60 
House b" Garden 
The color 
scheme of this 
little Directoire 
guest room was 
taken from a 
pair of old 
blue and yel¬ 
low striped 
silk curtains 
almost green 
All the bed¬ 
rooms shown 
on these pages 
are in the 
home of Mrs. 
Leland Ross 
in Madison, 
N. J. Ruby 
Ross Good- 
now, decorator 
COLOR SCHExMES 
f 0 
BEDROOMS 
RUBY ROSS GOODNOW 
W HAT determines the color scheme for 
a bedroom? 
Often one’s own room is apt to begin 
from some personal love of color. Most of 
us have carried for years a vision of an ideal 
room in our imagination, and when we have 
an opportunity to do a bedroom exactly as 
we like, we try to realize that picture. Often 
the possession of some one fine thing wall 
determine the color of a whole bedroom. I 
know one bedroom which began with an old 
blue and gold Venetian bed and its color 
evolved from that. Another fine room grew 
out of a set of three old salmon pink velvet 
valances embroidered with silver. Another 
was built as a background for an old screen 
of pale yellow paper. 
Nothing that is beloved is too small or 
too insignificant to give the impulse for a 
satisfactory color scheme for a bedroom. A 
vase, a foot stool, or a bedspread may be the 
insjri ration from which a whole room may 
grow. 
A slavish following of one color through¬ 
out the room will result in total disappoint¬ 
ment. There must be a variation of colors 
or the finished room will be banal and obvi¬ 
ous. A judicious use of one color will easily 
give the room a definite color distinction. 
At the moment, I am doing a number of 
white bedrooms which are as different one 
from another as rooms can possibly be, and 
yet each will be definitely a white room. 
One of these rooms is an Italian room at 
Palm Beach, developed from an enormous 
bed made of an old white carved headboard 
in which a painting of a Venetian lady is 
inset. The walls of this room are of rough 
grayish-white plaster. The curtains are of 
very hea\^ linen finished with a linen fringe 
and hanging to the floor with a valance of 
an old filet lace altar cloth. The bed, the 
wnlls, and the curtains, definitely declare 
the room to be white, and against this back- 
■ground we are using a number of pieces of 
walnut furniture, an easy chair covered with 
purplish-red, and pictures, lamps, small 
boxes, of every color imaginable. No one 
who has seen this room can think of it as 
anything but a white room. 
Another white room has walls of shining 
white varnished paint which looks like 
white lacquer, stiff long curtains of cream 
white glazed chintz hung over pale peach 
colored gauze glass curtains, a dark bottle- 
green carpet, and furniture of various col¬ 
ored brown woods. The white in this room 
is found first in the walls and curtains, and 
Old damask in rose, apricot, yellow 
and green in the head boards of the 
beds is charming with the gray 
green walls and rose and yellow silk 
bedspreads 
Harting 
