CARPETS AND DRAPERIES.
In the very old-fashioned, stately rooms of Queen Anne's reign the
carpeting was doled out in small proportions, and a somewhat comfortless
air must have prevailed where an expanse of floor was covered here and
there by what we should now characterise as a shabby bit of carpeting.
In fact a suitable floor-covering or appropriate draperies for these old
rooms is rather a difficult point. Modern tastes demand comfort and
brightness, and yet there is always the dread of too glaring contrasts,
and an inharmonious groundwork. Quite lately I saw a fine old-time
wainscotted room, whose walls and floor had taken a rich dark gloss from
age, brightened immensely and harmoniously by four or five of those
large Indian cotton rugs in dark blue and white, to be bought now-a-days
cheaply enough in Regent Street. The china in this room was of Delft
ware, also blue and white, and it had _short_ full curtains of a bright
French stuff, wherein blue lines alternated with a rich red, hanging in
the deep windows, whilst colour was given in a dusky corner by a silken
screen of embroidered peonies. A Turkish carpet is of course
inadmissible in a bed-room, and the modern Persian rugs are too gaudy to
harmonise well with the sober tone of a wainscotted bed-room, but it is
quite possible to find delicious rugs and strips of carpeting in
greenish blue copied from Eastern designs. The difficulty is perhaps
most simply met by a carpet of a very dark red, with the smallest
possible wave or suggestion of black in it, either in strips or in a
square, stopping short within two feet or so of the walls. I know a
suite of old-fashioned bed-rooms where the floor is covered with quite
an ecclesiastical-looking carpet, and it looks very suitable, warm and
bright, and thoroughly in keeping. In a house of moderate size there is
nothing I like so much as the whole of a bed-room floor being carpeted
in the same way--landings, passages, dressing-rooms, and all--and on the
whole, taking our dingy climate into consideration, a well-toned red
carpet or nondescript blue will generally be found the most suitable.
[Illustration]
Strange to say, next to red carpets white ones wear the best, but they
make such a false and glaring effect, that they cannot be considered
appropriate even for a pretty bowery bed-room, half dressing-room, half
boudoir. With ordinarily fair wear white carpets only take a creamy tint
as they get older, and then their bouquets and borders, have a chance of
fading into better harmony. But most of the designs of these carpets are
so radically wrong, so utterly objectionable from the beginning, that
the best which can be hoped from time is that it will obliterate them
altogether. It is true we flatter ourselves that we have grown beyond
the days of enormous boughs and branches of exaggerated leaves and
blossoms daubed on a crude ground, but _have_ we escaped from the
dominion of patterns, more minute it is true, but quite as much outside
the pale of good taste? What is to be said in defence of a design which,
when its colours are fresh, is so shaded as to represent some billowy
and uneven surface, fastened at intervals by yellow nails? or spots of
white flowers or stars on a grass-green ground? The only carpet of that
sort of white and green which I ever liked had tiny sprays of white
heather on a soft green ground, in the miniature drawing-room of a
Scotch shooting-box. _There_, it was so appropriate, so thoroughly in
keeping with even the view out of the windows, with the heathery chintz,
the roe-deer's heads on the panels of the wall, that it looked better on
the floor than anything else could possibly have done. Morris has
Kidderminster carpets for bed-rooms, in pale pink, buff, and blue, &c.,
which are simply perfect in harmony of colour and design.
People who consider themselves good managers are very apt to turn the
half worn-out drawing-room carpet into one of the bed-rooms, but this is
not a good plan, for it seldom matches the draperies, and is also apt to
become frowsy and fusty. I am not so extravagant as to recommend that a
good carpet with plenty of possibilities of wear yet in it should be
thrown away because it is not suitable for a bed-room. There are many
ways and means of disposing of such things, and even the threadbare
remains of an originally good and costly carpet can find a market of its
own. What I should like to see, especially in all London bed-rooms, is a
fresh, inexpensive carpet of unobtrusive colours, which can be
constantly taken away and cleaned or renewed, rather than a more costly,
rich-looking floor-covering, which will surely in time become and remain
more or less dirty. But light carpets are seldom soft in tone, and I
should be inclined to suggest felt as a groundwork, if the bare boards
are inadmissible, with large rugs thrown down before the fireplace,
dressing and writing-tables, &c. These should of course contrast
harmoniously with the walls. If you have a room of which the style is a
little too sombre, then lighten it and brighten it by all the means in
your power. If it be inclined to be garish and glaring, then subdue it.
People cannot always create, as it were, the place in which they are
obliged to live. One may find oneself placed in a habitation perfectly
contrary to every principle of correct taste as well as opposed to one's
individual preferences. But that is such an opportunity! out of
unpromising materials and surroundings you have to make a room, whether
bed-room or boudoir, which will take the impression of your own state.
As long as a woman possesses a pair of hands and her work-basket, a
little hammer and a few tin-tacks, it is hard if she need live in a room
which is actually ugly. I don't suppose any human being except a gipsy
has ever dwelt in so many widely-apart lands as I have. Some of these
homes have been in the infancy of civilisation, and yet I have never
found it necessary to endure, for more than the first few days of my
sojourn, anything in the least ugly or uncomfortable. Especially pretty
has my sleeping-room always been, though it has sometimes looked out
over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, at others, up a lovely New
Zealand valley, or, in still earlier days, over a waving West Indian
"grass-piece." But I may as well get out the map of the world at once,
and try to remember the various places to which my wandering destiny has
led me. All the moral I want to draw from this geographical digression
is that I can assert from my own experience--which after all is the only
true standpoint of assertion--that it is possible to have really pretty,
as well as thoroughly comfortable dwelling-places even though they may
lie thousands of miles away from the heart of civilisation, and
hundreds of leagues distant from a shop or store of any kind. I mean
this as an encouragement--not a boast.
