First of all, I think a dining-room should be light, and gay. The first
thing to be considered is plenty of sunshine. The next thing is the
planning of a becoming background for the mistress of the house. The
room should always be gay and charming in color, but the color should be
selected with due consideration of its becomingness to the hostess.
Every woman has a right to be pretty in her own dining-room.
I do not favor the dark, heavy treatments and elaborate stuff hangings
which seem to represent the taste of most of the men who go in for
decorating nowadays. Nine times out of ten the dining-room seems to be
the gloomiest room in the house. I think it should be a place where the
family may meet in gaiety of spirit for a pause in the vexatious
happenings of the day. I think light tones, gay wallpapers, flowers and
sunshine are of more importance than storied tapestries and heavily
carved furniture. These things are all very well for the house that has
a small dining-room and a gala dining-room for formal occasions as well,
but there are few such houses.
We New Yorkers have been so accustomed to the gloomy basement
dining-rooms of the conventional brown-stone houses of the late eighties
we forgot how nice a dining-room can be. Even though the city
dining-room is now more fortunately placed in the rear of the second
floor it is usually overshadowed by other houses, and can be lightened
only by skilful use of color in curtains, china, and so forth.
Therefore, I think this is the one room in the city house where one can
afford to use a boldly decorative paper. I like very much the Chinese
rice-papers with their broad, sketchy decorations of birds and flowers.
These papers are never tiresomely realistic and are always done in very
soft colors or in soft shades of one color, and while if you analyze
them they are very fantastic, the general effect is as restful as it is
cheerful. You know you can be most cheerful when you are most rested!
The quaint landscape papers which are seen in so many New England
dining-rooms seem to belong with American Colonial furniture and white
woodwork, prim silver and gold banded china. These landscape papers are
usually gay in effect and make for cheer. There are many new designs
less complicated than the old ones. Then, too, there are charming
foliage papers, made up of leaves and branches and birds, which are very
good.
While we may find color and cheer in these gay papers for gloomy city
dining-rooms, if we have plenty of light we may get more distinguished
results with paneled walls. A large dining-room may be paneled with
dark wood, with a painted fresco, or tapestry frieze, and a ceiling with
carved or painted beams, or perhaps one of those interesting cream-white
ceilings with plaster beams judiciously adorned with ornament in low
relief. Given a large dining-room and a little money, you can do
anything: you can make a room that will compare favorably with the
traditional rooms on which we build. You have a right to make your
dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of
light and air. But one thing you must have: simplicity! It may be the
simplicity of a marble floor and tapestried walls and a painted ceiling,
it may be the simplicity of white paint and muslin and fine furniture,
but simplicity it must have. The furniture that is required in a
dining-room declares itself: a table and chairs. You can bring side
tables and china closets into it, or you can build in cupboards and
consoles to take their place, but there is little chance for other
variation, and so the beginning is a declaration of order and
simplicity.
[Illustration: A GEORGIAN DINING-ROOM IN THE WILLIAM ISELIN HOUSE]
The easiest way to destroy this simplicity is to litter the room with
displays of silver and glass, to dot the walls with indifferent
pictures. If you are courageous enough to let your walls take care of
themselves and to put away your silver and china and glass, the room
will be as dignified as you could wish. Remember that simplicity depends
on balance and space. If the walls balance one another in light and
shadow, if the furniture is placed formally, if walls and furniture
are free from mistaken ornament, the room will be serene and
beautiful. In most other rooms we avoid the "pairing" of things, but
here pairs and sets of things are most desirable. Two console tables are
more impressive than one. There is great decorative value in a pair of
mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards
flanking a chimney-piece. You would not be guilty of a pair of wall
fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies
of the same portrait in a room. But when things "pair" logically, pair
them! They will furnish a backbone of precision to the room.
The dining-room in the Iselin house is a fine example of stately
simplicity. It is extremely formal, and yet there is about it none of
the gloominess one associates with New York dining-rooms. The severely
paneled walls, the fine chimney-piece with an old master inset and
framed by a Grinling Gibbons carving, the absence of the usual mantel
shelf, the plain dining-table and the fine old lion chairs all go to
make up a Georgian room of great distinction.
