The Art of Interior Decoration | Page 8

careful.
It is always excusable to retain an ugly, inartistic thing--if it is useful;
but an ornament must be beautiful in line or in colour, or it belies its
name. Practise that genuine, obvious loyalty which hides away on a
safe, but invisible shelf, the bad taste of our ancestors and friends.
Having settled upon a type of furniture, turn your attention to the walls.
Always let the location of your room decide the colour of its walls. The
room with a sunny exposure may have any colour you like, warm or
cold, but your north room or any room more or less sunless, requires
the warm, sun-producing yellows, pinks, apple-greens, beige and
wood-colours, never the cold colours, such as greys, mauves, violets
and blues, unless in combination with the warm tones. If it is your
intention to hang pictures on the walls, use plain papers. Remember

you must never put a spot on a spot! The colour of your walls once
established, keep in mind two things: that to be agreeable to the artistic
eye your ceilings must be lighter than your sidewalls, and your floors
darker. Broadly speaking, it is Nature's own arrangement, green trees
and hillsides, the sky above, and the dark earth beneath our feet. A
ceiling, if lighter in tone than the walls, gives a sense of airiness to a
room. Floors, whether of exposed wood, completely carpeted, or
covered by rugs, must be enough darker than your sidewalls to "hold
down your room," as the decorators say.
If colour is to play a conspicuous part, brightly figured silks and
cretonnes being used for hangings and upholstery, the floor covering
should be indefinite both as to colour and design. On the other hand,
when rugs or carpets are of a definite design in pronounced colours,
particularly if you are arranging a living-room, make your walls,
draperies and chair-covers plain, and observe great restraint in the use
of colour. Those who work with them know that there is no such thing
as an ugly colour, for all colours are beautiful. Whether a colour makes
a beautiful or an ugly effect depends entirely upon its juxtaposition to
other tones. How well French milliners and dressmakers understand
this! To make the point quite clear, let us take magenta. Used alone,
nothing has more style, more beautiful distinction, but in wrong
combination magenta can be amazingly, depressingly ugly. Magenta
with blue is ravishing, beautiful in the subtle way old tapestries are: it
touches the imagination whenever that combination is found.
PLATE VI
The table is modern, but made on the lines of a refectory table, well
suited in length, width and solidity for board meetings, etc.
The chairs are Italian in style.
[Illustration: Another View of the Same Office]
We grow up to, into, and out of colour schemes. Each of the Seven
Ages of Man has its appropriate setting in colour as in line. One learns
the dexterous manipulation of colour from furnishing, as an artist learns

from painting.
Refuse to accept a colour scheme, unless it appeals to your individual
taste--no matter who suggests it. To one not very sensitive to colour
here is a valuable suggestion. Find a bit of beautiful old silk brocade, or
a cretonne you especially like, and use its colour combinations for your
room--a usual device of decorators. Let us suppose your silk or
cretonne to have a deep-cream background, and scattered on it green
foliage, faded salmon-pink roses and little, fine blue flowers. Use its
prevailing colour, the deep cream, for walls and possibly woodwork;
make the draperies of taffeta or rep in soft apple-greens; use the same
colour for upholstery, make shades for lamp and electric lights of
salmon-pink, then bring in a touch of blue in a sofa cushion, a footstool
or small chair, or in a beautiful vase which charms by its shape as well
by reproducing the exact tone of blue you desire. There are some who
insist no room is complete without its note of blue. Many a room has
been built up around some highly prized treasure,--lovely vase or an
old Japanese print.
A thing always to be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not
recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless
treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a
blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of
converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how
should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room
would look if you scattered flowers about it, roses, tulips, mignonette,
flowers of yellow and blue, in the pell-mell confusion of a blooming
garden. Now imitate the flower colours by objets d'art so judiciously
placed that in a trice you will admire