous maze at Versailles, now, alas, utterly destroyed, was in trellis, and I have reproduced in our own garden at Villa Trianon, in Versailles, the entrance arch and doors, all in trellis. Our high garden fence with its curving gate is also in trellis, and you can imagine the joy with which we watched the vines grow, climbing over the gatetop as gracefully as if they too felt the charm of the curving tracery of green strips, and cheerfully added the decoration of their leaves and tendrils.

The trellis is primarily suitable for garden architecture, but it may be fitted to interior uses most skilfully. Pictures of the trellis room in the Colony Club have been shown so often it is not necessary to repeat more than one of them. The room is long and high, with a floor of large red tiles. The walls and ceiling are covered with rough gray plaster, on which the green strips of wood are laid. The wall space is entirely covered with the trellis design broken into ovals which hold lighting-fixtures—grapes and leaves in cloudy glass and green enamel. The long room leads up to the ivy-covered trellis of the fountain wall, a perfect background for the fountain, a bowl on the brim of which is poised a youthful figure, upheld by two dolphins. The water spills over into a little pool, banked with evergreens. Ivy has been planted in long boxes along the wall, and climbs to the ceiling, where the plaster is left bare, save for the trellised cornice and the central trellis medallion, from which is suspended an enchanting lantern made up of green wires and ivy leaves and little white flames of electric light.

In the Guinness house in New York there is a little hallway wainscoted in white with a green trellis covering the wall space above. Against this simple trellis—it is really a lattice—a number of plaster casts are hung. In one corner an old marble bowl holds a grapevine, which has been trained over the walls. The floor is of white tiles, with a narrow Greek border of black and white. This decoration of a little hall might be copied very easily.

The architects are building nowadays many houses that have a sun-room, or conservatory, or breakfast room. The smallest cottage may have a little breakfast room done in green and white lattice, with green painted furniture and simple flower boxes. I have had furniture of the most satisfactory designs made for my trellis rooms. Green painted wood with cane insets seems most suitable for the small rooms, and the marbles of the old trellised Temples d'Amour may be replaced by cement benches in our modern trellis pavillions.

The trellis work covers the spaces between windows and doors, and follows the contour of the arches. The ceiling is bordered with the trellis, and from a great square of it in the center a lamp is suspended. The wall panels are broken by appliques that suggest the bounty of summer, flowers and leaves and vines in wrought and painted iron. There are pedestals surmounted by marbles against some of the panels, and a carved bracket supporting a magnificent bust high on one of the wider panels. The room is classic in its fine balance and its architectural formality, and modern in its luxurious comfort and its refreshing color. Surely there could be no pleasanter room for whiling away a summer day.

VILLA TRIANON

The story of the Villa Trianon is a fairy-tale come true. It came true because we believed in it—many fairy stories are ready and waiting to come true if only people will believe in them long enough.

For many years Elizabeth Marbury and I had spent our summers in that charming French town, Versailles, before we had any hope of realizing a home of our own there. We loved the place, with its glamour of romance and history, and we prowled around the old gardens and explored the old houses, and dreamed dreams and saw visions.

How many, many times we peeped through the high iron railing at this enchanted domain, sleeping like the castle in the fairy tale. The garden was overgrown with weeds and shrubbery, the house was shabby and sadly in need of paint. We sighed and thought how happy would be our fortune if we might some day penetrate the mysteries of the tangled garden and the abandoned villa. Little did we dream that this would one day be our home.

The negotiations for the house were long and tedious. Our offer was an insult, a joke, a ridiculous affair to the man who had the selling of it! He laughed at us, and demanded twice the amount of our offer. We were firm, outwardly, and refused to meet him halfway, but secretly we spent hours and hours in the old house, sitting patiently on folding camp-stools, and planning the remaking of the house as happily as children playing make-believe.

