24 
House & Garden 
Against the pale 
brilliance of this 
blossoming wall 
paper tarnished 
mirrors and pol¬ 
ished wood are 
relief to the 
masses of fresh 
flowers 
This dr e s sin g 
room is gay with 
the Italian paper 
border one sees 
in the mirrors 
reflected 
Flowery spaces 
form a back¬ 
ground for paint- 
in g s by Fred¬ 
erick Frieseke in 
this room 
mirror backs engraved with peacocks were 
placed on this wall space. Two fine white 
and gold Adam chairs with blue brocade seats, 
were used to complete this wall. 
Against the long wall opposite a great Louis 
XV daybed of the most gracious curves was 
placed. The frame of the bed was light green, 
aged to a finer tone. A new covering was 
necessary so a deep brown-green moire was 
found at the dress goods counter, very much 
the color of the carpet. The largest of the 
Frieseke paintings was hung over this bed, and 
now when one comes into the room there is 
always the question: “Was the room evolved 
from the painting, or from the paper?” A 
comfortable lot of small tables and chairs com¬ 
plete this grouping. The other wall spaces are 
broken by two doors each, leaving smallish 
center panels. One of these is background to 
a flat French desk, furnished with lamps and 
books and flowers, with another Frieseke paint¬ 
ing hanging above it, and the other is an 
arrangement of a small commode, Frieseke’s 
painting “The Bride,” and a pair of delicate 
white Battersea candlesticks. 
Flowered Papers 
It is difficult to understand why there are 
so few flower)' patterns of wall papers to be 
had, when the appeal of flowery things is so 
universal. We have ransacked dozens of wall 
paper houses in an effort to find a paper as 
gay as the paper used in this Cinderella room, 
and yet surely there are hundreds of just such 
dismal rooms waiting for color and charm. A 
request for a canary yellow paper patterned 
with waving green branches was merely the 
exasperation of our disappointed imagination, 
and after that we amused ourselves by invent¬ 
ing papers we’d like to have and demanding 
them of bewildered dealers—papers of hya- 
cinthine blue clouded with white and yellow 
butterflies; papers of pinky-violet thick with 
London anemones—pink and purple and 
white; papers of sky blue dotted with gold 
stars; papers of pale green spotted with stiff 
bouquets of moss roses; all the entrancing 
things that should be and are not. In the 
basement of one wholesale house we found a 
lot of old paper (ten years old, perhaps, not 
really “antique”) of the desirable gayety—a 
fresh, baby blue ground, spotted with bouquets 
of pink and red geranium flowers—which the 
dealer was glad to sell for twenty-five cents a 
roll. In a Fifth Avenue shop we found a set 
of chemise-pink paper, a reprint of a Georgian 
one of Chinese design, at ten dollars a strip, 
but at prices between these, nothing. The dull 
doctrine of safety first is still favored by most 
wall-paper makers, and among a thousand 
imitations of tapestries and grass cloths and 
such uninteresting subjects one finds few fresh 
stripes and polka dots, few designs of any 
real merit. 
Fortunately, there are still enough old papers 
reproduced to meet the modern needs, and from 
France we get occasional shockingly nice new 
ones. The last time we investigated the Paris 
shops we not only found the most beautiful 
of the 18th Century toiles de Jouy reproduced 
in paper, but also a geherous lot of new de¬ 
signs that made us sigh over the paucity of 
ideas of American designers. Among the re- 