The woman who cannot afford such expensive simplicity might model a
dining-room on this same plan and accomplish a beautiful room at
reasonable expense. Paneled walls are always possible; if you can't
afford wood paneling, paint the plastered wall white or cream and break
it into panels by using a narrow molding of wood. You can get an effect
of great dignity by the use of molding at a few cents a foot. A large
panel would take the place of the Grinling Gibbons carving, and a
mirror might be inset above the fireplace instead of the portrait. The
dining-table and chairs might give place to good reproductions of
Chippendale, and the marble console to a carpenter-made one painted to
match the woodwork.
The subject of proper furniture for a dining-room is usually settled by
the house mistress before her wedding bouquet has faded, so I shall only
touch on the out-of-ordinary things here. Everyone knows that a table
and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind "go
together." The trouble is that everyone knows these things _too_ well,
and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant
departures from the usual.
My own dining-room in New York is anything but usual, and yet there is
nothing undignified about it. The room was practically square, so that
it had a certain orderly quality to begin with. The rooms of the house
are all rather small, and so to gain the greatest possible space I have
the door openings at the extreme end of the wall, leaving as large a
wall space as possible. You enter this room, then, through a door at the
extreme left of the south wall of the room. Another door at the extreme
right of the same wall leads to a private passage. The space left
between the doors is thereby conserved, and is broken into a large
central panel flanked by two narrow panels. The space above the doors is
also paneled. This wall is broken by a console placed under the central
panel. Above it one of the Mennoyer originals, which you may remember in
the Washington Irving dining-room, is set in the wall, framed with a
narrow molding of gray. The walls and woodwork of the room are of
exactly the same tone of gray--darker than a silver gray and lighter
than pewter. Everything, color, balance, proportion, objects of art, has
been uniformly considered.
Continuing, the east wall is broken in the center by the fireplace, with
a mantel of white and gray marble. A large mirror, surmounted with a
bas-relief in black and white, fills the space between mantel shelf and
cornice. This mirror and bas-relief are framed with the narrow carved
molding painted gray. Here again there is the beauty of balance: two
Italian candlesticks of carved and gilded wood flank a marble bust on
the mantel shelf. There is nothing more. On the right of the mirror, in
a narrow panel, there is a wall clock of carved and gilded wood which
also takes its place as a part of the wall, and keeps it.
The north wall is broken by two mirrors and a door leading to the
service-pantry. A large, four-fold screen, made of an uncut tapestry,
shuts off the door. We need all the light the windows give, so there are
no curtains except the orange-colored taffeta valances at the top. I
devised sliding doors of mirrors that are pulled out of the wall at
night to fill the recessed space of the windows. Ventilation is afforded
by the open fireplace, and by mechanical means. You see we do not
occupy this house in summer, so the mirrored windows are quite feasible.
The fourth wall has no openings, and it is broken into three large
paneled spaces. A console has the place of honor opposite the fireplace,
and above it there is a mirror like that over the mantel. In the two
side panels are the two large Mennoyers. There are five of these in the
room, the smaller ones flanking the chimney piece. You see that the
salvation of this room depends on this careful repetition and variation
of similar objects.
Color is brought into the room in the blue and yellow of the Chinese
rug, in the chairs, and in the painted table. The chairs are painted a
creamy yellow, pointed with blue, and upholstered with blue and yellow
striped velvet. I do not like high-backed chairs in a dining-room. Their
one claim to use is that they make a becoming background, but this does
not compensate for the difficulties of the service when they are used.
An awkward servant pouring soup down one's back is not an aid to
digestion, or to the peace of mind engendered by a good dinner.
