52 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
T 
EDITORIAL 
nowa- 
^HROUGH some un¬ 
accountable neglect 
or prejudice on the part 
of editors, the general 
run of articles published 
days on interior decoration seem 
to be restricted to the decoration 
of women's rooms; or, to put it 
more concisely, the advice given for the decoration of rooms is 
strongly tinctured with feminine influence. Doubtless there 
are excellent reasons; up to the past decade the centei of 
woman’s interests was the home, having to stay there most of 
the day she naturally fixed it up to suit herself. Men, on the 
other hand, have always been notorious housekeepers. They 
make atrocious beds—or else never make them—they clutter, 
are seldom known to pick up what they lay down, and their 
idea of a good time is to sit in a worn-out arm chair with a book 
and a reeking pipe. Consequently the average well-ordered 
household is sadly divided against itself in matters of decora¬ 
tion. Bence the rise of men’s clubs and mysterious lodges. 
Seriously, though, the man in the house is due his own sphere, 
and, in all modesty, can he not claim as his very own the work¬ 
shop and the library ? 
Perhaps it were more happily phrased: the workshop or the 
library. For men are of three kinds: Those who prefer to loll 
around the women’s quarters, like the weaklings of Whistler’s 
“Ten o’Clock,” who stayed behind with the women while the 
men followed the chase; those who enjoy work with their 
hands; and those whose greatest enjoyment is intellectual. 
One is symbolized by the green carnation, another by the ham¬ 
mer and the saw, the third by a book. The green carnation 
man will find his metier in the boudoir and need not be con¬ 
sidered here. Of the workshop and the library there are many 
things to be said. 
It is a singular paradox that the man who clutters in the 
house will be systematic and orderly in the workshop. Order 
is work’s first law. One cannot clutter with a lathe else the 
work is bungled. Bence the workshop is, as its name connotes, 
a place for systematic pleasure. It is, moreover, a room of 
queer smells, of paint and freshly-cut wood, of vile grease and 
noise. Because of these things it should be in a secluded posi¬ 
tion— a cellar or an attic or an outhouse. What a man does in 
his workshop may evince the subdued solicitation of his family, 
but should never be subject to its prying interests, for there it is 
that, with painstaking skill, he fashions those things of wood 
and iron which satisfy the craving 
of the artist in his soul. 
Or again, the workshop may be a 
greenhouse—another place of queer 
smells, silences and privacy, a place 
of mysterious experiments with soils 
and grafting knives, a place of tire¬ 
less battles against pest foes, where, 
with a care almost womanlike in its 
tenderness and persistency, a man 
will watch the child seeds grow to 
lusty manhood of plant and glori¬ 
ous prime of blossom. 
In the library the same general 
conditions prevail. It should never 
be a place en route—a room to go 
through to get to other rooms; nor 
should its doors open wide into 
other parts of the house, rather, one 
should enter it by a long passage or 
a low door, like the humble sill of 
some sanctuaried Beaven. It, too, 
is a workshop, and, like a work¬ 
shop, has the odors of its honest 
.toil—the u tang of aging buckram, 
the Vicrid.tinge, of .dead embers on 
^VaVrsImswepV hearth, and the pungent 
T‘ perfume of stale tobacco smoke. 
The Man in the House 
here 
Bere rank on rank stand 
the serried hosts of 
books — decoration 
enough in themselves; 
are work desk and map 
table, and by the wide hearth, 
comfortable chairs. Scattered 
about with no preconceived ar¬ 
tistry are trinkets rich with the association of many men and 
many places. Chaos may reign here, but only he who has 
made it can satisfactorily restore order. 
A lot has been written and said on how books should be cared 
for, and we have it on the authority of a host of housewives 
that dust is ruinous to books and hence they should be covered 
with glass. But to a man who genuinely loves his books no idea 
is more abhorrent. Besides, there is a certain sensuous plea¬ 
sure in “tunking” the dust out of a book. 
Above all, a library should be a place of accumulation. You 
may buy a complete bedroom suite at one time and still main¬ 
tain your self-respect, but where is the self-respecting man 
who would buy an entire library at one fell swoop! No, there 
must always be room for one book more, and if there is no 
more room, the library must be enlarged. 
Thus far, nothing practical on the decoration of men’s 
rooms ; nothing is to come. This, because the problems of color 
schemes and furniture arrangement are not half so vital as 
understanding the big idea behind each room. Therein lies the 
weakness of much modern decoration—it fails to grasp the 
psychology of that life which it purports to interpret. In a 
woman’s room the problem is to make a fit setting, a back¬ 
ground for her beauty; in a man’s it is to afford accommodation 
for his activities. The rose bud type of woman will want a 
dainty setting whether the setting be a boudoir or a living-room, 
but whoever heard of a man’s room decorated to suit his com¬ 
plexion or the color of his waistcoat! You do hear, though, 
of his rooms being given the particular environment of his 
hobbies and his work. 
Besides accommodation for his hobbies a man desires com¬ 
fort — perhaps comfort first and accommodation afterward. 
Be comes home to relax, he seeks relief from the tension of 
business; women, on the other hand, have no such radical 
changes of environment save they go out. Hence, the pen¬ 
chant women have for variety in room decoration. 
In a man’s mind decoration is invariably subordinate to com¬ 
fort. Be goes back unconsciously to the time when furniture 
was made because it was needed, 
and ornamented later, only as an af¬ 
terthought. He looks upon a chair 
not as an integral part of a decora¬ 
tive scheme or the product of some 
master, but as an accommodation. 
This differentiation may seem 
brutal and to reduce men to the 
level of a lower order of beast. It 
is, in fact, an indication of his high¬ 
er sensibility. He knows that 
rooms were made to live in, and 
that before anything else a room 
must be livable. He may add to the 
artistic appearance of the fabric of 
that room, but never once does he 
lose sight of its ultimate aim. 
As shown above, the odors of a 
man’s room are those of that labor 
which is relaxative — a classification 
more sane than sensuous. For one 
may see deeper with his nose than 
with his eyes. He knows a church 
by its musty odor of sanctity, he 
knows the boudoir by its odor of 
beauty and the workshop by its odor 
of toil — all things that come of life, 
life which is greater than art. 