I remember vividly the three of us, Miss Marbury, Sardou, and I, standing in the garden on a very rainy day. Sardou was bounding up and down, saying: "Buy it, buy it! If you don't buy it before twelve o'clock to-morrow I will buy it myself!" We were standing there soaking wet, perfectly oblivious to the downpour, wondering if we dared do such an audacious thing as to purchase property so far from our American anchorage.

Our house had always been called "Villa Trianon," and so we kept the name, but it should not be confused with the Grand Trianon or the Petit Trianon. Of course everyone knows about the Park at Versailles, but everyone forgets, so I shall review the history of the Park briefly, that you may appreciate our thrills when we really owned a bit of it.

The Petit Trianon was built by Louis XV for Madame du Barry. Later, during the reign of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who was then Queen, tiring of court etiquette and scorning the stately rooms of Versailles, persuaded her husband to make over to her the Petit Trianon. Here she built a number of little rustic cottages, where she and the ladies of her court, dressed in calicoes, played at being milkmaids. They had a little cottage called the "Laiterie," where the white cows with their gilded horns were brought in to be milked. Here, too, little plays were presented in a tiny theater where only the members of the court were admitted. The Queen and her brother, Comte de Provence, were always the chief actors.

Our villa adjoins the Park proper. In our deeds to the two acres there is a clause which reserves a right-of-way for the King! The deed is worded like the old lease that dates back to 1750, and so one day we may have to give a King a right-of-way through our garden, if France becomes a monarchy again. Anyone who knows French people at all knows how dearly they cherish the dream of a monarchy.

There was much to do! We hardly knew where to begin, the house was in such wretched condition. The roof was falling in, and the debris of years was piled high inside, but the walls and the floors were still very beautiful and as sound as ever, structurally. We had the roof restored, the debris removed, and the underbrush weeded out of the garden, and then we were ready to begin the real business of restoration.

We have not used the extravagant lace curtains that seem to go with brocades and carvings, because we are modern enough not to believe in lace curtains. And we find that the thin white muslin ones give our brocades and tapestries a chance to assert their decorative importance. Somehow, lace curtains give a room such a dressed-up-for-company air that they quite spoil the effect of beautiful fabrics. We have a few fine old Savonnerie carpets that are very much at home in this house, and so many interesting Eighteenth Century prints we hardly know how to use them.

We determined to make the house seem a part of the garden, and so we built a broad terrace across the rear of the villa. You step directly from the long windows of the salon and dining-room upon the terrace, and before you is spread out our little garden, and back of that, through an opening in the trees, a view of the Château, our never-failing source of inspiration.

The terrace is built of tiles on a cement foundation. Vines are trained over square column-like frames of wire, erected at regular intervals. Between the edge of the terrace and the smooth green lawn there is a mass of blue flowers. We have a number of willow chairs and old stone tables here, and you can appreciate the joy of having breakfast and tea on the terrace with the birds singing in the boughs of the trees.

There was a double ring of trees in one corner of our domain, enclosing the salle de verdure, or outdoor drawing-room. In the center of this enchanted circle there was a statue by Clodion, a joyous nymph, holding a baby faun in her arms. There were several old stone benches under the trees that must have known the secrets of the famous ladies of the Eighteenth Century courts. The salle de verdure looked just as it did when the little daughters of Louis XV came here to have their afternoon cakes and tea, so we did not try to change this bit of our garden.

The tapis vert occupies the greater part of the garden, and it is bordered by gravel walks bordered in turn with white flowerbeds. Between the walks and the walls there are the groups of trees, the statues with green spaces about them, the masses of evergreen trees, and finally the great trees that follow the lines of the wall. Indeed, the tapis vert is like the arena of an ample theater, with the ascending flowers and shrubs and trees representing the ascending tiers of seats. One feels that all the trees and flowers look down upon the central stretch of greensward, and perhaps there is a fairy ring here where plays take place by night. Nothing is impossible in this garden. Certainly the fairies play in the enchanted ring of the trees of the salle de verdure. We are convinced of that.

