A living-room in the home of Ernest F. Guilbert, architect. There are chairs of Italian design and Jacobean influence and articles showing char¬ 
acteristics of other period furnishings. But the room is satisfactory, since each of the pieces is intrinsically beautiful and they are made attractive 
in that they have color unity 
New Furnishings for Old Rooms 
HOW YOU CAN OVERCOME THE UGLINESS OF ROOMS BY TRANSFORMING CERTAIN OLD 
PIECES, ADDING NEW, AND GETTING RID OF THE HOPELESS ONES-VALUABLE HINTS FOR 
THE TASTEFUL REFURNISHING AND REDECORATION OF ROOMS THAT BEGIN TO PALL 
by Lucy Abbot Throop 
Photographs by Floyd Baker, Mary H. Northend, Thomas Ellison and others 
NCE upon a time, as the story-books say, 
there lived a family who fell heir to a 
house and all its contents. That 
sounds wonderful, I acknowledge, but 
the stumbling block, the thing that 
cast a gloom over their iives, was, “all 
its contents.” They sorted and sifted 
and threw away and gave things, but 
still the fact remained that there was 
too much, and a great deal of it was 
appalling to look upon. The blight of 
the Victorian era seemed over it all. 
They planned how much they could 
spend on “fixing over,” and then set 
to work to see what could be done. 
The house had to be changed a lit¬ 
tle to begin with, a wall or two taken down, several bathrooms 
added, the fireplaces changed, the kitchen and pantry made more 
convenient, a covered porch built on one side of the house and a 
terrace on the other. Then the house was painted gray with 
gray-white trimmings and green blinds. The garden was simple, 
and as it had some good shrubs and trees, they decided to recover 
from the financial strain of the house before they even thought of 
garden changes. The things for which no one had a kind word 
were banished to the attic, and so, with the trail blazed, the plan¬ 
ning began. 
The color scheme for the house was carefully worked out so 
that each room had its individuality but all held together and 
made an harmonious whole. The carpets in some of the rooms 
were perfectly good and strong, though hideous, and these were 
sent to a dye-house and dyed plain colors to harmonize with the 
rooms in which they were to be and then made into rugs. The 
Even in the simplicity of the bungalow there may be much beauty. Here 
the plain match-board ceiling is left in natural color and the plain chairs 
and other woodwork finished to match 
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