December, 1905 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



393 



Principles of Home Decoration 



I V . — The Withdrawing-Room 



By Joy Wheeler Dow 



HERE the mechanism of an 



orthodox menage — that is 



to say, a household with 



two or more servants, and 



where there is a fairly well 



maintained system of duties 

 for all its inmates — is established in a suit- 

 able architectural setting, not to say a man- 

 sion, a withdrawing-room is not only proper 

 but necessary — some room to which to 

 withdraw after dinner or luncheon, or even 

 after breakfast, as the case may be. But 

 in the average American cottage it is doubt- 

 ful if a withdrawing-room is just the thing, 

 at any rate to call it so. I say " with- 

 drawing-room " because its shorter and 

 more usual form — " drawing-room " — has 

 only one syllable less to commend it for 

 convenience in speaking, while there are de- 

 cided objections to its general adoption in 

 lieu of the homely but very sensible " living- 

 room." 



When I was a boy I always thought 

 that a drawing-room was a draughting- 

 room, and as I was fond of drawing I envied 

 the possessors of those houses with such con- 

 veniences very much. A drawing-room car 

 was a car for the use of railroad engineers, and perhaps 

 artists and architects while en route; and if my older brother 

 did call me " a stupid " for entertaining such an idea, and 

 had to explain to me that a drawing-room was merely the 

 English equivalent for an American parlor,* I do not believe 

 I was one bit more stupid than ninety-nine out of every one 

 hundred American boys at that time, when, although all 



2 — Of Course, Not Every Drawing- Room in England is as Good as This 



1 — The Poor Taste of the Average American Parlor 



Americans were supposed to have studied the English gram- 

 mar, few practised it in either speaking or writing, preferring 

 " you was " to " you were," and " it was him " to " it was 

 he," without the slightest compunctions of conscience; and 

 this, my dear reader, was the halcyon day of the great 

 American parlor. I regret I have no illustration of this 

 national apartment at the height of its universality. The old 

 Stewart mansion, which formerly stood at 

 the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth 

 Street, could have supplied an example of a 

 most sumptuous parlor, but that is no more. 

 Let me say, however, that of all the use- 

 less, ugly and yet expensive conventions 

 American society has invented or known our 

 conventional parlor was the worst. And 

 although we have gotten rid, to a great ex- 

 tent, of the odious word, and when it seems 

 too pretentious to say " drawing-room " 

 we say " living-room " instead, still the 

 science of furnishing and decorating this 

 apartment, so difficult to describe, appears 

 to be even more difficult, judging from even 

 our latest endeavors. 



There are few, indeed, good American 

 withdrawing-rooms, and of these few I have 

 but one at command for use in this paper, t 

 If an American be prosperous in money 



*The Pullman Company used to defer to this American- 

 ism and call their productions "parlor cars," until they sub- 

 stituted the single word "Pullman"; but the Wagner Car 

 Company's manufactures were always called "drawing- 

 room cars." 



f I will not say that Fig. 8 represents the best that has 

 been achieved by American designers of drawing-rooms, 

 but it is the best I have at my disposal for this article. 



