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House & Garden 
i 
i 
Orinoka 
Draperies & Upholsteries 
Colors Guaranteed Sun & Tubfast 
^Dedicated to Sunlight 
% 
I N Orinoka draperies modern homemakers 
gratify their taste for the buoyant inspiration 
of happy colors. And they have the assurance 
that the draperies of their choice will not fade 
from sunlight or tub—however fanciful the pat¬ 
terns or delicate the colorings. 
There are Orinoka Guaranteed Sun and Tub- 
fast Draperies to accord with every type of in¬ 
terior decoration. They come in a variety of 
weaves, textures and colors suitable for every 
nook and corner of the home—whether mansion 
or cottage. Soft-toned gauzes and sheer, filmy 
glass curtains admit the sun in mellow radiance. 
Rich and graceful over-draperies in just the proper 
hues complete the harmony. 
Remember that Orinoka colors are dyed fast 
in the yarn by our special process. Through 
rigorous tests of sunlight and tub they have 
refused to budge from their original intensity. 
Each yard of Orinoka fabric bears its manufac¬ 
turer’s guarantee—money back or new goods if 
it fades from sun or tub. 
It is well worth while to order your 
draperies by name—not to say “sunfast” 
alone, but “Orinoka Guaranteed Sun and 
Tubfast.” Look for the Orinoka name and 
guarantee tag on every bolt. 
THE ORINOKA MILLS 
510 Clarendon Bldg., New York City 
Send 20c for “Color Harmony in Window Draperies,” 
the Orinoka booklet. Prepared by a New York deco¬ 
rator, it contains illustrations of charming window, door 
and bed treatments, and reproductions of the fabric —• 
all in color. It gives practical suggestion for choosing 
materials, making and hanging draperies. Send for it. 
If You Are Going To Build 
(Concluded from page 67) 
laces and imitation furs, and a deaden¬ 
ing gray reticence crept over every 
artistic expression. 
And then, as we realized how des¬ 
perately bad this civilization was artist¬ 
ically, we turned a cold shoulder upon 
the dullness of an existence of mystery 
and sham, and began to study European 
conditions in earnest. We actually 
brought over whole villas and chateaux, 
or rooms thereof, or fittings of rooms 
and incorporated them into our own 
homes. Or we took our architects and 
builders to France and Italy, Spain and 
England, and had fairy-like palaces re¬ 
produced for ourselves to live in, in a 
county where they didn’t belong. 
At last, however, our architects 
stopped, and said “No, there is a dif¬ 
ferent type of home needed in this 
country.” And although we still see 
on Long Island, square Italian villas, 
with Chinese green tile roofs, and state¬ 
ly ecclesiastical French chateaux on the 
Hudson, and English half-timber con¬ 
struction wherever there is a beautiful 
old town with a beautiful old street; 
in the main, these houses are not copies 
but adaptations. Some fine inspiration 
from foreign beauty, some wonderful 
memory of century-old villages, may 
seep through the mind of the architect 
who builds our American homes today. 
This is quite right; the beauty of all 
the world should be the background of 
every beautiful home in this country. 
Our furniture still has the “period” 
fetish, our hearts warm and throb to 
the various Louis and to those fine old 
English craftsmen and to the leather and 
oak of Spain in the 18th Century. On 
the other hand, we have isolated cases 
of fine furniture making, people who are 
thinking out fascinating ideals of a new 
type of luxury and comfort for Amer¬ 
ican homes. There is a sense of life and 
progress also beginning in our fabrics, 
and a decidedly new feeling in our use 
of old-world fabrics. 
But when we come to hardware,— 
wrought iron, brass, bronze, copper, 
nickel, even silver and gold, we seem to 
lack freshness of inspiration, of design 
and execution. 
