The Furnishing of a House 
Italians, are employed constantly by decorators and frequently 
are under contract with them. They are skilled workmen and 
often artists and work under the supervision and from plans and 
detail drawings of draughtsmen, who, from travel and study as 
well as experience with the commercial side of their work, are 
well prepared to put out designs worthy of the most careful 
execution. The price of furniture produced under such collab¬ 
oration is, of necessity, prohibitive to the person of ordinary 
means and it is only within the last few years that the great 
purchasing public, who are quite as eager for good designs as 
are their richer neighbors, but unable to possess them at such 
cost, have found within their reach furniture really worthy both 
from a standpoint of art and construction. 
When the trade became assured that the passion for old 
furniture was not a mere caprice and was quite different from 
the taste for collecting antiques, and had its root in a genuine 
preference for certain designs familiarly made a century ago,— 
it prepared to meet these needs; and how well it has succeeded is 
evidenced in the examples shown here. 
The fact that the best models of factory-made furniture 
are not easily to be found, and frequently, when seen in a com¬ 
pleted house, pass as a special design of the decorator, made 
for that special niche and that special house, is due to the 
new, is responsible for the prevalence of the type of 
furniture found in the ordinary furniture shop. To 
him no contortion of line, no wooden goitre appear¬ 
ing in unmeaning ugliness is offensive,—if it be a new 
contortion or a new goitre. For the ordinary dealer 
declares and believes that what the people want is 
novelty and he who would have intimated a few years 
since that the dealer might not after all he the “last 
word” and that a demand could he found for furniture 
made year after year on the same lines, would have 
been relegated to the limbo of theorists,— that class 
so utterly scorned by the commercial mind. Of 
late, however, the manufacturer has discovered that 
he can make good furniture and sell it too and as 
a consequence the output of some factories to-day 
shows a very growing recognition of the best models 
and a disposition to eliminate all others. The 
dealer being unappreciative of their value fills 
his floor with the types he considers salable; 
and the better models, though quite as avail¬ 
able were he discriminating, are left for the 
“initiated” buyers who are comparatively 
few and who make the consumer pay them 
for their knowledge. Most frequently they 
are sold as “our own hand-made furniture” 
by professional decorators and house furnish¬ 
ers whose name, perhaps, together wfith the 
exorbitant price attached, lends them an 
alluring exclusiveness. 
This same dealer was responsible for the 
style of cabinet-work put out in the Early Vic¬ 
torian period when the cabinet-maker de¬ 
viated only from the ugly design he had used, 
THE FRENCH OR “sleigh” BED to offer Something different, though equally 
“dealer” who controls to a great extent the policy 
of the manufacturer. 
For furniture is made to sell and there is no room 
in the trade for that passionate devotion to art which 
leads an artist to keep his pictures unsold rather than 
lower them to the popular level. The manufacturer, 
how'^ever, is awakening to the fact that the consumer 
as well as the dealer is a factor to be counted, for, as 
a matter of fact, there is a strong impulse though it be 
blind, in the buying public tow^ard the beautiful, and 
the concessions it must make to the dealers’ taste is 
one of necessity and not of choice. This dealer, who 
comes every six months, with his money in his hand 
and his demand for something new,—the dealer,— 
who know’s no sin in furniture, save the “sin of same¬ 
ness, ” as he expresses it, and who drives the designer 
to distraction by his unending demand for something 
COLONIAL CORNER CHAIR 
Reproduction of Patrick Henry’s Chair, now at 
State Library, Richmond, Va. 
51 
