interior design

LOOK carefully at the room, which you intend doing over. Cannot you, unaided, find out why all of your efforts, some of them expensive ones, have failed to make it attractive?

You say that the moment you enter your room you have an impression of confused disorder pervading the whole plaque. Has the mantel too many things on it, and are these objects placed without any plan as to orderly, balanced arrangement? This is true in most cases where the general impression made by a room is one of disorder. Perhaps your mantel ornaments are neither beautiful nor interesting, and are unrelated in shape and color to the other decorative objects in the room.

Until amateur decorators learn to make the mantels in their rooms the keynote of their decorative schemes, it is wise not to experiment beyond the rule of three ornaments. These must be absolutely in character with the other furnishings. That is, your Colonial room is not the place for French ornaments, nor your French room the place for Colonial ornaments and clock, unless you have made yourself so familiar with the characteristics of the styles that you. Recognize related periods and can therefore combine them. In a room with very inexpensive furniture and hangings use equally inexpensive ornaments. In every case harmony is beauty.

Suppose you continue the analysis of your room by asking yourself if it has too many things in it to be "restful"? Have you, perhaps, used furniture, which does not go together as to shapes, color of woods or the materials used as upholstery? Have you too many "spots" in the room? By which we mean, are there too many figured materials with different designs and colors, used as hangings and for furniture coverings? Is your figured material, chintz, cretonnes or brocade, all of one design and coloring, but have you used too much of it, so that the effect is confused and un-restful?

Have you figured and several-colored wallpaper and a chintz with different design and cpk oring? This is a mistake. It is possible to get wallpapers and chintzes to match if you insist on everything being figured. But remember that you’re figured hangings will look their best with plain walls and only one or two pieces of furniture covered with the chintz or brocade.

Is your room small and have you made the woodwork a sharp contrast in color to your walls? You will find that in any room, to paint the woodwork the same color as walls adds immensely to the appearance of its size.

If the thing that you object to in your room furnished with attractive up-to-date furnishings is shiny black walnut wood-work, of the days of our grandmothers, have some one sand-paper the whole of it and you will be amazed by the result. Under that varnished finish is a charming, dull, sable-brown.

Is it possible that your room, which is puzzling you, so would look better if there were no pictures at all on the walls? Is your room really wrong or are you ill and for that reason unfit to judge fairly? There are, no doubt, moods in which, for example, bare walls rest the nerves. There are other moods, which find one grateful for the diversion of pictures. These are points to have in mind when arranging rooms for those who are kept to the house by illness.

Are your large pieces of furniture so placed as to give the appearance of balance to your room? And have you provided yourself with a sufficient number of easily moved pieces such as small tables and chairs, so as to form "groups" which suggest that human beings are expected to live in and enjoy this room!

Is your desk where the light comes over your left shoulder to the page you are writing? Are the lights in the room where they will be of most use? Can you enjoy your open-fire and at the same time have a good light to read by? If you play cards can you light the table and also the hands of each player? Has your room for informal use books and enough of them! Books and an open-fire are the ideal foundation for a home-like room.

If the room under consideration is a bedroom, and you do not want to modify its character, have you provided not only a bed but also a sofa of some kind on which to rest during the day?

Is the "cold" atmosphere of this room you want to alter due to the lack of a few bright flowers? Do you love music and have you many musical friends and yet does your home lack a piano? If you are really a lover of music a piano is as much a part of your home as your desk is a natural feature in your sitting room.

See to it that your home, your rooms each one of them expresses the tastes of the family. This is how you make " atmosphere." It is wise to furnish slowly. Haste is responsible for most mistakes. Begin by owning good shapes and color-combinations, and as you can afford it, discard your things of no intrinsic value for beautiful shapes and colors with value.

PAINTED furniture is, at present, the vogue, so if you own a piece made by the Adam brothers of England, decorated by the hand of Angelica Kauffman, or Pergolesi, from Greek designs, now is the moment to "star" it.

Different in decoration, but equal in charm, is the seventeenth and eighteenth century painted lacquers of Italy, France, China and Japan. In those days great masters labored at cabinet making and decorating, while distinguished artists carved the woodwork of rooms, and painted the ceilings and walls of even private dwellings.

To day we have reproductions (good and bad) of the veteran types, and some commendable inventions, more or less classic in line, and original in coloring and style of decoration.

At times, one wishes there was less evident effort to be original. We long for the repose of classic color schemes and classic line. In art, the line and the combination of colors, which have continued most popular throughout the ages, are very apt to be those with which one cans livelongest and not tire. For this reason, a frank copy of an antique piece of painted furniture is generally more satisfactory than a modern original.

If you are using dull colored carpets and hangings, have your modern reproductions antiqued. If you prefer gay, cheering tones, let the painted furniture be bright. These schemes are equally interesting in different ways. It is stupid to decry new things, since every grey antique had its frivolous, vivid youth.

One American decorator has succeeded in making the stolid, uncompromising square ness of mission furniture take on a certain lightness and charm by painting it black and discreetly lining it with yellow and red. Yellow velour is used for the seat pads and heavy hangings, thin yellow silk curtains are hung at the windows, and the black woodwork is set off by Japanese gold paper.

In a large house, or in a summer home where there are young people coming and going, a room decorated in this fashion is both gay and charming and makes a pleasant contrast to darker rooms. Then, too, yellow is a lovely setting for all flowers, the effect being to intensify their beauty, as when flooded by sunshine.

Another clever treatment of the mission type, which we include under the heading Painted Furniture, is to have it stained a rich dark brown, instead of the usual dark green. Give your dealer time to order your furniture unfinished from the factory, and have stained to your own liking; or, should you by any chance be planning to use mission in one of those cottages so often built in Maine, for summer occupancy, where the walls are of unplastered, unstained, dove-tailed boards, and the floors are unstained and covered with matting rugs, try using this furniture in its natural color unfinished. The effect is delightfully harmonious and artistic and quite Japanese in feeling.

In such a cottage, the living room has a raftered ceiling, the sidewalls, woodwork, settles the fireplaces, open bookcases and floor, stain all dark walnut. The floor color is very dark, the sidewalls, woodwork and bookshelves are a trifle lighter, and the ceiling boards still lighter between the almost black, heavy rafters.

The mission furniture is dark brown, the hangings and cushions are of mahogany-colored corduroy, and the floor is strewn with skins of animals. There are no pictures, the idea being to avoid jarring notes in another key. Instead, copper and brass bowls contribute a note of variety, as well as large jars filled with great branches of flowers, gathered in the nearby woods. The chimney is exposed. It and the large open fireplace are of rough, dark mottled brick.

A room of this character would be utterly spoiled by introducing white as ornaments, table covers, window curtains or picture-mats; it is a color scheme of dull wood-browns, old reds and greens in various tones. If you want your friends photographs about you in such a room, congregate them on one or two shelves above your books.

Hai girls,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.