 |
Rustic Home Decor & Decorating, Country Home Goods and Gift Ideas |
| My Account | Shopping Cart | Checkout |
II
BEFORE beginning to decorate a room it is
essential to consider for what purpose the room is to be used. It is not
enough
to ticket it with some such general designation as " library,"
"drawing-room," or "den." The individual tastes and habits of the people
who are to occupy it must be taken into account; it must be not
"a library," or "a drawing-room," but the library or the
drawing-room best suited to the master or mistress of the house which
is being decorated. Individuality in house-furnishing has seldom
been more harped upon than at the present time. That cheap originality which
finds expression in putting things to uses for which they were not
intended is often confounded with individuality; whereas the latter consists
not in an attempt to be different from other people at the cost of comfort, but in the desire to be comfortable in
one's own way, even though it be the way of a monotonously large majority. It
seems easier to most people to arrange a room like some one else's than to
analyze and express their own needs. Men, in these
matters, are less exacting than women, because their demands, besides being simpler, are uncomplicated
by the feminine tendency to want
things because other people have them, rather than to have things
because they are wanted.
18 The Decoration
of Houses
But it must never be forgotten that every one is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others,— the wants of dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences. The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms
are often to be explained in this way. They have still in their blood the traditional uses to which these rooms were put in times
quite different from the present It is only an unconscious extension of the conscious habit which old-fashioned people have of clinging to their parents' way of living. The difficulty of reconciling these instincts with our own comfort and convenience, and the various compromises to which they lead in the arrangement of our rooms, will be more fully dealt with in the following chapters. To go to the opposite extreme and discard things because they are old-fashioned is equally unreasonable. The golden mean lies in trying to arrange our houses with a view to our own comfort and convenience; and it will be found that the more closely we follow this rule the easier our rooms will be to furnish and the
pleasanter to live in.
People whose attention has never been specially called to the raison d'Stre of house-furnishing
sometimes conclude that because a thing is unusual
it is artistic, or rather that through some occult process the most ordinary things become artistic by being used in an unusual manner; while others, warned by the visible results of this theory of furnishing, infer that everything artistic is unpractical.
In the Anglo-Saxon mind beauty is not spontaneously born of material wants, as it is with the Latin races. We have to make things beautiful; they do not grow so
of themselves. The necessity of making this effort has
caused many people to put aside the whole
problem of beauty and fitness in household decoration
Rooms
in General
19
as
something mysterious and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. The architect and decorator are often aware that they are regarded by their clients as the possessors of some strange craft
like black magic or astrology.
This fatalistic attitude has complicated the simple and intelligible process of house-furnishing, and has produced much of the discomfort which causes so many rooms to be shunned by everybody in the house, in spite (or rather because) of all [the money and ingenuity expended on their arrangement Yet to penetrate the mystery of house-furnishing it is only necessary to analyze one satisfactory room and to notice wherein its charm lies. To the fastidious eye it will, of course, be found in fitness of proportion, in the proper use of each moulding and in the harmony of all
the decorative processes ; and even to those who
think themselves indifferent to such detail, much of the sense of restfulness and comfort produced by
certain rooms depends on the due
adjustment of their fundamental parts. Different
rooms minister to different wants and while a room may be made very livable without satisfying any
but the material requirements of its inmates it is evident that the perfect room should combine these qualities with what
corresponds to them in a higher order of needs. At present, however, the
subject deals only with the material
livableness of a room, and this will
generally be found to consist in the position of the doors and fireplace, the accessibility of the
windows, the arrangement of the
furniture, the privacy of the room and the absence of the superfluous.
The position of doors and fireplace, though the subject comes properly under the head of house-planning, may be included in this summary,
because in rearranging a room it is often possible
2o The
Decoration of Houses
to change its openings, or at any rate,
in the case of doors, to
modify their dimensions.
