The House in Good Taste

country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it what you will-awakening, develo

de and in, correct according to the best standards. What do we mean by the best standards? Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes hi

architecture. Their spacious, uncrowded interiors were usually beautiful. Houses and furniture

lerable furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle. There never was a house so bad that it couldn't be made over into so

go about accompl

tting

m, this evidence of our smug vanity, and

from which it is good sense to cho

he modern house, its romantic tr

of self-taught lessons of sincerit

olor and form and line, harmon

deas clearing into definite inspiration, then we are ready to talk

ong to wish it right. And we take it for granted that this American home is always the woman's home: a man may build and decorate a beautiful house, but it remains for a woman t

lect for your architect a man who isn't too determined to have his way. It is a fearful mistake to leave the entire planning of your home to a man whose social experience may be limited, for instance, for he can impose on you his conception of your tas

es, or the fine old houses of England, or the gracious villas of Italy? We must avoid such aspiring architects, and visualize our homes not as so many specially designated rooms and conve

ITY, SUITABILITY AND

sense and professional ability, the surer you may be that your house will be economically efficient. He will not only plan a house that will meet the needs of your family, but he will give you inspiration for its interior. He will concern himself with the moldings, the light-openings, the door-handles and hinges, the unconsidered things that make or mar your house. Select for your architect a man you'd like for a fri

rn house, the woman's house, to show you that all that is intimate and charming in the home as we know it has come through the unmeasured influence of women. Man conceived the great house with its parade rooms, its grand

of this little studio her personal retreat. Here she brought many of the treasures of the Italian Renaissance. Really, simplicity and reticence were the last things she considered, but the point is that they were considered at all i

et. She seceded from court because the court was swaggering and hurly-burly, with florid Marie-de-Medicis at its head. And with this recession, she began to exp

diversity of size and purpose, whereas before they had been vast, stately halls with cubbies hardby for sleeping. She gave the bedroom its alcove, boudoir, ante-chamber, and even its bath, and then as decorator she supplanted the old feudal yellow and red with her famous silver-blue. She covered blue chairs with silver bullion. Sh

devised for and consecrated to conversation, considered a new form of privilege! The

se. There, where the society that frequented it was analyzing its soul in dialogue and long platonic discussion that would

ciety, in a fit of madness, plunged into the rocaille. When the restlessness of Louis XV could no longer find moorings in this brilliancy, there came into being little houses called folies, garden hermitages for the privileged. Here we find Madame de Pompadour in calicoes, in a wild garden, bare-foot, playing as a milkmaid, or seated in a little gray-white in

ty of the Nineteenth Century, the fundamentals have changed but little. And now we of the Twentieth Century can only add material comforts and an expression of our personality. We raise the house beyond the reach of squalor, we give it measured heat, we give it water in abu

S AND OLD MIRROR

that is finished I Doesn't it seem that we are back in the old position of Isabella d'Este-eager, predatory, and "thingy"? And isn't it time for us to pull up short lest we sidestep the goal? We are so sure of a thousand appetites we are in

t, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it-and beauty of a n

harming, but you can learn by them. You can take your indiscriminate inheritance of Victorian rosewood of Eastlake walnut and cocobolo, your pickle-and-plum colored Morris furniture, and make a civilized interior

for talk, or warmth and reading; when you can see the fire from the bed in your sleeping-room, and dress near your bath; if this sort of sense of your rights is acknowledged in your rearrangement, your rooms will always have meaning, in the end. If you like only th

come to stay, and that before very long, we shall have simple houses with fireplaces that draw, electric lights in the proper places, comfortable and sensible