48 
House & Garden 
CORNERS in the DECORATION of a ROOM 
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The Safety Zones of Comfort and 
Convenience 
FREDERICK WALLACE 
Photographs by Northend 
The reading corner should contain a large, 
comfortable chair, a small smoking table and 
books within easy reach. It should be well 
lighted both day and night 
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The writing corner is a 
necessary feature in any lib¬ 
rary. This grouping is es¬ 
pecially good and equipped 
with modern conveniences 
Open stairs, a large window of leaded casements and 
a grouping of unusual furniture serve to give this 
hall corner an air of individuality 
the fireplace and—more corners. It’s a room that 
sets one’s sense of the psychology of furniture to 
working and makes one think. 
The angle of the stairs shown is nicely softened 
by the grandfather’s clock in the corner. Primarily a 
hall is a wise place for a clock since it is the main 
passageway to the breakfast table, the suburban train, 
the theatre and church on Sunday morning. Why 
do we put clocks in living rooms? Where is the 
hospitality in asking your neighbors to sit about 
your fireside, gazing full upon a mantlepiece clock 
that ticks formality into the conversation and sends 
them home “on time” ? I hate living room clocks 
just as I hate alarm clocks; they represent all the 
A fourth shows an inter¬ 
esting treatment of the cor¬ 
ner of an entrance hall. The 
feeling of the room is that 
of extreme informality, as 
one can judge by the slant¬ 
ing ceiling, the triple win¬ 
dow out of center, and the 
stairway, placed quite un- 
geometrically at one side. 
How much pleasanter that 
there should be an open bal¬ 
ustrade between the stairs 
and the room, instead of a 
solid plastered wall. Do 
you realize how interesting 
the play of light must be 
between the oak posts, how 
it gives you a feeling that 
there is an upstairs to the 
house that the owner is not ashamed of, that is 
there for your enjoyment and entertainment, if you 
care to use it? Too little thought is given to cor¬ 
ner stairways, particularly in summer houses, ^they 
are successful, too, in the year round house, if an 
allowance for additional heat radiation is made. 
In the library corner, we imagine the business of 
the house is transacted. It is not too obvious or 
obtrusive, and yet it fills its purpose as satisfactorily 
as that strange room, called by all that is unholy 
the den. This latter quarter, in the average house, 
boasts all sorts of impractical uses. It is supposed 
to be a card room and a smoking room and father s 
room” (a terrible place of inquisition where sons are 
moralized on cigarette smoking and daughters are 
cautioned against another failure to make the allow¬ 
ance “do”) and it is none of them. Check up on 
your friends’ “dens.” Eighty per cent of them are 
(Continued on page 70) 
The three-cornered table of 
our grandmothers serves to 
make a quaint serving cor¬ 
ner in a Colonial dining 
room such as this 
C ORNERS are the safe¬ 
ty zones of rooms. In 
a crowded living room, 
a corner is a retreat from 
the furniture that naturally 
groups itself around the 
hearth; where one feels free 
from the litter of magazines 
on the center table; where, 
without putting disordered 
pillows aright, or rearrang¬ 
ing chairs or collecting the 
multiple sections of one Sun¬ 
day paper, one can sit down 
for a moment, near an invit¬ 
ing window or a friendly 
book-shelf, and have a look 
at one’s garden, or read the 
last chapter of a new novel 
before one has read the 
first) or doze with out¬ 
stretched legs and a handker¬ 
chief over one’s eyes like 
Sir Jeremy Tunbridge in the 
tea room scene of an English 
problem play. Corners were 
invented for nerves, naps 
and newspapers. 
Here are five comers; 
halls, living room, library 
and dining room. There are no kitchen or cellar 
corners shown because corners in such rooms are 
failures. The ideal kitchen or pantry or bathroom, 
or indeed any service room of the house where 
cleanliness is before Godliness, should have no cor¬ 
ners; instead, the angles should be curved to the 
sweep of the broom and mop. 
A Living Room Corner 
The living room corner has a comfortable chair, 
flanked by a window, a bookstand and a smoking 
table. It sends its welcome to you the moment you 
enter. Even though the furniture is not exactly in 
keeping, one can’t help feeling that this corner has 
saved the room, which architecturally is good, but 
which, from the viewpoint of comfort and cosiness, 
may appear lacking. It is the kind of room that 
needs rugs and a great center table and soft-shadowed 
lamps and wall brackets, and a big wing chair near 
things in life that one has 
to do and doesn’t want to 
do; they get you up in the 
morning and make you go to 
school and remind you that 
you’re sitting up too late. 
They are the betes noirs of 
human existence. 
A Corner of a Hall 
