October, 1913 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
207 
to fall away from both these ideal qualities that one must be per¬ 
petually on guard to avoid doing so. The only way to do is to 
subject everything that goes into your house to a rigorous cen¬ 
sorship, fully determining thus whether, in the first place, it is 
really necessary and, in the second, whether it is exactly what 
you wish. So soon as you relax this vigilance and let useless or 
indifferent things slip in, your house will sink below the stand¬ 
ard of simplicity and restraint that you have set and begin to 
look overloaded, cheap and commonplace. 
Let everything you put in your house be of the best, both in 
quality and decorative merit, or else let it be palpably inexpensive 
and simple. Never tolerate anything that is mediocre in any 
respect. The really good things you will always cherish and 
preserve with admiring satisfaction; the frankly inexpensive and 
temporary things, when they have served their day and are to be 
replaced by better things, you will give up willingly; but the 
mediocre thing will always be a little too good to throw away and 
yet not good enough for the place it occupies. Beware, there¬ 
fore, of its insidious presence at the outset. Exactly what is 
meant by this bit of advice will appear more fully further on. 
Some people seem to imagine that the cult of simplicity and 
restraint in furnishing means bareness and discomfort. This is 
not the case. It does not mean any such thing. However, pre¬ 
cept and advice will have little weight with such folk when they 
have a mistaken notion firmly imbedded in their minds and the 
only way they can be convinced is by actual sight and experience, 
after their neighbors have had the wit to work out the problem. 
So much then for generalities. 
Having now set forth in a brief manner some principles to 
guide us in our work let us take several concrete examples and 
see what we can do with them to show the application of those 
principles. From first to last let it be always borne in mind that 
the proper furnishing of a house is a delicate piece of constructive 
work, requiring much thought and study if it is to be done well 
and is not to be left to haphazard chance. If it is, you may be 
very certain the result will always be unsatisfactory. The in¬ 
terior of many a house that is excellent architecturally has been 
wholly ruined by bad and thoughtless furnishing. The occu¬ 
pants, perhaps, have always been dimly conscious that something 
is wrong, but they have not taken the pains to study the matter 
and see that the fault lies in themselves and their own decorative 
indiscretions. To some of them, indeed, a chair is only a chair 
and a table a table. It makes no particular matter what species 
they belong to. Now there is no excuse for such indifference 
to details. It simply betrays a coarse and ignorant mind, and 
as an extreme example to show that distinctions do count we 
might submit that those same people would be much disturbed 
if they went to shoo the house tabby out of their pet “nondescript” 
armchair and found that that amiable animal had suddenly 
changed into a tiger. Yet they ought not to mind at all if they 
were consistent in their disregard of distinctions, for both tiger 
and tabby are cats. 
Assuming that the house is already built, in the majority of 
cases, before the future occupants are confronted with the prob¬ 
lem of furnishing, it should be emphatically laid down that the 
very first and most important thing to do is to study thoroughly 
An extremely important problem in the large living-room is to arrange it so there shall be a definite social and conversational center. A good 
method is to commence with the fireplace, putting in front of it a comfortable lounge backed by a large reading table, and allowing space for 
armchairs to be drawn up at the sides. The other features may then be handled more easily 