Chintz is what naturally suggests itself to the inquirer's mind as most
suitable for the drapery of a bed-room, and there is a great deal to be
said in its favour. First of all, its comparative cheapness and the
immense variety of its designs. Cretonnes are comely too, if care be
taken to avoid the very gaudy ones. If there is no objection on the
score of difficulty of keeping clean, I am fond, in a modern bed-room,
of curtains all of one colour, some soft, delicate tint of blue or rose,
with a great deal of patternless white muslin either over it or beneath
it as drapery to the window. This leaves you more free for bright,
effective bits of colour for sofa, table-cover, &c., and the feeling of
the window curtains can be carried out again in the screen. A bed-room,
to be really comfortable, should always have one or even two screens, if
it be large enough. They give a great air of comfort to a room, and are
exceedingly convenient as well as pretty. The fashion of draped
toilet-tables is passing away so rapidly that they cannot be depended
upon for colour in a room, though we get the advantage in other ways. So
we must fall back upon the old idea of embroidered quilts once more to
help with colour and tone in our bed-rooms. They are made in a hundred
different and almost equally pretty designs. Essentially modern quilts
for summer can be made of lace or muslin over pink or blue batiste or
silk to match the tints of the room; quilts of linen embroidered with
deliciously artistic bunches of fruit or flowers at the edge and
corners; quilts of eider-down covered with silk, for preference, or if
our means will not permit so costly a material, then of _one_ colour,
such as Turkey red, in twilled cotton. I have never liked those gay
imitation Indian quilts. They generally "swear" at everything else in
the room.
But there are still more beautiful quilts of an older style and date. I
have seen some made of coarse linen, with a pattern running in parallel
strips four or six inches wide, formed by pulling out the threads to
make the groundwork of an insertion. The same idea looks well also when
carried out in squares or a diamond-shaped pattern. Then there are
lovely quilts of muslin embroidered in delicate neutral tints, which
look as if they came straight from Cairo or Bagdad, but which have never
been out of England, and owe their lightness and beauty to the looms of
Manchester.
One of the prettiest and simplest bed-rooms I know had its walls covered
with lining paper of the very tenderest tint of green, on which were
hung some pretty pastel sketches, all in the same style. The chintzes,
or rather cretonnes, were of a creamy white ground with bunches of
lilacs powdered on them, and the carpet, of a soft green, had also a
narrow border with bouquets of lilacs at each corner. The screens were
of muslin over lilac batiste, and the quilt of the simple bedstead had
been worked by the owner's own fingers, of linen drawn out in threads.
The very tiles of the fireplace--for this pretty room had an open hearth
with a sort of basket for a coal fire in the middle--and the china of
the basin-stand as well as the door-handles and plates, were all
decorated with the same flower, and although essentially a modern room
in a modern house, it was exquisitely fresh and uncommon. This was
partly owing to the liberal use of the leaves of the lilac, which are in
form so exceedingly pretty.
In an old-fashioned house if I wanted the draperies and quilt of my
bed-room to be thoroughly harmonious I should certainly go to the Royal
School of Art Needlework in the Exhibition Road for designs, as they
possess extraordinary facilities for getting at specimens of the best
early English and French needlework, and they can imitate even the
materials to perfection. I saw some curtains the other day in a modern
boudoir from this Royal School of Art Needlework. They were of a
delicate greenish blue silk-rep, which hung in delicious round folds and
had a bold and simple design of conventionalised lilies in a material
like Tussore silk _appliqué_-d with a needlework edge. Of course they
were intended for a purely modern room, but there were also some copies
of draperies which went beautifully with Chippendale chairs and lovely
old straight up and down cupboards and settees.
There is rather a tendency in the present day to make both bed-rooms and
boudoirs gloomy; a horrible vision of a room with walls the colour of a
robin's egg (dots and all) and _black_ furniture, rises up before me,
and the owner of this apartment could not be induced to brighten up her
gloom by so much as a gay pincushion. Now our grandmothers understood
much better, though probably no one ever said a word to them about it,
how necessary it was to light up dark recesses by contrasts. You would
generally have found an exquisite old blue and white Delft jar full of
scented rose-leaves, a gay beau-pot full of poppies, or even a
spinning-wheel with its creamy bundle of flax or wool bound by a scarlet
ribbon, in the unregarded corner of a dingy passage, and I think we do
not bear in mind enough how bright and gay the costumes of those days
used to be. To a new house, furnished according to the present rage for
old-fashioned decoration, our modern sombre apparel is no help. We do
not lighten up our rooms a bit now by our dress, except perhaps in
summer, but generally we sit, clad in dingiest tints of woollen
material, or in very inartistic black silk, amid furniture which was
originally designed as a sort of background to much gay and gallant
clothing, to flowered sacques and powdered heads, to bright steel
buttons and buckles and a thousand points of colour and light. Let us
follow their old good example thoroughly, if we do it at all, and do our
best to brighten the dull nooks and corners which will creep into all
dwellings, by our attire, as well as in all other ways.