36 
House £s? Garden 
Cream color with blue moldings is the paneling 
of the dressing room in which one of the most 
interesting bits of furniture is a console, re¬ 
produced from a collection of Doucet. The 
appliques are of bronze with porcelaine dc 
Saxe flowers 
In the second place, they visibly emphasize 
the truth—a truth that especially needs 
emphasis in view of the all too common 
passion for “bigness”—that elegance is in 
no way dependent upon size for its adequate 
expression. This is a truth that should be 
perfectly obvious but which, unfortunately, 
seems often to be overlooked and neglected 
in the general pursuit of quantity rather than 
quality. 
The Louis Quinze Regence and Louis 
Looking through the doorway leading from 
the living room to the library gives oppor¬ 
tunity to study the details of the paneling, 
overdoors and cornices, which are so 
characteristically Regence 
Seize styles, which have been used in 
decorating the rooms of the apartment 
shown, belong to an era that marked a 
general revolt against the palatial gal¬ 
leries and magnificent but oppressive 
formality of the Louis Quatorze period 
and fostered instead the making of 
smaller and more intimate rooms which 
lost none of their elegance in the process 
but rather intensified it. 
Weary of the chilly splendors and 
ponderously pompous atmosphere of the 
old regime, the people were resolved 
to have an “environment in which to 
live rather than a setting in which to be 
on parade. . . . The age of the with- 
drawing-room and boudoir had arrived.” 
And of these smaller rooms the utmost 
elegance and refinement of taste and 
the utmost perfection of workmanship 
that skilled craftsmen could compass were 
thoroughly characteristic. It may be truly 
said that elegance was of the very essence of 
these rooms. The vulgarity and outre forms 
which the bad taste of the 19th Century 
laboriously strove to foist upon the American 
public were abnormal exceptions and not the 
rule. Restraint was a dominant quality in the 
majority of cases. 
The spirit of these old French interiors, well 
exemplified in the modern rooms illustrated, 
is a valuable witness to the perfect com¬ 
patibility of decorative moderation and small 
perfections of grace, with a very livable 
human quality and wholesome playfulness. 
Furthermore, to see the admirable result 
attainable by taking advantage of every 
Perfect in type is what is known as the u Jade 
room," with all the delicacy of style which 
characterizes the Regence. The paneling, which 
is old gray with a mellow yellowish tone, has 
gra iously curved moldings with burnishings 
of gold 
legitimate possibility for decoration in a small 
apartment makes one feel that the owner of 
a small apartment who, because of its lack of 
inspiring size, refuses to make the most of his 
opportunities to surround himself with an 
environment of self-respecting elegance is very 
like the man in the parable who went and digged 
in the earth and hid his one talent in a napkin 
because he had only one talent and not ten. 
Another quality that these interiors forcibly 
(1 Continued on page 62) 
