I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women
throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it
what you will--awakening, development, American Renaissance--it is a
most startling and promising condition of affairs.
It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly æsthetic
tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it
should tell the time. Home-makers are determined to have their houses,
outside and in, correct according to the best standards. What do we mean
by the best standards? Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged
house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes his
home with a hopeless disregard of tradition. We must accept the
standards that the artists and the architects accept, the standards that
have come to us from those exceedingly rational people, our ancestors.
Our ancestors built for stability and use, and so their simple houses
were excellent examples of architecture. Their spacious, uncrowded
interiors were usually beautiful. Houses and furniture fulfilled their
uses, and if an object fulfils its mission the chances are that it is
beautiful.
It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual
castle in Spain, but it isn't necessary to live among intolerable
furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle. There never was a
house so bad that it couldn't be made over into something worth while.
We shall all be very much happier when we learn to transform the things
we have into a semblance of our ideal.
How, then, may we go about accomplishing our ideal?
By letting it go!
By forgetting this vaguely pleasing dream, this evidence of our smug
vanity, and making ourselves ready for a new ideal.
By considering the body of material from which it is good sense to
choose when we have a house to decorate.
By studying the development of the modern house, its romantic tradition
and architectural history.
By taking upon ourselves the duty of self-taught lessons of sincerity
and common sense, and suitability.
By learning what is meant by color and form and line, harmony and
contrast and proportion.
When we are on familiar terms with our tools, and feel our vague ideas
clearing into definite inspiration, then we are ready to talk about
ideals. We are fit to approach the full art of home-making.
We take it for granted that every woman is interested in houses--that
she either has a house in course of construction, or dreams of having
one, or has had a house long enough wrong to wish it right. And we take
it for granted that this American home is always the woman's home: a man
may build and decorate a beautiful house, but it remains for a woman to
make a home of it for him. It is the personality of the mistress that
the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how
much happiness they may find there.
You will express yourself in your house, whether you want to or not, so
you must make up your mind to a long preparatory discipline. You may
have only one house to furnish in your life-time, possibly, so be
careful and go warily. Therefore, you must select for your architect a
man who isn't too determined to have _his_ way. It is a fearful mistake
to leave the entire planning of your home to a man whose social
experience may be limited, for instance, for he can impose on you his
conception of your tastes with a damning permanency and emphasis. I once
heard a certain Boston architect say that he taught his clients to be
ladies and gentlemen. He couldn't, you know. All he could do is to set
the front door so that it would reprove them if they weren't!
Who does not know, for instance, those mistaken people whose houses
represent their own or their architects' hasty visits to the fine old
_châteaux_ of the Loire, or the palaces of Versailles, or the fine old
houses of England, or the gracious villas of Italy? We must avoid such
aspiring architects, and visualize our homes not as so many specially
designated rooms and convenient closets, but as individual expressions
of ourselves, of the future we plan, of our dreams for our children. The
ideal house is the house that has been long planned for, long awaited.
[Illustration: IN THIS HALL, SIMPLICITY, SUITABILITY AND PROPORTION ARE
OBSERVED]
Fortunately for us, our best architects are so very good that we are
better than safe if we take our problems to them. These men associate
with themselves the hundred young architects who are eager to prove
themselves on small houses. The idea that it is economical to be your
own architect and trust your house to a building contractor is a
mistaken, and most expensive, one. The surer you are of your architect's
common sense and professional ability, the surer you may be that your
house will be economically efficient. He will not only plan a house that
will meet the needs of your family, but he will give you inspiration for
its interior. He will concern himself with the moldings, the
light-openings, the door-handles and hinges, the unconsidered things
that make or mar your house. Select for your architect a man you'd like
for a friend. Perhaps he will be, before the house comes true. If you
are both sincere, if you both purpose to have the best thing you can
afford, the house will express the genius and character of your
architect and the personality and character of yourself, as a great
painting suggests both painter and sitter. The hard won triumph of a
well-built house means many compromises, but the ultimate satisfaction
is worth everything.
I do not purpose, in this book, to go into the historic traditions of
architecture and decoration--there are so many excellent books it were
absurd to review them--but I do wish to trace briefly the development of
the modern house, the woman's house, to show you that all that is
intimate and charming in the home as we know it has come through the
unmeasured influence of women. Man conceived the great house with its
parade rooms, its _grands appartements_ but woman found eternal parade
tiresome, and planned for herself little retreats, rooms small enough
for comfort and intimacy. In short, man made the house: woman went him
one better and made of it a home.
The virtues of simplicity and reticence in form first came into being,
as nearly as we can tell, in the _Grotta_, the little studio-like
apartment of Isabella d'Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, away back in
1496. The Marchioness made of this little studio her personal retreat.
Here she brought many of the treasures of the Italian Renaissance.
Really, simplicity and reticence were the last things she considered,
but the point is that they were considered at all in such a restless,
passionate age. Later, in 1522, she established the _Paradiso_, a suite
of apartments which she occupied after her husband's death. So you see
the idea of a woman planning her own apartment is pretty old, after all.
The next woman who took a stand that revealed genuine social
consciousness was that half-French, half-Italian woman, Catherine de
Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. She seceded from court because the
court was swaggering and hurly-burly, with florid Marie-de-Medicis at
its head. And with this recession, she began to express in her conduct,
her feeling, her conversation, and, finally, in her house, her awakened
consciousness of beauty and reserve, of simplicity and suitability.
