84 
House & Garden 
PAGES from a 
DECORATOR’S DIARY 
'T' HE romances of furniture and with the playful creatures. Renee Prahar has done a conception of decoration that reads like one of Amy 
x objects of art are as en- series of small stone monkeys for Mrs. Charles Lowell’s exotic pages of vers fibre, and yet is so 
thralling as the romances of hu- Dillingham’s lovely blue-washed courtyard in her 
man beings. The adventures of New York house, as well as for Mrs. Vanderbilt’s 
that precious pair of Chinese terrace. The young French artists have made some 
pagodas which now adorns the hall- gay wall papers, one of which Mrs. Archibald Mc- 
way of Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt’s Laren has used in her boudoir in her Setauket, Long 
lovely Georgian house, 1 Sutton Island, house. This paper is pale green in tone, 
Place, New York City, would patterned with yellow monkeys holding white ban- papier peint, although the arrangements and the 
make a long and beguiling tale. ners, surrounded by tendrillv branches and flowers of lorms are modern. 
I first saw those pagodas in a a purplish-pink. Mrs. McLaren also has a set of 
Madison Avenue antique shop, and the famous monkey band, in porcelain figurines de¬ 
fell madly in love with them, but signed by Teniers, on her desk. 
beautifully painted as to suggest the precisely 
crowded surface of a Persian or a Chinese panel. 
O fresh, so free is the idea of this little room that 
the result is very near perfection. The technique 
of the painting takes on the quality of the old 
The walls are divided into panels by slender 
pilasters painted in an old tone of chartreuse. These 
panels are framed in borders of lace paper, dull gray 
could not find them a home in any Another monkey-lover is Robert W. Chandler, in tone and covered with a pattern of red. Centered 
of the houses with which I had to whose amazing hallway is painted like a jungle, with 
do. I used to pay them visits of dozens of life-size monkeys and gorillas climbing 
ceremony, and sigh that I could among tropic flowering trees, 
not possess them. They are ex- Addison Mizner, in his beautiful 
traordinary affairs of delicately Spanish house in Palm Beach, 
carved wood, exquisitely painted h a s two real monkeys—small, 
in powdery soft pomegranate reds rare, ring-tailed ones—who live 
and jade greens and sky blues, in a great cage in his loggia, 
standing fully 8’ high, and as fra- and rejoice in the modern names 
gile-seeming as cardboard edifices, of Frankie and Johnny. 
Once, before they found their 
present home, a certain rich man (”)NE of my dearest possessions 
and his wife wandered into the is an old cook book which 
shop and the man fell in love with began as a ledger and ended as 
the curious old things and wanted to purchase my great-grandmother's cook- 
them But it seems that he not only had to have book. She lived on a South Caro- 
enough money and enough appreciation to acquire lina rice plantation, and there are 
them, he had to have his wife’s approval. And to hundreds of delectable recipes for 
his wife these things were emphatically Heathen cooking rice, as well as all other 
Chinee! She refused, flatly, to have them in her delicious things, in this old book 
house. I never felt so sorry for a man. Not only her own recipes but 
those of all her friends and 
r T HEN Mrs. Vanderbilt discovered them, and cousins are carefuly copied in the 
bought them for her new house, which 0 i c i ledger, and when I look at 
Mott Schmidt was then planning. It seems m y ridiculously small pantrv and 
that the pagodas were originally in the Royal think of 
in each of these nicely proportioned panels is 
mounted an additional panel of old paper, faded 
into old ivory tones, on which is 
painted clusters of fruit, vege¬ 
tables, and flowers arranged in 
urns, vases and baskets and some¬ 
times growing in the foreground 
of landscapes. A large duck¬ 
like bird appears in each panel. 
