It was the ideal of the chalet dwellers to make the interior trim and furnishings harmonize as nearly as possible with the keynote of the house. 
The living-room might have been transported from the Tyrol. 
How We Furnished the Chalet 
by Helen R a y 
I N a recent number of House & Garden, a writer remarks that 
the quality of picturesqueness in the Breton farmhouse, or a 
Swiss chalet, is much a matter of architecture wedded to land¬ 
scape. All will agree that the harmonious relationship of a build¬ 
ing to its site is the first essential of success in the final whole. 
No less important is the fitness and relation of things within the 
house. 
When the owners of “Felsengarten" (illustrated in the No¬ 
vember, 1910, House & Garden) had finished building and the 
chalet seemed to “ride" very well with its stony hillside furnish¬ 
ing a truly Swiss approach, they found themselves up against it, 
as the boys say, to make “boughten" furniture cousin with Swiss 
architecture. The woman in the question brought her woman's 
wit to the problem, and then called in the carpenter. A bedstead 
of German solidity and of the uncompromising lines of the 
Vaterland, was the first 
evolution of the ingenious 
carpenter — shall we call 
him “wood worker,” as 
being a more feeling- 
title ? W h e n the bed 
was made up, with its 
heavy spread of old blue 
and white homespun and 
big Dutch pillows with 
crochet edged ruffles, it 
certainly looked the part. 
A bureau, warranted to 
endure for aye, and de¬ 
signed upon the same 
massive lines, followed. 
Those who know, had 
told us that the sine qua non in chalet work was massiveness bor¬ 
dering upon clumsiness, so each piece was made rugged and solid. 
All were built of heavy Oregon pine, stained a warm, walnut 
brown, not too much rubbed, so that all seemed part and parcel 
of the woodwork of the rooms. A few odd chairs, a mirror with 
quaint frame, a candle stand for the side of the bed, were fash¬ 
ioned from odds and ends of the lumber about the place. 
The living-room and dining room combined made a fascinating 
“picture puzzle” in composing its properties. A big library table 
was built of heavy, two-inch lumber, with sprawling supports, 
into which the under shelf was let with wooden pegs; an open 
work clover-leaf was carved out of each end ; the same open-work 
clover-leaf appears elsewhere in other pieces. A small-sized rag- 
rug of dust color, into which were woven little green pine trees, 
served for a table spread and was well suited to the surroundings. 
The look of the shiny 
upright piano of polished 
golden oak could not be 
tolerated for one instant, 
as being too American-ish 
altogether for the Swiss 
interior, and therefore a 
folding screen was created 
to conceal it. In the cen¬ 
tral one of the three pan¬ 
els, a colored oil print of 
Def rigger’s “Zither 
Player” was introduced, 
the outside panels being 
of beautifully grained 
Oregon pine stained a rus¬ 
set brown. Here again 
Felsengarten, the California chalet, is built according to all the conventions of 
the Alpine chalet. Myron Hunt & Elmer Gray, architects. 
380 