We leave America early in June, tired out with the breathless business of living, and find ourselves in our old-world house and garden. We fall asleep to the accompaniment of the tiny piping of the little people in bur garden. We awake to the matins of the birds. We breakfast on the stone terrace, with boughs of trees and clouds for our roof, and as we look out over the masses of blue flowers and the smooth green tapis vert, over the arched trelliage with its fountains and its marbles, the great trees back of our domain frame the supremely beautiful towers of the Château le Magnificent, and we are far happier than anyone deserves to be in this wicked world!

NOTES ON MANY THINGS

A LITTLE TALK ON CLOCKS.

The selection of proper clocks for one's house is always long-drawn-out, a pursuit of real pleasure. Clocks are such necessary things the thoughtless woman is apt to compromise, when she doesn't find exactly the right one. How much wiser and happier she would be if she decided to depend upon an ordinary alarm clock until the proper clock was discovered! If she made a hobby of her quest for clocks she would find much amusement, many other valuable objects by-the-way, and finally exactly the right clocks for her rooms.

Everyone knows the merits and demerits of the hundreds of clocks of commerce, and it isn't for me to go into the subject of grandfather-clocks, bracket clocks, and banjo clocks, when there are so many excellent books on the subject. I plead for the graceful clocks of old France, the objets d'art so lovingly designed by the master sculptors of the Eighteenth Century. I plead particularly for the wall clocks that are so conspicuous in all good French houses, and so unusual in our own country.

I feel that if women generally knew how very decorative and distinguished a good wall clock may be, the demand would soon create a supply of these beautiful objects. It would be quite simple for the manufacturers to make them from the old models. The late Mr. Pierpont Morgan gave to the Metropolitan Museum the magnificent Hoentschel collection of objets d'art, hoping to stimulate the interest of American designers and artisans in the fine models of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. There are some very fine examples of wall clocks in this collection which might be copied in carved wood by the students of manual training schools, if the manufacturers refuse to be interested.

The wall clocks I like best are fixed directly on the wall, the dial glass opening so that the clock may be wound with a key. You will notice such a clock in the photograph of one of my dining-rooms. This fine old clock is given the place of honor in the main panel of the wall, above the console table. I often use such a clock in a dining-room, just as I use the fine old French mantel clocks in my drawing-rooms. You will observe a very quaint example of the Empire period in the illustration of my drawing-room mantel. This clock is happily placed, for the marble of the mantel, the lighting-fixtures near by and the fine little bronze busts are all in key with the exquisite workmanship of the clock. In another room in my house, a bedroom, there is a beautiful little French clock that is the only object allowed on the mantel shelf. The beautiful carving of the mirror frame back of it seems a part of the clock, a deliberate background for it. This is one of the many wall clocks which were known as bracket clocks, the bracket being as carefully designed and carved as the clock itself. Most of the clocks we see nowadays grew out of the old bracket models.

Every room in my house has its clock, and to me these magic little instruments have an almost human interest. They seem always friendly to me, whether they mark off the hours that weigh so heavily and seem never-ending, or the happy hours that go all too quickly. I love clocks so much myself that it always astonishes me to go into a room where there is none, or, if there is, it is one of those abortive, exaggerated, gilded clocks that are falsely labeled "French" and sold at a great price in the shops. Somehow, one never expects a clock of this kind to keep time—it is bought as an ornament and if it runs at all it wheezes, or gasps, or makes a dreadful noise, and invariably stops at half-past three.

There are traveling clocks in small leather cases which can be bought very cheaply indeed now, and one of these clocks should be a part of everyone's traveling equipment. The humble nickeled watch with a leather case is infinitely better than the pretentious clocks, monstrosities of marble and brass and bad taste.

A CORNER FOR WRITING.

One of my greatest pleasures, when I am planning the furnishing of a house, is the selection and equipment of the necessary writing-tables. Every room in every house has its own suggestion for an original treatment, and I enjoy working out a plan for a writing-corner that will offer maximum of convenience, and beauty and charm, for in these busy days we need all these qualities for the inspiration of a pleasant note. You see, I believe in proper writing-tables, just as I believe in proper chairs. I have so many desks in my own house that are in constant use, perhaps I can give you my theory best by recording my actual practice of it.