American Craftsmen 
We do not lack craftsmen, we find 
them making amazingly perfect repro¬ 
ductions of our old Colonial wrought 
iron, and we have one significant crafts¬ 
man in the original use of iron, Samuel 
Yellin of Philadelphia. But in the main, 
when we are planning our houses, after 
we have decided upon the woodwork 
and the plumbing, heating and lighting, 
the big essentials for our comfort, we 
look about in vain for a new type of 
hardware, whether we wish it for our 
doors, or windows, or shutters, or as a 
finish for our furniture. It is difficult 
to find. To be sure, Colonial hardware 
can be used satisfactorily with almost 
every simple American home, especially 
since at least twenty-five per cent, of 
simple American homes are modified 
Colonial. But when we look through 
the beautifully illustrated catalogues 
that are sent out by the important 
manufacturers of hardware, we find 
ourselves once more feasting our eyes 
on examples of wrought iron from the 
Italian and French Renaissance, on fine 
Gothic designs with their trefoil arches, 
or examples of elaborate Elizabethan 
hinges and door-pulls and escutcheons, 
rich enough for our finest Tudor homes; 
and delicately elaborate things, too, in 
the spirit of the court of Louis XVI, 
finely wrought handles for casement 
windows and key escutcheons, with fleur 
de lis, that talisman of French period 
art, woven into the pattern, and lovely 
cupids, too, a delicate invitation subtly 
incorporated in the design. And there 
is beautiful old cabinet wrought metal 
work of silver and iron and bronze, all 
suited to fragrant boudoirs, for desks 
too fragile to hold aught but love let¬ 
ters, for window latches too decorative 
to open for aught but a rendezvouz. 
A sturdier lot has its inspiration from 
Flanders, where the crafts in wrought 
iron reached a perfection of technique 
in the 17th Century. We can also go 
back, in these fine catalogues, to hard¬ 
ware that owes all its beauty to Greece, 
designs that suggest somewhat an orna¬ 
mentation by Phidias, intricate elabora¬ 
tion, combining the palm, the bay, the 
laurel and acanthus leaves. Models 
from Rome are more severe, more 
mathematical, simpler, and well suited 
to some of our simple, sturdy types of 
modern houses. 
For The Cottage 
More practical still for the bungalow, 
for the cottage, for that charming con¬ 
crete house known as the American 
type, is a fascinating group of hardware 
called Mission. There is very little 
ornamentation either in the escutcheons, 
pulls or latches of this type of craft 
work, but the metal is beautifully han¬ 
dled, and is put in place, simply, with 
heavy nails, that in some instances form 
the only ornamentation. One firm is 
also putting out iron ware suited to 
rooms with Secession decoration, the 
sort of rooms Lalique designed in Paris 
and Hoffman in Vienna. 
But after you have gone through all 
the exhibitions of iron, silver, copper, 
bronze and brass, again and again, you 
realize that the beauty is inspired largely 
by the mediaeval craftsmen of Europe. 
We would be much more surprised to 
find an original group of finely modern, 
wrought-iron fittings than to have 
offered us Gothic door-pulls with grace¬ 
ful pear-shaped pendants, or a Bolog¬ 
nese knocker with elaborately conven¬ 
tionalized birds and figures of the 16th 
Century. It is much easier to discover 
in the open market a Pompeian brass 
tripod with fine plain handles, than a 
20th Century wrought-iron bowl made 
by some young craftsman with a flame 
of beauty in his heart and an inspired 
technique. 
The craftsmen who do want to work 
as the gold and silversmiths did cen¬ 
turies ago practically all find places to¬ 
day in the big manufactories where they 
are imitating or adapting or modifying 
the accomplishments of their predeces¬ 
sors in the crafts, but where very little 
opportunity is given for the cultivating 
of their own imagination and the de¬ 
velopment of modern ideals of beauty. 
The fact, however, that we do not 
often see original hardware designs, does 
not mean that the utmost skill is not 
displayed in the production of adapted 
ideals. A great variety of materials is 
used, with new finishes, and suited to 
all the purposes of the modern luxurious 
home, which must be fitted up with the 
last degree of comfort and convenience. 
It is quite possible that the widespread 
use of such extremely good models as 
our manufacturers are handling, made 
with such a variety of metals and fin¬ 
ishes to suit the infinite individuality of 
American home decoration, may even 
prove to be the very school to develop 
craftsmen so needed in this country. 
