Interior Decoration

Interior Decoration
Avoid In Interior Decoration











E all know the saying that it is only those who have mastered the steps in dancing who can afford to forget them. It is the same in every art. Therefore let us state at once, that all rules may be broken by the educated the masters of their respective arts. For beginners we give the following rules as a guide, until they get their bearings in this fascinating game of making pictures by manipulating lines and colors, as expressed in necessary furnishings.

Avoid crowding your rooms, walls or tables, for in creating a home one must produce the quality of restfulness by order and space.

As to walls, do not use a cold color in a north or shaded room. Make your ceilings lighter in tone than the sidewalls, using a very pale shade of the same color as the sidewalls.

Do not put a spotted (figured) surface on other spotted (figured) surfaces. A plain wallpaper is the proper, because most effective, background for pictures.

Avoid the mistake of forgetting that table decoration includes all china, glass, silver and linen used in serving any meal. In attempting the decoration of your dining-room table avoid anything inappropriate to the particular meal to be served and the scale of service. Do not have too many flowers on your table, or flowers not in harmony with the rest of the setting, in variety or color.

Do not use peasant china, no matter how decorative in itself, on fine damask or rare lace. By so doing you strike a false note. The background it demands is crash or peasant lace.

Avoid crowding your dining table or giving it an air of confusion by the number of things on it, thus destroying the laws of simplicity, line and balance in decoration.

Avoid using on your walls as mere decorations articles such as rugs or priests' vestments primarily intended for other purposes.

Avoid the misuse of anything in furnishing. It needs only knowledge and patience to find the correct thing for each need. Better do without than employ a makeshift in decorating.

Inappropriateness and elaboration can defeat artistic beauty but intelligent elimination never can beware of having about too many vases, or china meant for domestic use. The proper place for table china, no matter how rare it is, is in the dining room. If very valuable, one can keep it in cabinets.

Useless bric-a-brac in a dining room looks worse than it does anywhere else. Your dining room is the best place for any brasses, copper or pewter you may own.

If sitting room and dining-room connect by a wide opening, keep the same color scheme in both, or, in any case, the same depth of color. This gives an effect of space. It is not uncommon when a house is very small, to keep all of the walls and woodwork, and all of the carpets, in exactly the same color and tone. If variety in the color-scheme is desired, it may be introduced by means of cretonnes or silks used for hangings and furniture covers.

Avoid the use of thin, old silks on sofas or chair seats. Avoid too cheap materials for curtains or chair covers, as they will surely fade.

Avoid too many small rugs in a room. This gives an impression of restless disorder and interferes with the architect's lines. Do not place your rugs at strange angles; but let them follow the lines of the walls.

Avoid placing ornaments or photographs on a piano, which is in sufficiently good condition to be used.

Avoid the chance of ludicrous effects. For example, keep a plain background behind your piano. Make sure that, when listening to music you are not distracted by seeing a bewildering section of a picture above the pianist's head, or a silly little vase dodging, as he moves, in front of, above, or below his nose!

Avoid placing vases, or a clock, against a chimneypiece already elaborately decorated by the architect, as a part of his scheme in using the moulding of panel to frame a painting over the mantel. In the old palaces one sees that a bit of undecorated background is provided between mantel and the architect's decoration. If your room has a long wall space, furnish it with a large cabinet or console, or a sofa and two chairs.

Avoid blotting out your architect's cleverest points by thoughtlessly misplacing hangings. Whoever decorates should always keep the architect's intention in mind.

Avoid having an antique clock, which does not go, and is used merely as an ornament. Make your rooms alive by having all the clocks running. This is one of the subtleties, which marks the difference between an antique shop, or museum, and a home.

Avoid the desecration of the few good antiques you own, by the use of a too modern color scheme. Have the necessary modern pieces you have bought to supplement your treasures, stained or painted a dull dark color in harmony with the antiques, and then use dull colors in the floor coverings, curtains and cushions. If you have no good old ornaments, try to get a few good shapes and colors in inexpensive reproductions of the period to which your antiques belong.

Avoid the mistake of forgetting that every room is a "stage setting," and must be a becoming and harmonious background for its OCCUT pants.

Avoid arranging a Louis XVI bedroom, with fragile antiques and delicate tones, for your husband of athletic proportions and elemental tastes. He will not only feel, but also look out of place. If he happens to be fond of artistic things, give him these in durable shades and shapes.

Avoid the omission of a thoroughly masculine sitting room, library, smoking-room or billiard-room for the man, or men, of the house.


By. DIDIK MARJADI

A Young Girl's Room,She Is Your Girl

A Young Girl's Room,She Is Your Girl

A Young Girl's Room

Young girls usually like furniture with straight, slender lines made of some light-colored wood or painted one of the soft, silvery grays, blues or lavenders. Blush-pink is sometimes used on youthful furniture and apple-green delights young girls if you are sure to give them as curtains pink gingham, linen, or taffeta, with pure white net or scrim against the sashay apple blossom effect!