I have spoken of the necessity of a desk in the hallway, and indeed, I have said much of desks in other rooms, but I have still to emphasize my belief in the importance of the equipment of desks.

Of course, one needs a desk in one's own room. Here there is infinite latitude, for there are dozens of delightful possibilities. I always place my desks near the windows. If the wall space is filled, I place an oblong table at right angles to a window, and there you are. In my own private sitting-room I have a long desk so placed, in my own house. In a guest-room I furnished recently, I used a common oblong table of no value, painting the legs a soft green and covering it with a piece of sage-green damask. This is one of the nicest writing-tables I know, and it could be copied for a song. The equipment of it is what counts. I used two lamps, dull green jars with mauve silk shades, a dark green leather rack for paper and envelopes, and a great blotter pad that will save the damask from ink-spots. The small things are of green pottery and crystal. In a young girl's bedroom I used a sweet little desk of painted wood, a desk that has the naïve charm of innocence. I do hope it inspires the proper love-letters.

I like the long flat tables or small desks much better than the huge roll-top affairs or the heavy desks built after the fashion of the old armoire. If the room is large enough, a secretary after an Eighteenth Century model will be a beautiful and distinguished piece of furniture. I have such a secretary in my own sitting-room, a chest of drawers surmounted by a cabinet of shelves with glass doors, but I do not use it as a desk. I use the shelves for my old china and porcelains, and the drawers for pamphlets and the thousand and one things that are too flimsily bound for bookshelves. Of course, if one has a large correspondence and uses one's home as an office, it is better to have a large desk with a top which closes. I prefer tables, and I have them made big enough to hold all my papers, big enough to spread out on.

Then there are the small desks made by modern furniture-makers, just large enough to hold a blotting-pad, a paper rack, and a pair of candlesticks. There is always a shallow drawer for writing materials. Such a desk may be decorated to match the chintzes of any small bedroom.

If it isn't possible for you to have a desk in each guest-room, there should be a little writing-room somewhere apart from the family living-room. If you live in one of those old-fashioned houses intersected by great halls with much wasted space on the upper floors, you may make a little writing-room of one of the hall-ends, and screen it from the rest of the hall with a high standing screen. If you have a house of the other extreme type, a city house with little hall bedrooms, use one of these little rooms for a writing-room. You will require a desk well stocked with stationery, and all the things the writer will need; a shelf of address books and reference books—with a dictionary, of course; many pens and pencils and fresh blotters, and so forth. Of course, you may have ever so many more things, but it isn't necessary. Better a quiet corner with one chair and a desk, than the elaborate library with its superb fittings where people come and go.

Test the efficiency of your writing-tables occasionally by using them yourself. This is the only way to be sure of the success of anything in your house—try it yourself.

STOOLS AND BENCHES.

I often wonder, when I grope my way through drawing-rooms crowded and jammed with chairs and sofas, why more women do not realize the advantages of stools and benches. A well-made stool is doubly useful: it may be used to sit upon or it may be used to hold a tray, or whatever you please. It is really preferable to a small table because it is not always full of a nondescript collection of ornaments, which seems to be the fate of all small tables. It has also the advantage of being low enough to push under a large table, when need be, and it occupies much less space than a chair apparently (not actually) because it has no back. I have stools, or benches, or both in all my rooms, because I find them convenient and easily moved about, but I have noticed an amusing thing: Whenever a fat man comes to see me, he always sits on the smallest stool in the room. I have many fat friends, and many stools, but invariably the fattest man gravitates to the smallest stool.

