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.
My object in taking this house was twofold: I wanted to prove to my
friends that it was possible to take one of the darkest and grimiest of
city houses and make it an abode of sunshine and light, and I wanted to
furnish the whole house exactly as I pleased--for once!
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.
From the fore-court you enter the hall. Once within the hall, the, house
widens magically. Surely this cool black and white apartment cannot be
a part of restless New York! Have you ever come suddenly upon an old
Southern house, and thrilled at the classic purity of white columns in a
black-green forest? This entrance hall gives you the same thrill; the
elements of formality, of tranquillity, of coolness, are so evident. The
walls and ceiling are a deep, flat cream, and the floor is laid in large
black and white marble tiles. Exactly opposite you as you enter, there
is a wall fountain with a background of mirrors. The water spills over
from the fountain into ferns and flowers banked within a marble curb.
The two wall spaces on your right and left are broken by graceful niches
which hold old statues. An oval Chinese rug and the white and orange
flowers of the fountain furnish the necessary color. The windows
flanking the entrance doorway are hung with flat curtains of coarse
white linen, with inserts of old filet lace, and there are side curtains
of dead black silk with borderings of silver and gold threads.
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.
[Illustration: THE FORECOURT AND ENTRANCE OF THE FIFTY-FIFTH STREET
HOUSE]
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 house is narrow in the extreme, and the secret of its
successful renaissance is plenty of windows and light color and
mirrors--mirrors--mirrors! It has been called the "Little House of Many
Mirrors," for so much of its spaciousness and charm is the effect of
skilfully managed reflections. The stair-landings are most ingeniously
planned. There are landings that lead directly from the stairs into the
rooms of each floor, and back of one of the mirrored stair walls there
is a little balcony connecting the rooms on that floor, a private
passageway.
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.
But I think we can carry the white paint idea too far: I have grown a
little tired of over-careful decorations, of plain white walls and white
woodwork, of carefully matched furniture and over-cautious
color-schemes. Somehow the feeling of homey-ness is lost when the
decorator is too careful. In this drawing-room there is furniture of
many woods, there are stuffs of many weaves, there are candles and
chandeliers and reading-lamps, but there is harmony of purpose and
therefore harmony of effect. The room was made for conversation, for
hospitality.
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 two windows in this room are obviously windows by day, but at night
two sliding doors of mirrors are drawn, just as a curtain would be
drawn, to fill the window spaces. This is a little bit tricky, I admit,
but it is a very good trick. The dining-table is of carved wood painted
gray and covered with yellow damask, which in turn is covered with a
sheet of plate glass. The chairs are covered with a blue and gold
striped velvet. The rug has a gold ground with medallions and border of
blue, ivory and rose. Near the door that leads to the service rooms
there is a huge screen made of one piece of wondrous tapestry. No other
furniture is needed in the room.
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.
I firmly believe that the whole question of household comfort evolves
from the careful planning of the service portion of the house. My
servants' rooms are all attractive. The woodwork of these rooms is
white, the walls are cream, the floors are waxed. They are all gay and
sweet and cheerful, with white painted beds and chests of drawers and
willow chairs, and chintz curtains and bed-coverings that are
especially chosen, _not_ handed down when they have become too faded to
be used elsewhere!
V