[Illustration: MRS. OGDEN ARMOUR'S CHINESE-PAPER SCREEN]
[Illustration: MRS. JAMES WARREN LANE'S PAINTED DINING-TABLE]
The painted table is very unusual. The legs and the carved under-frame
are painted cream and pointed with blue, like the chairs, but the top is
as gay as an old-fashioned garden, with stiff little medallions, and
urns spilling over with flowers, and conventional blossoms picked out
all over it. The colors used are very soft, blue and cream being
predominant. The table is covered with a sheet of plate glass. This
table is, of course, too elaborate for a simple dining-room, but the
idea could be adapted and varied to suit many color and furniture
schemes.
Painted furniture is a delight in a small dining-room. In the Colony
Club I planned a very small room for little dinners that is well worth
reproducing in a small house. This little room was very hard to manage
because there were no windows! There were two tiny little openings high
on the wall at one end of the room, but it would take imagination to
call them windows. The room was on the top floor, and the real light
came from a skylight. You can imagine the difficulty of making such a
little box interesting. However, there was one thing that warmed my
heart to the little room: a tiny ante-room between the hall proper and
the room proper. This little ante-room I paneled in yellowish tan and
gray. I introduced a sofa covered with an old brocade just the color of
dried rose leaves--ashes of roses, the French call it--and the little
ante-room became a fitting introduction to the dining-room within.
The walls of the rooms were paneled in a delicious color between yellow
and tan, the wall proper and the moldings being this color, and the
panels themselves filled with a gray paper painted in pinky yellows and
browns. These panels were done by hand by a man who found his
inspiration in the painted panels of an old French ballroom. As the
walls were unbroken by windows there was ample space for such
decoration. A carpet of rose color was chosen, and the skylight was
curtained with shirred silk of the same rose. The table and chairs were
of painted wood, the chairs having seats of the brocade used on the
ante-room sofa. The table was covered with rose colored brocade, and
over this, cobwebby lace, and over this, plate glass. There are two
consoles in the room, with small cabinets above which hold certain
_objets d'art_ in keeping with the room.
Under the two tiny windows were those terrible snags we decorators
always strike, the radiators. Wrongly placed, they are capable of
spoiling any room. I concealed these radiators by building two small
cabinets with panels of iron framework gilded to suggest a graceful
metal lattice, and lined them with rose-colored silk. I borrowed this
idea from a fascinating cabinet in an old French palace, and the result
is worth the deception. The cabinets are nice in themselves, and they do
not interfere with the radiation of the heat.
I have seen many charming country houses and farm houses in France with
dining-rooms furnished with painted furniture. Somehow they make the
average American dining-room seem very commonplace and tiresome. For
instance, I had the pleasure of furnishing a little country house in
France and we planned the dining-room in blue and white. The furniture
was of the simplest, painted white, with a dark blue line for
decoration. The corner cupboard was a little more elaborate, with a
gracefully curved top and a large glass door made up of little panes set
in a quaint design. There were several drawers and a lower cupboard. The
drawers and the lower doors invited decorations a little more elaborate
than the blue lines of the furniture, so we painted on gay little
medallions in soft tones of blue, from the palest gray-blue to a very
dark blue. The chair cushions were blue, and the china was blue
sprigged. Three little pitchers of dark-blue luster were on the wall
cupboard shelf and a mirror in a faded gold frame gave the necessary
variation of tone.
A very charming treatment for either a country or small city dining-room
is to have corner cupboards of this kind cutting off two corners. They
are convenient and unusual and pretty as well. They can be painted in
white with a colored line defining the panels and can be made highly
decorative if the panels are painted with a classic or a Chinese design.
The decoration, however, should be kept in variations of the same tone
as the stripe on the panels. For instance, if the stripe is gray, then
the design should be in dark and light gray and blue tones. The chairs
can be white, in a room of this kind, with small gray and blue
medallions and either blue and white, or plain blue, cushions.