I have a fine Eighteenth Century banquette in my drawing-room, the frame being carved and gilded and the seat covered with Venetian red velvet. You will find these gilded stools all over England. There are a number at Hampton Court Palace. At Hardwick there are both long and short stools, carved with the dolphin's scroll and covered with elaborate stuffs. The older the English house, the more stools are in evidence. In the early Sixteenth Century joint stools were used in every room. In the bedrooms they served the purposes of small tables and chairs as well. There are ever so many fine old walnut stools and the lower stools used for bed-steps to be bought in London shops that make a specialty of old English furniture, and reproductions of them may be bought in the better American shops. I often wonder why we do not see more bedside stools. They are so convenient, even though the bed be only moderately high from the floor. Many of mine are only six inches high, about the height of a fat floor cushion.

Which reminds me: the floor cushion, made of the same velvet made for carpeting, is a modern luxury we can't afford to ignore. Lately I have seen such beautiful ones, about three feet long and one foot wide, covered with tapestry, with great gold tassels at the corners. The possibilities of the floor cushion idea are limitless. They take the place of the usual footstool in front of the boudoir easy chair, or beside the day bed or chaise-longue, or beside the large bed, for that matter. They are no longer unsanitary, because with vacuum cleaners they may be kept as clean as chair cushions. They may be made to fit into almost any room. I saw a half dozen of them in a dining-room, recently, small square hard ones, covered with the gold colored velvet of the carpet. They were not more than four or five inches thick, but that is the ideal height for an under-the-table cushion. Try it.

PORCELAIN STOVES.

Encouraged by this success I purchased another porcelain stove, this time a cream-colored porcelain one, and used it in a hallway in an uptown house. It was the one thing needed to give the hall great distinction. Since then I have used a number of these stoves, and I wonder why our American manufacturers do not make them. They are admirable for heating difficult rooms—outdoor porches, and draughty halls, and rooms not heated by furnaces. The stoves are becoming harder and harder to find, though I was fortunate enough to purchase one last year from the Marchioness of Anglesey, who was giving up her home at Versailles. This stove was of white Majolica with little Loves in terra cotta adorning it. The new ones are less attractive, but it would be perfectly simple to have any tile manufacturer copy an old one, given the design.

THE CHARM OF INDOOR FOUNTAINS.

Wall fountains as we know them are introduced into our modern houses for their decorative interest and for the joy they give us, the joyous sound and color of falling water. We use them because they are beautiful and cheerful, but originally they had a most definite purpose. They were built into the walls of the dining-halls in medieval times, and used for washing the precious plate.

If you look into the history of any objet d'art you will find that it was first used for a purpose. All the superb masterly things that have come to us had logical beginnings. It has remained for the thoughtless designer of our times to produce things of no use and no meaning. The old designers decorated the small objects of daily use as faithfully as they decorated the greater things, the wall spaces and ceilings and great pieces of furniture, and so this little wall basin which began in such a homely way soon became a beautiful thing.

Europe has countless small fountains built for interior walls and for small alcoves and indoor conservatories, but we are just beginning to use them in America. American sculptors are doing such notable work, however, that we shall soon plan our indoor fountains as carefully as we plan our fireplaces. The fact that our houses are heated mechanically has not lessened our appreciation of an open fire, and running water brought indoors has the same animate charm.

Our modern use of indoor fountains is perfectly legitimate: we use them to bring the atmosphere of outdoors in. In country houses we use fountains in our gardens, but in the city we have no gardens, and so we are very wise to bring in the outdoor things that make our lives a little more gay and informal. The more suggestive of out-of-doors the happier is the effect of the sun room. Occasionally one sees a rare house where a glass enclosed garden opens from one of the living-rooms. There is a house in Nineteenth Street that has such an enclosed garden, built around a wall fountain. The garden opens out of the great two-storied music-room. Lofty windows flank a great door, and fill the end of the room with a luminous composition of leaded glass. Through the door you enter the garden, with its tiled floor, its glass ceiling, and its low brick retaining walls. The wall fountain is placed exactly in front of the great door, and beneath it there is a little semi-circular pool bordered with plants and glittering with goldfish. Evergreens are banked against the brick walls, and flat reliefs are hung just under the glass ceiling. The garden is quite small, but takes its place as an important part of the room. It rivals in interest the massive Gothic fireplace, with its huge logs and feudal fire irons.