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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



August, 1905 



The Household 



The Individual Room 



HE plea for individuality in the furnishing 

 of the room is the stock-in-trade advice of 

 all professors of the art of household ar- 

 rangement. On its face it is very good 

 advice, and, as far as it goes, quite excellent. 

 But advice is only good when it means some- 

 thing and has definite value. It may be worth while, then, to 

 briefly analyze this suggestion, with a view to ascertaining 

 its real value. 



Individuality in room arrangement has two aspects, the 

 general and the personal. In a general sense every room 

 should display some personal note. And this personal note 

 should be so marked as to be decisive and characteristic of 

 the whole apartment. It means more than making each room 

 look different or filling each apartment with different articles 

 of furniture; and it is, on the other hand, something quite 

 different from making each room so very distinct that its 

 relationship to the adjoining rooms is simply that of 

 contiguity. 



One's own room, we are glibly told, and very often told, 

 should be a reflection of oneself. The suggestion is well 

 worth pondering over. Is human nature, then, so open a 

 book that its innermost recesses may be displayed in the 

 choice of chairs and tables, in the selection of colors, in the 

 tints of the wall coverings and in other articles of household 

 equipment? Do the laboratories of psychology in which so 

 much excellent work is done for the study of mind include 

 such matters in their well ordered courses of investigation? 

 Or is the soul, after all, not to be revealed, nor one's choicest 

 thoughts? 



This, of course, opens up the weakness of advice of this 

 sort. Should a person of mild, gentle disposition exhibit 

 these delightful characteristics in the choice of colors and in 

 the curves of furniture? Should the furnishings of the room 

 of a pugnacious person bristle with opposition and display 

 bull-dog tenacity in every article? Yet, unless these qualities 

 are made obvious, how is the advice to be followed, and the 

 room made a true index of the personality that dominates it? 



Some recent room idealists go even further, and claim that 

 it is not too much to arrange a room to suit the complexion 

 of the person whose room it is. Thus the story is told of a 

 white-haired woman who dresses in white and receives in a 

 white drawing-room, a combination that very effectively 

 brings out the rare beauty of her rose-leaf complexion. A 

 soft shade of brown is said to form a most effective back- 

 ground to a head of golden-rose hair. And so on. Exquisite 

 affairs such rooms must be, and most helpful to the beauty 

 of the woman for whom they are arranged. 



This would seem to be the last word in advice concerning 

 room arrangement, and perhaps it is; it certainly offers fruit- 

 ful themes for study and experiment. But the value of such 

 suggestions is, after all, not concrete and absolute, but in 

 directing attention to the room and the possibilities of its 

 furnishings. It is a good thing for people to consider their 

 rooms as capable of individual arrangement. It is a good 

 thing to try to make them more beautiful in themselves and 

 better adapted to the person who lives in them. It is good 

 to be told that rooms are capable of giving individual im- 

 pressions, and it is better yet to try to make them do so. 



The Buying of Furniture 



The buying of furniture is one of the most difficult things 

 in the equipment of a home, and it is a singular fact that 

 many stores which are loaded with furniture to the roof offer 

 little serious aid in this most important task. The furniture 

 man has, of course, to suit many tastes and meet many re- 

 quirements; his wares are apt to be most various and diverse. 

 They consist, without exception, of goods of two great 

 classes, good furniture and bad furniture. These he displays 

 with so much art that the good is thoroughly mixed with the 

 bad. In his heart of hearts he doubtless knows that the bad 

 furniture is not worthy to sell; but he probably regards a bad 

 chair sold as a piece of good business, and he calmly leaves 

 the selection to his customer. If the buyer can not distin- 

 guish between good furniture and bad it is none of his busi- 

 ness. He is there to sell goods. He very likely would not 

 understand what was meant by the immorality of selling a 

 bad chair or an evil-looking table. 



The responsibility for the purchase must rest with the 

 customer. And very few customers attack the problem 

 with adequate knowledge or with any knowledge at all. A 

 piece of furniture that in itself may be very beautiful may 

 not have any real value either of use or of beauty in the 

 modern household. The delicate furniture of the various 

 Louis epochs, for example, has little modern value, even 

 though very beautiful in itself. It was designed for a definite 

 environment and for people who lived and dressed in the 

 modes of a former time. It is distinctly not modern, and 

 therefore not well adapted to modern needs. That such 

 furniture is used to-day and abounds in houses of the wealthy 



does not in the least alter the fact of its ill adaptation to 

 modern necessities. 



It is obvious that the great rule in furniture buying is 

 excellence — excellence of materials, excellence of form, ex- 

 cellence of style, excellence in utility. The word, in fact, 

 sums up, in one way or another, about all the requirements 

 that can be demanded of modern furniture. There are, of 

 course, various degrees of excellence in furniture, for a single 

 piece may be made of good materials, and well made, to boot, 

 and yet be thoroughly ill adapted to modern needs and quite 

 useless as a household convenience. 



Another helpful rule in furniture buying is not to buy too 

 much. With persons of average means this advice may 

 seem superfluous, for even a moderate amount of new fur- 

 niture costs a considerable sum. But the happy housewife, 

 intent on making her home attractive, is very apt to buy more 

 than she needs, and to buy pieces which may be quite un- 

 necessary. It is always well to leave something to a future 

 time. The table or chair that seems so charming to-day may 

 not be found to have any real utility to-morrow. It is not 

 the change in fashions that should be awaited, for such a 

 method would only result in confusion and unseemly mix- 

 ture; it is rather to avoid filling one's rooms and burdening 

 oneself with more than one actually needs. 



Furniture has a utilitarian value that can not be ignored. 

 It must not only be excellent, but it must be useful. It is use 

 which determines its purpose perhaps more than any one 

 other single cause. Chairs must be comfortable; tables must 

 be suited to their uses; beds must be of sufficient length. 