This was the early Seventeenth Century, mind you, when the main salons
of the French houses were filled with such institutions as rows of red
chairs and boxed state beds. She undertook, first of all, to have a
light and gracefully curving stairway leading to her salon instead of
supplanting it. She grouped her rooms with a lovely diversity of size
and purpose, whereas before they had been vast, stately halls with
cubbies hardby for sleeping. She gave the bedroom its alcove, boudoir,
ante-chamber, and even its bath, and then as decorator she supplanted
the old feudal yellow and red with her famous silver-blue. She covered
blue chairs with silver bullion. She fashioned long, tenderly colored
curtains of novel shades. Reticence was always in evidence, but it was
the reticence of elegance. It was through Madame de Rambouillet that the
armchair received its final distribution of yielding parts, and began
to express the comfort of soft padded backward slope, of width and
warmth and color.
It was all very heavy, very grave, very angular, this Hôtel Rambouillet,
but it was devised for and consecrated to conversation, considered a new
form of privilege! The _précieuses_ in their later jargon called chairs
"the indispensables of conversation."
I have been at some length to give a picture of Madame de Rambouillet's
hôtel because it really is the earliest modern house. There, where the
society that frequented it was analyzing its soul in dialogue and long
platonic discussion that would seem stark enough to us, the word which
it invented for itself was _urbanité_--the coinage of one of its own
foremost figures.
It is unprofitable to follow on into the grandeurs of Louis XIV, if one
hopes to find an advance there in truth-telling architecture. At the end
of that splendid official success the squalor of Versailles was
unspeakable, its stenches unbearable. In spite of its size the Palace
was known as the most comfortless house in Europe. After the death of
its owner society, in a fit of madness, plunged into the _rocaille_.
When the restlessness of Louis XV could no longer find moorings in this
brilliancy, there came into being little houses called _folies_, garden
hermitages for the privileged. Here we find Madame de Pompadour in
calicoes, in a wild garden, bare-foot, playing as a milkmaid, or seated
in a little gray-white interior with painted wooden furniture, having
her supper on an earthen-ware service that has replaced old silver and
gold. Amorous alcoves lost their painted Loves and took on gray and
white decorations. The casinos of little _comédiennes_ did not glitter
any more. English sentiment began to bedim Gallic eyes, and so what we
know as the Louis XVI style was born.
And so, at that moment, the idea of the modern house came into its own,
and it could advance--as an idea--hardly any further. For with all the
intrepidity and passion of the later Eighteenth Century in its search
for beauty, for all the magic-making of convenience and ingenuity of the
Nineteenth Century, the fundamentals have changed but little. And now we
of the Twentieth Century can only add material comforts and an
expression of our personality. We raise the house beyond the reach of
squalor, we give it measured heat, we give it water in abundance and
perfect sanitation and light everywhere, we give it ventilation less
successfully than we might, and finally we give it the human quality
that is so modern. There are no dungeons in the good modern house, no
disgraceful lairs for servants, no horrors of humidity.
[Illustration: MENNOYER DRAWINGS AND OLD MIRRORS SET IN PANELINGS]
And so we women have achieved a house, luminous with kind purpose
throughout. It is finished--that is our difficulty! We inherit it, all
rounded in its perfection, consummate in its charms, but it is finished,
and what can we do about a thing that is finished I Doesn't it seem that
we are back in the old position of Isabella d'Este--eager, predatory,
and "thingy"? And isn't it time for us to pull up short lest we
sidestep the goal? We are so sure of a thousand appetites we are in
danger of passing by the amiable commonplaces. We find ourselves
dismayed in old houses that look too simple. We must stop and ask
ourselves questions, and, if necessary, plan for ourselves little
retreats until we can find ourselves again.
What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes on within it,
a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler
kind that we may grow to understand, a house that _looks_ amenity.
Suppose you have obtained this sort of wisdom--a sane viewpoint. I think
it will give you as great a satisfaction to re-arrange your house with
what you have as to re-build, re-decorate. The results may not be so
charming, but you can learn by them. You can take your indiscriminate
inheritance of Victorian rosewood of Eastlake walnut and cocobolo, your
pickle-and-plum colored Morris furniture, and make a civilized interior
by placing it right, and putting detail at the right points. Your sense
of the pleasure and meaning of human intercourse will be clear in your
disposition of your best things, in your elimination of your worst ones.
When you have emptied the tables of _rubbish_ so that you can put
_things_ down on them at need, placed them in a light where you can
write on them in repose, or isolated real works of art in the middle of
them; when you have set your dropsical sofas where you want them for
talk, or warmth and reading; when you can see the fire from the bed in
your sleeping-room, and dress near your bath; if this sort of sense of
your rights is acknowledged in your rearrangement, your rooms will
always have meaning, in the end. If you like only the things in a chair
that have meaning, and grow to hate the rest you will, without any other
instruction, prefer--the next time you are buying--a good Louis XVI
_fauteuil_ to a stuffed velvet chair. You will never again be guilty of
the errors of meaningless magnificence.
To most of us in America who must perforce lead workaday lives, the
absence of beauty is a very distinct lack. I think, indeed, that the
present awakening has come to stay, and that before very long, we shall
have simple houses with fireplaces that draw, electric lights in the
proper places, comfortable and sensible furniture, and not a gilt-legged
spindle-shanked table or chair anywhere. This may be a decorator's
optimistic dream, but let us all hope that it may come true.