The fireplace must be
the focus of every rational scheme of arrangement. Nothing is so dreary, so hopeless to deal
with, as a room in which the fireplace
occupies a narrow space between two
doors, so that it is impossible to sit about the hearth.1 Next
in importance come the windows. In town houses especially, where there is so little light that every ray is precious to
the reader or worker, window-space is invaluable. Yet in few rooms are the windows easy of approach, free
from useless draperies and provided
with easy-chairs so placed that the light falls properly on the
occupant's work.
It is no
exaggeration to say that many houses are deserted by the men of the
family for lack of those simple comforts which they find at their
clubs: windows unobscured by layers of muslin, a fireplace
surrounded by easy-chairs and protected from draughts,
well-appointed writing-tables and files of papers and magazines. Who
cannot call to mind the dreary drawing-room, in small town houses
the only possible point of reunion for the family, but too
often, in consequence of its exquisite discomfort, of no more use as a
meeting-place than the vestibule or the cellar? The windows in this
kind of room are invariably supplied with two sets of muslin curtains, one
hanging against the panes, the other fulfilling the supererogatory duty of
hanging against the former; then come the heavy stuff curtains, so draped as
to cut off the upper light of the windows by day, while it is impossible to drop them at night: curtains that have
thus ceased to serve the purpose for which they exist. Close to the curtains stands
* There is no objection to putting a fireplace between two doors, provided
both doors be at least six feet from the chimney.
PLATE VII.
Rooms
in General
21
the inevitable lamp or jardiniere, and the
wall-space between the two windows, where a writing-table might be put, is
generally taken up by a cabinet or console, surmounted by a picture made invisible by the
dark shadow of the hangings. The writing-table might find place
against the side-wall near either window; but these spaces are
usually sacred to the piano and to that modern futility, the
silver-table. Thus of necessity the writing-table is either banished or put in
some dark corner, where it is little wonder that the ink dries unused and a vase of flowers grows in the
middle of the blotting-pad.
The hearth should be
the place about which people gather; but the mantelpiece in the average
American house, being ugly, is usually covered with inflammable draperies;
the fire is, in consequence, rarely lit, and no one cares to sit about a
Tireless hearth. Besides,
on the opposite side of the room is a gap in the wall eight or ten feet wide, opening directly upon the hall, and exposing what should be the most private part of the
room to the scrutiny of messengers,
servants and visitors. This opening is sometimes
provided with doors; but these, as a rule, are either slid into the wall
or are unhung and replaced by a curtain through
which every word spoken in the room must necessarily pass. In such a room it matters very little how
the rest of the furniture is
arranged, since it is certain that no one will ever sit in it except the luckless visitor who has no other
refuge.
Even the visitor
might be thought entitled to the solace of a few books; but as all
the tables in the room are littered with knick-knacks, it is difficult for the
most philanthropic hostess to provide even this slight alleviation.
When the town-house is built on the
basement plan, and the drawing-room or parlor is up-stairs, the family, to
escape
22 The
Decoration of Houses
from its discomforts, habitually take refuge
in the small room opening off the hall on the ground floor; so that instead of
sitting in a room twenty or twenty-five feet wide, they are packed into one less than half
that size and exposed to the frequent intrusions from which, in
basement houses, the drawing-room is free. But too often even the "little
room down-stairs" is arranged less like a sitting-room in a
private house than a waiting-room at a fashionable doctor's or
dentist's. It has the inevitable yawning gap in the wall, giving on the hall close to
the front door, and is either the refuge of
the ugliest and most uncomfortable furniture in the house, or, even if
furnished with taste, is arranged with so little regard to comfort that one might as well make it part of the hall, as is often done in rearranging old houses.
This habit of sacrificing a useful
room to the useless widening of the hall is indeed the natural outcome of furnishing rooms of this kind in so unpractical a way that their real usefulness has
ceased to be apparent The science of
restoring wasted rooms to their proper uses is one of the most important and
least understood branches of house-furnishing.
