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!
Before you begin the decoration of your walls, be sure that your floors
have been finished to fulfil their purposes. Stain them or polish them
to a soft glow, keep them low in tone so that they may be backgrounds.
We will assume that the woodwork of each room has been finished with a
view to the future use and decoration of the room. We will assume that
the ceilings are proper ceilings; that they will stay in their place,
i.e., the top of the room. This is a most daring assumption, because
there are so many feeble and threatening ceilings overhanging most of us
that good ones seem rare. But the ceiling is an architectural problem,
and you must consider it in the beginning of things. It may be beamed
and have every evidence of structural beauty and strength, or it may be
beamed in a ridiculous fashion that advertises the beams as shams,
leading from nowhere to nowhere. It may be a beautiful expanse of creamy
modeled plaster resting on a distinguished cornice, or it may be one of
those ghastly skim-milk ceilings with distorted cupids and roses in
relief. It may be a rectangle of plain plaster tinted cream or pale
yellow or gray, and keeping its place serenely, or it may be a
villainous stretch of ox-blood, hanging over your head like the curse of
Cain. There are hundreds of magnificent painted ceilings, and vaulted
arches of marble and gold, but these are not of immediate importance to
the woman who is furnishing a small house, and are not within the scope
of this book. So let us exercise common sense and face our especial
ceiling problem in an architectural spirit. If your house has
structural beams, leave them exposed, if you like, but treat them as
beams; stain them, and wax them, and color the spaces between them cream
or tan or warm gray, and then make the room beneath the beams strong
enough in color and furnishings to carry the impressive ceiling.
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.
The main thing to remember, when you begin to cover your walls, is that
they are walls, that they are straight up and down, and have breadth and
thickness, that they are supposedly strong, in other words, that they
are a structural part of your house. A wall should always be treated as
a flat surface and in a conventional way. Pictorial flowers and lifelike
figures have no place upon it, but conventionalized designs may be used
successfully--witness the delighted use of the fantastic landscape
papers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Walls should always be
obviously _walls_, and not flimsy partitions hung with gauds and
trophies. The wall is the background of the room, and so must be flat in
treatment and reposeful in tone.
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!
The first impulse of all of us is to hang the things we admire on our
walls. Unfortunately, we do not always select papers and fabrics and
pictures we will continue to admire. Who doesn't know the woman who goes
to a shop and selects wall papers as she would select her gowns, because
they are "new" and "different" and "pretty"? She selects a "rich" paper
for her hall and an "elegant" paper for her drawing-room--the chances
are it is a nile green moire paper! For her library she thinks a paper
imitating an Oriental fabric is the proper thing, and as likely as not
she buys gold paper for her dining-room. She finds so many charming
bedroom papers that she has no trouble in selecting a dozen of them for
insipid blue rooms and pink rooms and lilac rooms.
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.
[Illustration: A PAINTED WALL BROKEN INTO PANELS BY NARROW MOLDINGS]
To me, the most beautiful wall is the plain and dignified painted
wall, broken into graceful panels by the use of narrow moldings, with
lighting fixtures carefully placed, and every picture and mirror hung
with classic precision. This wall is just as appropriate to the six-room
cottage as to the twenty-room house. If I could always find perfect
walls, I'd always paint them, and never use a yard of paper. Painted
walls, when very well done, are dignified and restful, and most
sanitary. The trouble is that too few plasterers know how to smooth the
wall surface, and too few workmen know how to apply paint properly. In
my new house on East Fifty-fifth Street I have had all the walls
painted. The woodwork is ivory white throughout the house, except in the
dining-room, where the walls and woodwork are soft gray. The walls of
most of the rooms and halls are painted a very deep tone of cream and
are broken into panels, the moldings being painted cream like the
woodwork. With such walls you can carry out any color-plan you may
desire.
You would think that every woman would know that walls are influenced by
the exposure of the room, but how often I have seen bleak north rooms
with walls papered in cold gray, and sunshiny south rooms with red or
yellow wall papers! Dull tones and cool colors are always good in south
rooms, and live tones and warm colors in north rooms. For instance, if
you wish to keep your rooms in one color-plan, you may have white
woodwork in all of them, and walls of varying shades of cream and
yellow. The north rooms may have walls painted or papered with a soft,
warm yellow that suggests creamy chiffon over orange. The south rooms
may have the walls of a cool creamy-gray tone.
