House & Garden 
CHAIRS AS MEMBERS OF THE HOUSEHOLD 
F unny things, chairs! 
Sticks of wood, turned and carved. A bit of upholstery. A panel 
of cane. 
You see them in the shops, row after row of them, the fat, the slim, 
the gaudy and the neat, waiting proud and aloof like expectant servants 
in an intelligence office. 
You go down the line inspecting them casually, while a salesman 
murmurs catchwords about their periods. Eventually you come to one 
that takes your fancy. Yes, that might look well in your room. The 
salesman extols the merits of its upholstery and swears on his immortal 
soul that it is pure mahogany—as pure as ever came out of Brazil— 
and not mahoganized birch. Forthwith you exchange cash of the realm 
for the bundle of wood and hank of tufted hair, and go on your way 
satisfied that you have made a good purchase. 
Sheer rubbish! A chair isn’t a thing, it’s a personality. 
T here are two ways of looking at a chair or a table or any piece 
of furniture: you may consider it a mere decorative objective, or 
something that plays an active role in your life—a member of your 
household. 
By itself a chair may be simply so much wood upon which a crafts¬ 
man has spent his energies and artistry. But once you think of a chair 
in respect to men and women who sit in it, 
or a table in respect to those who gather 
about it, the inanimate becomes suddenly 
alive. It is clothed with personality. It is real 
and vital. It will mean very much in your 
home because it means very much in your 
life. 
A poet in The Spectator once put this 
thought into a verse— 
I give a loving glance as I go 
To three brass pots on a shelf in a row, 
To my grandfather’s grandfather’s loving cup 
And a bandy-leg chair I once picked up. 
And I can’t for the life of me make you see 
Just why these things are a part of me. 
It follows then, that the way to buy furni¬ 
ture is not to choose it merely for the beauty 
of the workmanship or the wood or the up¬ 
holstery— all important things—but first, for 
its adaptability to the sort of life you lead 
and the sort of person you are. 
Choosing a chair or any piece of furniture 
is not unlike choosing a friend. You require 
sincere craftsmanship, which connotes good 
materials; beauty of line and color, which 
will be a pleasure to the eye; and strength 
with which to stand the wear and tear of 
everyday use. Granted these three, you will 
soon become accustomed to it, and its pres¬ 
ence will have a great deal to do with your 
feeling about home. 
For a home is more than furniture and 
people; it is a place where people appreciate 
furniture and furniture, in turn, would seem 
to appreciate people. A place where there 
is a camaraderie between the animate and 
inanimate, where the things that surround 
you are a part of you. 
It isn’t merely marital bliss and well-be¬ 
haved children that make a home of a house. 
Furniture plays a big part. The furniture 
in a house very seriously influences your de¬ 
sire to live there. Although many people are 
not aware of it, the fact is that bad furniture 
can get on one’s nerves and make home an 
unpleasant place. It has as evil an effect as 
bad drains and drink, and is far more in¬ 
sidious. When our legislative fathers shall 
have finished with drink as a home-wrecker, 
they might well turn their attention to bad 
furniture. Possibly the average citizen will 
anticipate them by learning what good furni¬ 
ture is and can mean to him and by.exercis- 
ing discrimination in its selection and ar¬ 
rangement. 
THE ROAD 
My way of life is a winding road, 
A road that wanders, yet turns not back. 
Where one should go with as light a load 
As well may be in a traveler’s pack; 
A road that rambles through march and 
wood. 
Meadow and waste, to the cloudy end; 
But, smooth or rugged, I find it good, 
For something’s always around the bend. 
There may be storms in the bleak defiles, 
But oh, the calm of the valley’s breast! 
There may be toil on the upward miles. 
But oh, the joy of the mountain-crest! 
And here’s a thistle and there’s a rose 
And next—whatever the road may send; 
For onward ribbons the way I chose. 
With something always around the bend. 
Then come and travel my road with me 
Through windy passes or waves of 
flowers. 
Though long and weary the march may be. 
The rover’s blessing shall stUl be ours: 
“A noonday halt at a crystal well, 
A word and smile with a passing friend, 
A song to sing and a tale to tell. 
And something coming around the bend!” 
—Arthur Guiterman. 
O N this page we are not concerned with what constitutes a good 
piece of furniture; we are concerned with two prejudices: Grand 
Rapids and grandfather. 
In some minds the name Grand Rapids is anathema. Nothing good 
can come out of that town. If they want to say that a piece of furniture 
is bad, they call it after the name of the well-known Michigan city. 
Now Grand Rapids is more than a place; it is a principle, an ideal. 
Like everything else human, it makes mistakes, it falls far below its 
ideal and at times would seem to flout its principle. But taking it by 
and large. Grand Rapids lives up to some mighty high ideals. It 
makes good furniture. It makes livable furniture. It makes a great deal 
of the furniture that dealers say is their own. Years of study, the skill 
of able craftsmen, the dreams of patient designers have been combined to 
produce lines of furniture of which the American people can be proud. 
Personally, I would rather sit in a comfortable Grand Rapids antique 
reproduction than in its uncertain original. And as the years pass it 
will come to mean just as much to me as would any antique with a 
pedigree. Not that I distrust antiques. They are around me by the 
dozen—only I will not permit myself to take the blind reactionary view 
that age necessarily makes a piece of furniture good or that the im¬ 
ported piece is always to be held in esteem. 
What has been said of Grand Rapids can also be said of Boston and 
Jamestown, N. Y. Our American manu¬ 
facturers are awake to the necessity of mak¬ 
ing well-designed, well-built furniture. They 
employ workmen of the highest skill. Their 
designers come from many lands. They pro¬ 
duce in abundance because the market is 
large. The American buying public—and it 
buys considerably over $200,000,000 worth of 
furniture a year—reciprocates in its apprecia¬ 
tion of these patient labors. For the line of 
good taste is going up steadily and each year 
sees more people learning the lesson that good 
furniture helps to make a good home. 
T he other prejudice is grandfather and 
the things that belonged to him. 
Among the criticisms leveled at the current 
interest in decorating is the fact that it is no 
respecter of sentiment. It would seem to be 
given to fads, to change its entire viewpoint 
every few years. What was howled at in ex¬ 
hibitions of bad taste a few years back has 
been revived and now enjoys popularity. 
There is just one flaw in this criticism. It 
is true that styles in furniture change—just 
as they change in clothes. It is true that 
modern decoration has little regard for senti¬ 
ment—because it knows that most sentiment 
is mere sentimentality. It is also true that it 
has revived objects and usages that a few 
years back were laughed at, but—here is the 
flaw—it does not revive everything. It re¬ 
vives what was good in the past. 
Modern decoration is pragmatic. It takes 
the good from the past and embodies it in the 
present. It lifts the tie-backs from the Vic¬ 
torian curtain and puts them on curtains in 
modern homes. But it does not revive the 
Rogers group! 
This is where grandfather enters the con¬ 
troversy. Because a thing belonged to an 
ancient and honorable member of the family, 
because it was beloved by him, does not neces¬ 
sarily make it livable or the sort of furniture 
with which to surround a rising generation. 
If it is good, then preserve it. If it is bad, 
irrepressibly bad, then have done with it. 
You do not insist on wearing your grand¬ 
mother’s dress simply because it was your 
grandmother’s. Why then insist on keeping 
grandfather’s furniture around simply be¬ 
cause it was his? What you do with the 
dress is to save the old lace. What you 
should do with the furniture is to save what 
is good. 