Privacy would seem
to be one of the first requisites of civilized life, yet it is only
necessary to observe the planning and arrangement of the average
house to see how little this need is recognized. Each room in a
house has its individual uses: some are made to sleep in, others are for
dressing, eating, study, or conversation ; but whatever the uses of a room,
they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a small world
by itself. If the drawing-room be a part of the hall and the library a part of the drawing-room,
all three will be equally unfitted to serve their special
purpose. The indifference to privacy which has sprung up in modern times, and
which in France, for instance,
Rooms in General
23
has given rise to the grotesque conceit of
putting sheets of plate-glass between two rooms, and of replacing doorways by
openings fifteen feet wide, is of complex origin. It is probably due in part to the fact that
many houses are built and decorated by people unfamiliar with the
habits of those for whom they are building. It may be that
architect and decorator live in a simpler manner than their clients,
and are therefore ready to sacrifice a kind of comfort of which they
do not feel the need to the "effects" obtainable by vast
openings and extended "vistas." To the untrained observer size
often appeals more than proportion and costliness than suitability. In a handsome house such an observer is attracted rather by the ornamental
detail than by the underlying
purpose of planning and decoration. He sees the beauty of the detail, but not its relation to the whole. He therefore regards it as elegant but useless; and his
next step is to infer that there is
an inherent elegance in what is useless.
Before beginning to
decorate a house it is necessary to make a prolonged and careful study of its plan
and elevations, both as a whole and in
detail. The component parts of an undecorated room are its floor, ceiling, wall-spaces and openings. The openings consist of the doors, windows and fireplace
; and of these, as has already been
pointed out, the fireplace is the most important in the general scheme
of decoration.
No room can be
satisfactory unless its openings are properly placed and proportioned, and the
decorator's task is much easier if he has also been the architect of the house
he is employed to decorate ; but as this seldom happens his ingenuity is
frequently taxed to produce a good design upon the background of a faulty and illogical
structure. Much may be done to overcome this difficulty by making slight changes in the
proportions of the
24 The
Decoration of Houses
openings; and the skilful decorator, before
applying his scheme of decoration, will do all that he can to correct the
fundamental lines of
the room. But the result is seldom so successful as if he had built the room, and those who employ different people to build and decorate their houses should at least
try to select an architect and a
decorator trained in the same -school of composition, so that they may come to some understanding with regard to
the general harmony of their work.
In deciding upon a
scheme of decoration, it is necessary to keep in mind the relation
of furniture to ornament, and of the room as a whole to other rooms in the house. As in a small house
a very large room dwarfs all the others, so a room decorated in a very rich
manner will make the simplicity of those about it look mean. Every house should be decorated according to a carefully graduated scale of ornamentation
culminating in the most important
room of the house; but this plan must be carried out with such due sense
of the relation of the rooms to each other
that there shall be no violent break in the continuity of treatment. If a white-and-gold drawing-room opens
on a hall with a Brussels carpet and
papered walls, the drawing-room will look too fine and the hall mean.
In the furnishing of
each room the same rule should be as carefully observed. The simplest and most
cheaply furnished room (provided the furniture be good of its kind, and the
walls and carpet unobjectionable in color) will be more pleasing to the fastidious eye than one in
which gilded consoles and cabinets of buhl stand side by side
with cheap machine-made furniture, and delicate old marquetry
tables are covered with trashy china ornaments.
It is, of course, not
always possible to refurnish a room when it is redecorated.
Many people must content themselves with
PLATE Vlll.
Rooms in General
25
using their old furniture, no matter how ugly
and ill-assorted it may be; and it is the decorator's business to see that his
background helps the
furniture to look its best It is a mistake to think
that because the furniture of a room is inappropriate or ugly a good background will bring out these defects. It
will, on the contrary, be a relief to
the eye to escape from the bad lines of the furniture to the good lines of the walls ; and should the opportunity
to purchase new furniture ever come, there will be a suitable background ready
to show it to the best advantage.