Another dining-room of the same sort was planned for a small country
house on Long Island. Here the woodwork was a deep cream, the walls the
same tone, and the ceiling a little lighter. We found six of those prim
Duxbury chairs, with flaring spindle-backs, and painted them a soft
yellow-green. The table was a plain pine one, with straight legs. We
painted it cream and decorated the top with a conventional border of
green adapted from the design of the china--a thick creamy Danish ware
ornamented with queer little wavy lines and figures. I should have
mentioned the china first, because the whole room grew from that. The
rug was a square of velvet of a darker green. The curtains were soft
cream-colored net. One wall was made up of windows, another of doors and
a cupboard, and against the other two walls we built two long, narrow
consoles that were so simple anyone could accomplish them: simply two
wide shelves resting on good brackets, with mirrors above. The one
splendid thing in the room was a curtain of soft green damask that was
pulled at night to cover the group of windows. Everything else in the
room was bought for a song.
[Illustration: THE PRIVATE DINING-ROOM IN THE COLONY CLUB]
I have said much of cupboards and consoles because I think they are so
much better than the awkward, heavy "china closets" and "buffets" and
sideboards that dominate most dining-rooms. The time has come when we
should begin to do fine things in the way of building fitment furniture,
that is, furniture that is actually or apparently a part of the shell of
the room. It would be so much better to build a house slowly, planning
the furniture as a part of the architectural detail. With each
succeeding year the house would become more and more a part of the
owner, illustrating his life. Of course, this would mean that the
person who planned the developing of the house must have a certain
architectural training, must know about scale and proportion, and
something of general construction. Certainly charming things are to be
created in this way, things that will last, things immeasurably
preferable to the cheap jerry-built furniture which so soon becomes
shabby, which has to be so constantly renewed. People accept new ideas
with great difficulty, and my only hope is that they may grow to accept
the idea of fitment furniture through finding the idea a product of
their own; a personal discovery that comes from their own needs.
I have constantly recommended the use of our native American woods for
panelings and wall furniture, because we have both the beautiful woods
of our new world and tried and proven furniture of the old world, and
what couldn't we achieve with such material available? Why do people
think of a built-in cupboard as being less important than a detached
piece of furniture? Isn't it a braggart pose, a desire to show the
number of things you can buy? Of course it is a very foolish pose, but
it is a popular one, this display of objects that are ear-marked
"expensive."
It is very easy to build cupboards on each side of a fireplace, for
instance, making the wall flush with the chimney-breast. This is always
good architectural form. One side could have a desk which opens beneath
the glass doors, and the other could have cupboards, both presenting
exactly the same appearance when closed. Fitted corner cupboards,
triangular or rounded, are also excellent in certain dining rooms.
Wall tables, or consoles, may be of the same wood as the woodwork or of
marble, or of some dark polished wood. There are no more useful pieces
of furniture than consoles, and yet we only see them in great houses.
Why? Because they are simple, and we haven't yet learned to demand the
simple. I have had many interesting old console-tables of wrought iron
support and marble tops copied, and I have designed others that were
mere semi-circles of white painted wood supported by four slender legs,
but whether they be marble or pine the effect is always simple. There
are charming consoles that have come to us from the Eighteenth Century,
consoles made in pairs, so that they may stand against the wall as
serving-tables, or be placed together to form one round table. This is a
very good arrangement where people have one large living room or hall in
which they dine and which also serves all the purpose of daily
intercourse. This entirely removes any suggestion of a dining-room, as
the consoles may be separated and stand against the wall during the day.
Many modern houses are being built without the conventional dining-room
we have known so long, there being instead an open-air breakfast room
which may be glazed in winter and screened in summer. People have come
to their senses at last, and realize that there is nothing so pleasant
as eating outdoors. The annual migration of Americans to Europe is
responsible for the introduction of this excellent custom. French houses
are always equipped with some outdoor place for eating. Some of them
have, in addition to the inclosed porch, a fascinating pavilion built in
the garden, where breakfast and tea may be served. Modern mechanical
conveniences and the inexpensive electric apparatus make it possible to
serve meals at this distance from the house and keep them hot in the
meantime. One may prepare one's own coffee and toast at table, with the
green trees and flowers and birds all around.
Eating outdoors makes for good health and long life and good temper,
everyone knows that. The simplest meal seems a gala affair when everyone
is radiant and cheerful, whereas a long and elaborate meal served
indoors is usually depressing.