When I am asked to decorate a new house, my first thought is
suitability. My next thought is proportion. Always I keep in mind the
importance of simplicity. First, I study the people who are to live in
this house, and their needs, as thoroughly as I studied my parts in the
days when I was an actress. For the time-being I really am the
chatelaine of the house. When I have thoroughly familiarized myself with
my "part," I let that go for the time, and consider the proportion of
the house and its rooms. It is much more important that the wall
openings, windows, doors, and fireplaces should be in the right place
and should balance one another than that there should be expensive and
extravagant hangings and carpets.
My first thought in laying out a room is the placing of the electric
light openings. How rarely does one find the lights in the right place
in our over-magnificent hotels and residences! One arrives from a
journey tired out and travel-stained, only to find oneself facing a
mirror as far removed from the daylight as possible, with the artificial
lights directly behind one, or high in the ceiling in the center of the
room. In my houses I always see that each room shall have its lights
placed for the comfort of its occupants. There must be lights in
sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of
the dressing-table, and so on.
Then I consider the heating of the room. We Americans are slaves to
steam heat. We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions
by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat. In my own houses I have
a fireplace in each room, and I burn wood in it. There is a
heating-system in the basement of my house, but it is under perfect
control. I prefer the normal heat of sunshine and open fires. But,
granted that open fires are impossible in all your rooms, do arrange in
the beginning that the small rooms of your house may not be overheated.
It is a distinct irritation to a person who loves clean air to go into a
room where a flood of steam heat pours out of every corner. There is
usually no way to control it unless you turn it off altogether. I once
had the temerity to do this in a certain hotel room where there was a
cold and cheerless empty fireplace. I summoned a reluctant chambermaid,
only to be told that the chimney had never had a fire in it and the
proprietor would rather not take such a risk!
[Illustration: A PORTRAIT BY NATTIER INSET ABOVE A FINE OLD MANTEL]
Perhaps the guest in your house would not be so troublesome, but don't
tempt her! If you have a fireplace, see that it is in working order.
We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the
first time, by her surroundings. We judge her temperament, her habits,
her inclinations, by the interior of her home. We may talk of the
weather, but we are looking at the furniture. We attribute vulgar
qualities to those who are content to live in ugly surroundings. We
endow with refinement and charm the person who welcomes us in a
delightful room, where the colors blend and the proportions are as
perfect as in a picture. After all, what surer guarantee can there be of
a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited,
than taste? It is a compass that never errs. If a woman has taste she
may have faults, follies, fads, she may err, she may be as human and
feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!
How can we develop taste? Some of us, alas, can never develop it,
because we can never let go of shams. We must learn to recognize
suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our
needs. I grant you we may never fully appreciate the full balance of
proportion, but we can exert our common sense and decide whether a thing
is suitable; we can consult our conscience as to whether an object is
simple, and we can train our eyes to recognize good and bad proportion.
A technical knowledge of architecture is not necessary to know that a
huge stuffed leather chair in a tiny gold and cream room is unsuitable,
is hideously complicated, and is as much out of proportion as the
proverbial bull in the china-shop.
A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or
not. How can we believe that a woman of sincerity of purpose will hang
fake "works of art" on her walls, or satisfy herself with imitation
velvets or silks? How can we attribute taste to a woman who permits
paper floors and iron ceilings in her house? We are too afraid of the
restful commonplaces, and yet if we live simple lives, why shouldn't we
be glad our houses are comfortably commonplace? How much better to have
plain furniture that is comfortable, simple chintzes printed from old
blocks, a few good prints, than all the sham things in the world? A
house is a dead-give-away, anyhow, so you should arrange is so that the
person who sees your personality in it will be reassured, not
disconcerted.
Too often, here in America, the most comfortable room in the house is
given up to a sort of bastard collection of gilt chairs and tables,
over-elaborate draperies shutting out both light and air, and huge and
frightful paintings. This style of room, with its museum-like
furnishings, has been dubbed "Marie Antoinette," _why_, no one but the
American decorator can say. Heaven knows poor Marie Antoinette had
enough follies to atone for, but certainly she has never been treated
more shabbily than when they dub these mausoleums "Marie Antoinette
rooms."
I remember taking a clever Englishwoman of much taste to see a woman who
was very proud of her new house. We had seen most of the house when the
hostess, who had evidently reserved what she considered the best for
the last, threw open the doors of a large and gorgeous apartment and
said, "This is my Louis XVI ballroom." My friend, who had been very
patient up to that moment, said very quietly, "What makes you think so?"
Louis XVI thought a salon well furnished with a few fine chairs and a
table. He wished to be of supreme importance. In the immense salons of
the Italian palaces there were a few benches and chairs. People then
wished spaces about them.
Nowadays, people are swamped by their furniture. Too many centuries, too
many races, crowd one another in a small room. The owner seems
insignificant among his collections of historical furniture. Whether he
collects all sorts of things of all periods in one heterogeneous mass,
or whether he fills his house with the furniture of some one epoch, he
is not at home in his surroundings.
The furniture of every epoch records its history. Our ancestors of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries inherited the troublous times of
their fathers in their heavy oaken chests. They owned more chests than
anything else, because a chest could be carried away on the back of a
sturdy pack mule, when the necessity arose for flight.
People never had time to sit down in the Sixteenth Century. Their
feverish unrest is recorded in their stiff, backed chairs. It was not
until the Seventeenth Century that they had time to sit down and talk.
We need no book of history to teach us this--we have only to observe the
ample proportions of the arm-chairs of the period.
Our ancestors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries worked with a
faith in the permanence of what they created. We have lost this happy
confidence. We are occupied exclusively with preserving and reproducing.
We have not succeeded in creating a style adapted to our modern life. It
is just as well! Our life, with its haste, its nervousness and its
preoccupations, does not inspire the furniture-makers. We cannot do
better than to accept the standards of other times, and adapt them to
our uses.
Why should we American woman run after styles and periods of which we
know nothing? Why should we not be content with the fundamental things?
The formal French room is very delightful in the proper place but when
it is unsuited to the people who must live in it it is as bad as a sham
room. The woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as
the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong
time!
This is what I am always fighting in people's houses, the unsuitability
of things. The foolish woman goes about from shop to shop and buys as
her fancy directs. She sees something "pretty" and buys it, though it
has no reference either in form or color to the scheme of her house.
Haven't you been in rooms where there was a jumble of mission
furniture, satinwood, fine old mahogany and gilt-legged chairs? And it
is the same with color. A woman says, "Oh, I love blue, let's have
blue!" regardless of the exposure of her room and the furnishings she
has already collected. And then when she has treated each one of her
rooms in a different color, and with a different floor covering, she
wonders why she is always fretted in going from one room to another.
Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must
select the furniture of some one period and stick to that. It isn't at
all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth
Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be
compared.
There are so many beautiful things that have come to us from other times
that it should be easy to make our homes beautiful, but I have seen what
I can best describe as apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like
aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures
in the form of tassels, and such horrors, in many houses of to-day under
the guise of being "authentic period furniture." Only a connoisseur can
ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can
easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes.
I shan't talk about ear-marks here, however, because dozens of
collectors have compiled excellent books that tell you all about curves
and lines and grain-of-wood and worm-holes. My business is to persuade
you to use your graceful French sofas and your simple rush bottom New
England chairs in different rooms--in other words, to preach to you the
beauty of suitability. Suitability! _Suitability!_ SUITABILITY!!
It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of
furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How
many rooms have I not cleared of junk--this heterogeneous mass of
ornamental "period" furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room
"look cozy." Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the
room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in
their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture
of the room becomes its decoration.