Most rooms contain a
mixture of good, bad, and indifferent furniture. It is best to adapt the
decorative treatment to the best pieces and to discard those which are in bad taste, replacing them, if necessary, by willow chairs and stained
deal tables until it is possible to
buy something better. When the room is to be refurnished as well as redecorated the client often makes his purchases without regard to the decoration. Besides
being an injustice to the
decorator, inasmuch as it makes it impossible for him to harmonize his decoration with the furniture,
this generally produces a result
unsatisfactory to the owner of the house. Neither decoration nor furniture, however good of its
kind, can look its best unless each
is chosen with reference to the other. It is therefore necessary that the decorator, before
planning his treatment of a room,
should be told what it is to contain. If a gilt set is put in a room the walls of which are treated in low
relief and painted white, the high
lights of the gilding will destroy the delicate values of the mouldings, and the walls, at a little
distance, will look like flat expanses of whitewashed plaster.
When a room is to be
furnished and decorated at the smallest possible cost, it must be remembered
that the comfort of its occupants depends more on the nature of the furniture than of the
26 The
Decoration of Houses
wall-decorations or
carpet In a living-room of this kind it is best to tint the walls and
put a cheerful drugget on the floor, keeping as much money as
possible for the purchase of comfortable chairs and sofas and substantial
tables. If little can be spent in buying furniture, willow arm-chairs1
with denim cushions and solid tables with stained legs and covers of denim
or corduroy will be more satisfactory than the "parlor suit" turned
out in thousands by the manufacturer of cheap furniture, or the pseudo-Georgian
or pseudo-Empire of the dealer in "high-grade goods." Plain bookcases may be
made of deal, painted or stained; and a room treated in this way,
with a uniform color on the wall, and plenty of lamps and books, is sure to be
comfortable and can never be vulgar.
It is to be regretted
that, in this country and in England, it should be almost impossible to buy
plain but well-designed and substantial furniture. Nothing can exceed
the ugliness of the current designs: the bedsteads with towering head-boards
fretted by the versatile jig-saw; the "bedroom suits" of
"mahoganized" cherry, bird's-eye maple, or some other crude-colored
wood; the tables with meaninglessly turned legs; the "Empire" chairs
and consoles stuck over with ornaments of cast bronze washed in liquid gilding; and,
worst of all, the supposed "Colonial" furniture, that unworthy
travesty of a plain and dignified style. All this showy stuff has
been produced in answer to the increasing demand for cheap "effects"
in place of unobtrusive merit in material and design; but now that an
appreciation of better things in architecture is becoming more general, it
is to be hoped that the "artistic" furniture disfiguring so many of
our shop-windows will
no longer find a market
[1] Not rattan, as the models are too bad.
Rooms in General
27
There is no lack of
models for manufacturers to copy, if their customers will but
demand what is good. France and England, in the eighteenth century, excelled
in the making of plain, inexpensive furniture of walnut, mahogany, or
painted beechwood (see Plates VII-X). Simple in shape and substantial in
construction, this kind of furniture was never tricked out with moulded bronzes and
machine-made carving, or covered with liquid gilding, but depended for its
effect upon the solid qualities of good material, good design and good
workmanship. The eighteenth-century cabinet-maker did not,attempt cheap copies
of costly furniture; the common sense of his patrons would have resented such a perversion of
taste. Were the modern public as fastidious, it would soon be easy
to buy good furniture for a moderate price; but until people recognize the
essential vulgarity of the pinchbeck article flooding our shops and overflowing
upon our sidewalks, manufacturers will continue to offer such wares in
preference to better
but less showy designs.
The worst defects of the furniture now
made in America are due to an Athenian
thirst for novelty, not always regulated by an Athenian sense of
fitness. No sooner is it known that beautiful
furniture was made in the time of Marie-Antoinette than an epidemic of supposed "
Marie-Antoinette " rooms breaks out
over the whole country. Neither purchaser nor manufacturer has stopped to inquire wherein the essentials of
the style consist They know that the
rooms of the period were usually painted in light colors, and that the furniture (in palaces) was often gilt and covered with brocade; and it is taken for granted
that plenty of white paint, a pale wall-paper with bow-knots, and
fragile chairs dipped in liquid gilding and
covered with a flowered silk-and-cotton material,
must inevitably produce
a "Marie-Antoinette"
28
room.