We know daffodil rooms in which a lovely yellow and stem green are combined. In fact one mother with half a dozen daughters, in the. Spring of their years, has taken a flower for each prom and the family always say, "You will find it in the Primrose Room," meaning Kath-erine's, or "It is in the Rose Room," meaning Belle's.

One modern girl ultra modern, whose room is much discussed, has used colors of a more sophisticated sort than those above. She goes in for crimson, royal purple, orange and emerald green, and shades her lamps with plain natural colored parchment paper, over which she drops squares of chiffon hole cut out in the center. These "veils" are of every rich Oriental shade and weighted with gold fringe or balls sewn to the corners. Her walls are covered with Japanese fiber paper in dull gold, and at her windows hang curtains of a very thin, rope color material found as theatrical gauze. This she has bound with emerald green satin ribbon. The valance at the top and the bands, which loop back, the curtains are of cretonne having a purple ground with birds as design, in most of the colors used over lampshades.

Every young girl likes a three-winged mirror on her dressing table. We think her very wise. The hair most carefully arranged is going to look the most attractive and the hat put on at an angle to accentuate the special charm of the girl who is inspecting herself, is the hat one will call a "winner." Your young girl knows!

As to the wood of which her furniture is made, that is a question of the style of the season. This sounds, and is, very expensive unless your young girl is the clever, up-to-date, self-helping sort who can do things herself. There are many girls of fifteen and sixteen who paint their own furniture and do it very well.

They get their brother or some friend, expert with the saw, to amputate unbeautiful knobs and other fancy excrescence, once the fashion, but compared with modern creations patterned after classic shapes, offensive to ^her eye. Any girl with a keen intelligence can educate her taste by studying the furniture displayed by the leading dealers.

The young girl's room must be what she, not your mature woman, calls attractive. So consult each girl in turn. Young girls as a rule like bright and spring like colors. One should feel on entering that some happy girl calls it her very own. Hangings and furniture covers can be of solid colors, pink, yellow or pale blue with dancing, frilly white sash curtains. If. Preferred, lovely chintz and cretonne to suit each style of furniture come at all prices.

Dear to the heart of your young girl is a dressing table with a three-winged mirror. They sound an extravagance, but remember you can pay a great deal for one; a moderate sum, or you can even make one yourself! If you are blessed with plenty of this world's goods and can satisfy your heart's desire we would suggest furniture of the Louis XVI style made in some light glossy wood or painted. This style with cane let into wood is very girlish and charming. But do not be discouraged; if you are possessed of more taste than money, use your wits. Buy what you can and make the rest!

We have in mind an ingenious woman who made for a young girl friend a fascinating three-winged mirror in fact the whole table by reconstructing an old-fashioned washstand that had one drawer and two doors below. The doors were removed and became the side wings of mirror. Sides and back of stand were also taken away and the back lifted to form back of center mirror. Mirror glass was then fastened to center and wings and framed with picture molding. Sides and back with doors having been removed, the four corner uprights figured as the four legs of a slender dressing table. The whole was painted and enameled white. A clever girl can make almost anything!

One young woman we know bought up many kinds of old tables, chairs, bureaus and beds at auctions in her town, and these she stored in her father's barn to make over on rainy afternoons after school hours. This resulted in her refurnishing their home, and then, that turned out so alluring, she drifted into decorating the homes of friends. To day, five years after she painted her first piece of furniture, she has become a full-fledged decorator, with her sign out!

She loves doing rooms for young girls and says "Give your girl, as well as your older woman, a sofa in her room and on the foot of each sofa a dainty, soft and warm coverlet to draw up over the feet and limbs if she wants to steal a nap after lunch or before dinner. Let this coverlet be one of the bright colors used for lampshades or sofa pillows. Give your young girl gay colors and graceful shapes; plenty of mirrors and windows, lots of windows! Youth would have light and life."

Your young girl needs a writing desk in her room and so placed that the light falls over her left shoulder. If it is comfortable to write, she will be far more apt to answer letters and not put off the "bread and butter" sort! Start her with a generous supply of paper, pens, ink, stamps and blotters. After that she is the one to see that her equipment is kept up so that the desk of some grown-up is not resorted to for necessities.

As much a necessity as her desk is her worktable. And when your young girl moves into her beautiful and complete new room, she is of tea so fascinated by the convenience of silks and cottons to match all her belongings that the task of repairing ceases to be a burden and things get done as a matter of course. It is all taken as one of the items "in the day's work" or program.

Those who live with young people of either sex know that half the battle of teaching order is won when a place has been provided for everything. By this method "house-keeping" is reduced to its simplest form and the actual cost of service kept down. All youth has its untidy moments not to be taken too seriously, but the chronic habit of untidiness, if not checked, gets into the character.

By. DIDIK MARJADI