Some vases are overturned, scat¬ 
tering leaves and blossoms 
through the air. A picnic is 
interrupted, an apple left half 
pared, a melon unseeded, a bee 
is tempted. Near a light-house, 
with a distant view of the pro¬ 
vincial yacht club, a schooner 
and many small sail boats. A 
large slice of chocolate layer 
cake speared with a kitchen 
fork; an emptied wine glass on 
the grass; a snail crawling from 
its ponderous shell, contemplating 
a waxen camellia. A butterfly 
and a caterpillar are rivals for 
a luscious peach cut in twain 
. „ . my great-grandmother’s 
Pavilion at Brighton, England, so Mrs. Vanderbilt i f ee ] as jf \ vvere playing at doll’s housekeeping and seeded for the delectation of the insects, 
went there to tind whatever history there might be again. Here is the most stupendous recipe of Tulips have been placed in a pink glass vase, to 
of their original background, and employed Allyn a j] : — 0 f a ll cake recipes in the world. make breakfast on the grass more gay, but the soft 
Cox to paint her hallway in the same manner. The “Cousin Eugenia’s Plum Cake for Weddings and boiled egg in its stand remains untouched,—two gray- 
result was shown in a photograph in the August Occasions—Take twenty pounds of butter, twenty of hounds sport by the fountain on a neglected lawn 
number of this magazine. sugar, twenty of flour, twenty of raisins, forty of of a bleak country place—Pheasant quills, a red 
The hall has a floor of small hexagonal tiles, of currants, twelve of citron, twenty nutmegs, five banana, a lighted cigar, a Charlotte-Russe, some 
brick red. The curving stairway ascends through ounces of mace, four of cinnamon, twenty glasses peppers and a cordial, for the sake of composition, 
a painted hanging garden, in the Chinese taste, of wine, twenty glasses of brandy, ten eggs to the have taken together a downward path through the 
a ground of greenish-yellow on which are painted pound. Add cloves to your taste. If you wish it air. A cucumber, a compote of petite-fours, an 
fantastic trees and flowers. In two painted niches richer, add two pounds of currants and one of elaborate box of glace fruit and a blue glass pitcher 
are painted figures of jade. In 
the original Pavilion decoration 
these figures were in grisaille 
but Mr. Cox has painted them 
brilliantly in imitation jade 
and semi-precious stones. The 
two pagodas stand at the outer 
curves of the hallway, senti¬ 
nels of oriental calm. 
I was amused to see a large 
and cheerful monkey swinging 
in one of the Chinese trees, a 
merry creature among the se¬ 
rene Chinoiserie pageant. 
Mrs. Vanderbilt evidently has a 
great affection for monkeys, 
for two stone ones are placed 
on the garden terrace of her 
house, under the overhanging 
garden door. These quaint 
creatures have their arms fold¬ 
ed, and look out over the 
changing river with faint 
amusement. They are the 
work of the sculptor, Renee 
Prahar, of Vienna. 
Monkeys were enormously fashionable in the 18th such enthusiasm of idea, such gayety of method, 
of lemonade are companions! near the sea shore 
where we see oysters, celery and shrimps, 
ipe, because it makes me feel . , . 
economical and modest when I I HE white towering bulk ot the \\ oolworth Build- 
ing is seen over the top of the spout ot 
an old silver teapot. A cold meat pie, with salt 
and pepper, looms large. A riding whip, an arm 
band from the steeplechase, and a red and white 
camellia for the victor, are another group. 
A glove, a rosary, a volume of Madame Bovary 
with a daisy marking a place, a fruit jelly, a dish 
of chocolates and nuts are neglected for a better 
view of a nearby regatta. A sailor lies prone on the 
ground gazing at some kites, high in the air above 
the church steeple. A carrier bird, speeds on with a 
special delivery letter, 
raisins to each pound of flour.’’ 
I like to reread that old rec- 
go around the corner and pay 
several dollars for a diminutive 
Thanksgiving fruit cake. Times 
in this direction at least, have 
changed. Nowhere, unless it 
were for a state fair exhibit, 
would a cake of such gargan¬ 
tuan dimensions be baked. 
£) ECORATIVE painting is 
rapidly becoming the fash¬ 
ion in New York, which means 
in America. Every architect stamped and addressed to 
one meets is enthusiastic about 
some room that some vounf 
the author, and passes in 
his flight a delicious lady- 
painter has done for him. The lock. 
older and more academic mural 
painters have been so expensive 
I know this sounds like 
hopeless mixture, but 
Century. In the Louis XIV period John Berain 
constantly employed monkeys in his decorations. 
“Le Salon des Singes”, of a later period at Chantilly, 
is one of the most amazing rooms in existence. So 
popular were monkeys at this period that “Singerie 
was as much a recognised style as “Chinoiserie”. 
Jean-Baptiste Oudry employed monkeys constantly 
in his cartoons for the Beauvais tapestries in the 
early 18th Century. Of late there has been a revival 
of interest in the monkey as a basis of design, and 
that the decorative painting of these thousand every-day 
a room has long been a luxury, things find themselves so 
but now the young painters beautifully disposed on 
have attacked the problem with the long panels, so hum¬ 
orously drawn, so ex¬ 
quisitely colored, that one 
sighs with content at a 
purely American thing well 
done. This little room 
is as frankly a product of 
our times and our life as 
and such modesty of price that nearly every 
new house one goes into has some delightfully 
original room to exhibit. Victor White, Joseph B. 
Platt, Robert Locher, Louis Bouche, Allyn Cox, 
Mark Tobey, Florine Stettheimer, James Reynolds. 
Barrv Faulkner, and of course Robert W. 
Chandler, have executed infinitely engaging rooms John Alden Carpenter’s 
in New York houses within the past year. modern music, “Krazy 
One of the most original and most finished rooms Kat”, which has just been 
I have seen is Bobbv Locher’s little dining room in produced in the Greenwich 
many sculptors and painters are amusing themselves his house on Emerson Hill, Staten Island. Here is a \ illage Follies. 
RUBY ROSS GOODNOW 
