HOUSES AND GARDENS 



French furniture, and the dining-room is duly enriched with its appointed 



carved and fumigated oak. The shadow of the flunkey broods over the whole 



establishment. 



The man who is sincere enough to see the unworthiness of such ideas, and 

 who is wise enough to regard the small house as a large cottage rather than a 

 restricted mansion, will demand planning and furniture on totally opposite 

 principles to those usually followed. He has no wish to emulate his neigh- 

 bours in the matter of fashionable furnishings and methods of life. He has a 

 settled conviction that the simplest form of life is the worthiest and most 

 reasonable, and that true progress lies not in multiplying and complicating the 

 appointments of the house, but in reducing them to the lowest effective limit. 

 He does not consider the house to be a place for the display of furniture and 

 bric-a-brac, but primarily a home for human beings, planned for their comfort, 

 convenience, and pleasure. He demands in the planning of his house, besides 

 practical comforts, that kind of beauty which is inherent in the structure, 

 which depends largely on proportion, and does not require furniture for effect. 

 And so in the broad simple spaces of his roomy cottage he disposes his few 

 belongings. He has no wish to reproduce the departed glories of any of the 

 popular styles. These fantastic and histrionic revivals find no place in his 

 home. He is content with simple and straightforward joiner work. Neither 

 is he anxious to cover every square inch of his walls and ceilings with pattern, 

 and he is quite unimpressed by the wares of the trade decorator, with his 

 embossing and stamping and gilding. These things are familiar to him in the 

 houses of his friends, in his club and his hotel, and at home he would have rest. 

 Not that he has entirely abjured decoration in his home, but it must be for him 

 not the seductive cleverness of the trade artist, but the best product of the heart 

 and brain ; something, too, individual and peculiar. In the meantime, white- 

 wash will do well enough. 



For the rest, he has an eye for detail, and as far as possible he tries to 

 secure good and thoughtful design, not only in his house but in all its appoint- 

 ments, and so his knives and forks, his china and glass, all bear the impress of 

 thought and feeling in design and manufacture. Nor does he stop here. The 

 very simplicity and unpretentiousness of his surroundings are eloquent in 

 suggestions for the ritual of his daily life, and just as he does not wish to 

 imitate the mansion in his modest dwelling, so is he less willing to ape the 

 habits of its occupants. When he asks a friend to dinner, he does not seek to 

 impress his guests by the multitude of his courses or the magnificence of his 

 plate. He may indeed be quietly proud of the homely beauty of his sur- 

 roundings, but it is a pride which is based not on their costliness, not on their 

 price in the market, but rather on such qualities as fitness for their uses and 

 beauty of line, colour, or texture. 



In the furnishing of his house he has been careful to exclude all but the 

 absolutely essential. He does not buy a table because he thinks it will " look 

 well " standing in a bay window, and then proceed to find some ornament 

 which will " look well " standing on the table. He might as reasonably first 

 buy a mouse-trap on aesthetic grounds, and then a supply of mice to enable it 

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