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.
In a great room with a beamed ceiling and oak paneled walls a painted
fresco or a frieze of tapestry or some fine fabric is a very fine thing,
especially if it has a lot of primitive red and blue and gold in it, but
in simple rooms--beware!
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.
Painted walls, and walls hung with tapestries and leather, are not
possible to many of us, but they are the most magnificent of wall
treatments. I know a wonderful library with walls hung in squares of
Spanish leather, a cold northern room that merits such a brilliant wall
treatment. The primitive colors of the Cordova leather workers, with
gold and crimson dominant, glow from the deep shadows. Spanish and
Italian furniture and fine old velvets and brocades furnish this room.
The same sort of room invites wood paneling and tapestry, whereas the
ideal room for painted walls in a lighter key is the ballroom, or some
such large apartment. I once decorated a ballroom with Pillement panels,
copied from a beautiful Eighteenth Century room, and so managed to bring
a riot of color and decoration into a large apartment. The ground of the
paneling was deep yellow, and all the little birds and flowers
surrounding the central design were done in the very brightest,
strongest colors imaginable. The various panels had quaint little scenes
of the same Chinese flavor. Of course, in such an apartment as a
ballroom there would be nothing to break into the decorative plan of the
painted walls, and the unbroken polished floor serves only to throw the
panels into their proper prominence. Painted walls, when done in some
such broad and daring manner, are very wonderful, but they should not be
attempted by the amateur, or, indeed, by an expert in a room that will
be crowded with furniture, and curtains, and rugs.
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.
[Illustration: A WALL PAPER OF ELIZABETHAN DESIGN WITH OAK FURNITURE]
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.
Some of the figured wall papers are so decorative that they are more
than tempting, they are compelling. The Chinese ones are particularly
fascinating. Recently I planned a small boudoir in a country house that
depended on a gay Chinoiserie paper for its charm. The design of the
paper was made up of quaint little figures and parasols and birds and
twisty trees, all in soft tones of green and blue and mauve on a deep
cream ground. The woodwork and ceiling repeated the deep cream, and the
simple furniture (a day bed, a chest of drawers, and several chairs)
were of wood, painted a flat blue green just the color of the twisty
pine-trees of the paper.
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.
Among the most enchanting of the new papers are the black and white
ones, fantastic Chinese designs and startling Austrian patterns. Black
and white is always a tempting combination to the decorator, and now
that Josef Hoffman, the great Austrian decorator, has been working in
black and white for a number of years, the more venturesome decorators
of France, and England and America have begun to follow his lead, and
are using black and white, and black and color, with amazing effect. We
have black papers patterned in color, and black velvet carpets, and
white coated papers sprinkled with huge black polka dots, and all manner
of unusual things. It goes without saying that much of this fad is
freakish, but there is also much that is good enough and refreshing
enough to last. One can imagine nothing fresher than a black and white
scheme in a bedroom, with a saving neutrality of gray or some dull tone
for rugs, and a brilliant bit of color in porcelain. There is no hint of
the mournful in the decorator's combination of black and white: rather,
there is a naïve quality suggestive of smartness in a gown, or chic in a
woman. A white walled room with white woodwork and a black and white
tiled floor; a black lacquer bed and chest of drawers and chair; glass
curtains of white muslin and inside ones of black and white Hoffman
chintz; a splash of warm orange-red in an oval rug at the bedside, if it
be winter, or a cool green one in summer--doesn't this tempt you?
I once saw a little serving-maid wearing a calico gown, black crosses on
a white ground, and I was so enchanted with the cool crispness of it
that I had a glazed wall paper made in the same design. I have used it
in bedrooms, and in bathrooms, always with admirable effect. One can
imagine a girl making a Pierrot and Pierrette room for herself, given
whitewashed walls, white woodwork, and white painted furniture. An
ordinary white cotton printed with large black polka dots would make
delightful curtains, chair-cushions, and so forth. The rug might be
woven of black and white rags, or might be one of those woven from the
old homespun coverlet patterns.
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.
[Illustration: THE SCHEME OF THIS ROOM GREW FROM THE JARS ON THE
MANTEL]