70 
House & Garden 
Walls covered with an old Scenic paper, trim of the doorway and valances carried out in a Chippendale design, chairs of 
green lacquer, lighting by candles alone—these are some of the elements of delight that give elegance to the dining room 
in the residence of Joseph B. Thomas in the Piedmont Valley, Virginia 
ELEGANCE IN THE DINING ROO^ 
The Necessary Furniture Arranged in An Orderly Fashion and With Accessories to Delight 
the Eye Give the Atmosphere Required for Dining Well 
E legance and elegant are two words 
ver}’ often misused in America. The one 
is sweepingly applied to such diverse things 
as a good dinner, a becoming hat or a beauti¬ 
ful sunset; the other is considered the pose of 
the corrupt and contented rich. 
Elegance is a very restricted attribute, and 
it is not a pose. It is the concomitant of gen¬ 
tility and culture. 
Social upheavals and the misuse of the word 
cannot destroy elegance. It is a fundamental 
quality always active in certain strata of so¬ 
ciety and quiescent at least in others. 
Provide a modicum of leisure and the means 
that made a modicum of leisure possible, and 
elegance or the striving for it immediately 
manifest themselves. 
In no other phase of life is this more true 
than of the decoration of the house. 
^^'e speak of the livableness of living rooms, 
the intimacy of bedrooms, the hospitality of 
halls and the personality of libraries, but the 
one room in which elegance should l>e evident 
is the dining room. This is made even more 
important by a recent economic change in the 
E'nited States. 
W hether for good or evil, whether legal or 
illegal, whether the will of the people or the 
madness of religio-maniacs, Prohibition is an 
established fact. Drinking has gone out as an 
art. Wdth this social custom destroyed, it is 
reasonable to believe that its place will be 
taken b)' eating. And eating is the one habit 
common to man with which elegance has been 
most often associated. 
W'e are not concerned here with the alimen¬ 
tary requisites of gastronomic delight—such a 
subject would fill many volumes—but we are 
interested in the part played in the fine art of 
eating by the place where one eats. 
I'he actual food on the table is only half 
the meal. The other half is the kind of table, 
the kind of napery and silver and decorations, 
the chairs, the walls and all those other fur¬ 
nishings that combine to establish an atmos¬ 
phere of elegance in the dining room. 
Perhaps the first mark of elegance is the 
desire to have a few things but have them good. 
One must first choose between cjuality and 
quantity. 
Discernment does not judge the value of 
dining room furniture on the basis of useful¬ 
ness alone; it must delight the eye. A Mission 
dining room suite, such as one sees advertised 
by the instalment-plan furniture houses, may 
appear more useful than a set of quaint Lan¬ 
cashire chairs and a Welsh dresser, but the 
IMission will offend the eye, whereas its paral¬ 
lel in simplicity will not. Those who plead 
for Mission say that it is “honest craftsman¬ 
ship”, that it “shows how it was made.” Ele¬ 
gance, on the other hand, presupposes good 
craftsmanship, and above all things it does 
not want furniture that shows how it was 
made. Such things rarely delight the eye. 
The delight of the eye, it must be remem¬ 
bered, is twin to delight of the palate. 'Phe 
difference between good hash and, bad is often 
the way it is served and the room it is served in. 
Another evidence of elegance is order. 
Order requires a certain amount of formality. 
Fonnality is a compliment a hostess pays 
her guests and a mark of respect she pays 
herself. Formality is order—the right thing 
at the right time and in the right place. 
Order demands, for example, that onh' the 
necessary pieces of furniture be placed in the 
dining room. A couch is obviously unneces- 
sar}'. So is a china closet. Why display all 
one’s ceramic possessions? Keep the china in 
the pantry. It is disorderly in the dining room. 
On the other hand there may be accessories 
that delight the eye—mirrors, torcheres on 
either side the serving table, bits of Capo di 
Monte or a fish bowl set in the bay window 
to catch the sunlight. These are more useful 
{Continued on page 82) 