According to the creed of the modern manufacturer, you have only to combine certain
"goods" to obtain a certain style.
This quest of
artistic novelties would be encouraging were it based on the desire
for something better, rather than for something merely different. The tendency to dash
from one style to another, without
stopping to analyze the intrinsic qualities of any, has defeated the efforts of those who have tried
to teach the true principles of
furniture-designing by a return to the best models. If people will buy the stuff now offered them as
Empire, Sheraton or Louis XVI, the manufacturer is not to blame for
making it. It is not the maker but the
purchaser who sets the standard; and there
will never be any general supply of better furniture until people take time to study the subject, and find
out wherein lies the radical unfitness of what now contents them.
Until this golden age
arrives the householder who cannot afford to buy old pieces, or to have old
models copied by a skilled cabinet-maker, had better restrict himself to
the plainest of furniture, relying for the embellishment of his room upon good
bookbindings
and one or two old porcelain vases for his lamps.
Concerning the
difficult question of color, it is safe to say that the fewer the colors
used in a room, the more pleasing and restful the result will be. A multiplicity of
colors produces the same effect as a number
of voices talking at the same time. The voices may not be discordant, but
continuous chatter is fatiguing in the long
run. Each room should speak with but one voice : it should contain one color,
which at once and unmistakably asserts its predominance, in obedience to the rule that where there is a division of parts one part shall visibly prevail
over all the others.
To
attain this result, it is best to use the same color and, if
|
|
Rooms in General
possible, the same material, for curtains
and chair-coverings. This produces an impression of unity and gives an
air of spaciousness to the room. When the walls are simply panelled in oak
or walnut, or are painted in some neutral tones, such as gray and white, the carpet may
contrast in color with the curtains and chair-coverings. For
instance, in an oak-panelled room crimson curtains and chair-coverings
may be used with a dull green carpet, or with one of dark blue
patterned in subdued tints; or the color-scheme may be reversed, and
green hangings and chair-coverings combined with a plain crimson carpet.
Where the walls are
covered with tapestry, or hung with a large number of pictures,
or, in short, are so treated that they present a variety of colors, it is best
that curtains, chair-coverings and carpet should all be of one color and
without pattern. Graduated shades 01 the same color should almost always be
avoided; theoretically they seem harmonious, but in reality the light shades look faded in
proximity with the darker ones. Though it is well, as a rule, that
carpet and hangings should match, exception must always be made in favor of a really fine
old Eastern rug. The tints of such rugs are
too subdued, too subtly harmonized by time, to clash with any colors the room may contain; but those who cannot cover their floors in this way will do
well to use carpets of uniform tint,
rather than the gaudy rugs now made in the East. The modern red and green Smyrna or Turkey carpet is an exception. Where the furniture is dark and substantial,
and the predominating color is a
strong green or crimson, such a carpet is always suitable. These Smyrna carpets are usually well designed; and if
their colors be restricted to red and green, with small admixture of dark blue, they harmonize with almost
any style of decoration. It is well, as a rule, to shun the
decorative schemes
30 The
Decoration of Houses
concocted by the writers who supply our
newspapers with hints for "artistic interiors." The use of such
poetic adjectives as jonquil-yellow, willow-green, shell-pink, or
ashes-of-roses, gives to these descriptions of the "unique
boudoir" or "ideal summer room" a charm which the reality would
probably not possess. The arrangements suggested are usually cheap devices
based upon the mistaken idea that defects in structure or design may be remedied by an overlaying of color or
ornament This theory often leads to the spending of much more money than would have been required to make one or two changes in
the plan of the room, and the result
is never satisfactory to the fastidious.
There are but two ways of dealing with a room which is fundamentally ugly: one is to accept it, and the other is courageously to correct its ugliness. Half-way remedies are a waste of money and serve rather to call attention to the defects of the room than to conceal them.
III. WALLS
Decoration of Houses - Chapter Guide | Decoration of Houses Introduction [Previous Chapter] | Decorating Walls [Next Chapter]