March, i p i 6 
27 
A boudoir with furniture designed and made in America after the Secessionist 
idea of abroad. The rug is blue, the upholstery black and tan striped velvet, the 
pillows rose, the legs of the furniture black and the plain surfaces cream with 
panels of blue 
CREATING THE SENSE OF SPACE IN A SMALL ROOM 
The Principles of Line, Color and Selection that Lessen the 
Crowded Appearance of Limited Quarters 
B. RUSSELL HERTS 
Author of “The Furnishing and Decoration of Apartments” 
W HENEVER one tries to bring something into being 
which does not exist, he has to work with all his might 
and main. If, for example, one were trying to produce a sense 
of intense light in a coal mine, he would have to leave no stone 
unturned (figuratively or actually) to bring about the desired 
result. An intense light is not very much rarer in the average 
mine than unoccupied space is in the average apartment. It is 
necessary to marshal every available element of line and color 
to produce the sense of distance or height, of the spaciousness 
needed for furniture, or the vistas required for viewing pic¬ 
tures. 
The consciousness of such a necessity, which has grown up 
in the minds of decorators, of apartment builders and dwellers 
alike, has had one unfortunate result: it has made a great 
many moderate priced apartments look very much alike. There 
has been a tendency to use much the same colors for ceilings 
and for walls in one room after another almost without end. 
Mantelpieces and mirrors have been employed in much the 
same fashion in constructing every building, and, even in the 
more personal element of furnishing, people have tended to 
reproduce each other’s effects. 
1 here is a larger excuse for the lack of originality which 
exists in the structural elements of an apartment house, for 
the architect is confined to the use of stock mouldings and 
woodwork, doors and mantels, lighting fixtures and the like; 
although even in these it seems that many buildings are pro¬ 
vided with fitments that are needlessly ugly. When it comes 
to the furniture, the selection of wall papers and of fabrics 
for furniture coverings and curtains, there is less excuse for 
endless duplication; it exists merely because people have not 
yet come to realize that they can employ the same principles 
as their neighbors and yet reach altogether personal results. 
People have not yet, in any large numbers, attempted to make 
their homes individually expressive, and there are still thou¬ 
sands of women who will search through a dozen shops to 
obtain a hat which embodies exactly their idea of what they 
ought to wear, to whom it never occurs to seek a chair or a 
table for their own boudoirs which may be equally expressive. 
It would be regrettable if a more universal study of the 
principles behind the creation of a sense of space did not 
make us more individualistic in our decoration and not less so. 
The Effects of Colors 
If we apply such principles as we have at hand to any par¬ 
ticular room, we can see at once what a wide range of possi¬ 
bilities they open up. For example, it is a well known fact 
of physics that the light rays of certain colors travel much 
more quickly than those of other hues. An example of the 
rapidly moving type is red. the rays of which reach the eye 
more quickly than those of any other color. A room, there¬ 
fore, done in red appears smaller than it would in other colors, 
while one in blue appears extremely large for its size. If this 
fact had been more generally realized by the last generation, 
we should not have had the widespread use of red wall papers 
and window curtains, which existed in America a quarter of a 
century ago. To-day we have not discarded red as an element 
in decoration; we have merely determined that its use is de¬ 
sirable only in very large rooms, where the effort is rather to 
reduce space than to increase it; or in small objects such as 
lamp shades, pillows, vases, etc., which are to be emphasized 
