34 
House & Garden 
.4 music room designed for Mrs. 
Imre Josika Herczeg, by Karl 
Freund {Zodiac, Inc.). The door, 
concealing a victrola, painted in 
Chinese spirit. A porcelain stork 
conceals opening for the sound 
And then, too, a contributing factor 
to the general stodginess of the at¬ 
mosphere was the craze, then at its 
height, for embroidery. “Woman’s 
place was in the home,”-—and there 
she stayed and embroidered her way 
laboriously over all the furniture. 
Nothing was safe. From footstool to 
grandfather’s chair, embroidery ran 
riot. There was something so highly 
genteel and lady-like about the oc¬ 
cupation, and so elegantly useless. 
Still, we should not be too drastic in 
our criticism, for we are beginning to 
realize the beauties of some of the 
embroidered bell-pulls and cushions 
and even the framed wreaths of su¬ 
premely ridiculous flowers character¬ 
istic of other days. 
But in our revival, we are being 
guided by the firm hand of tho^e who 
know and are judiciously selecting the 
very cream of the period for present- 
day use. 
One clever designer of furniture has 
been impressed by the Chinese in¬ 
fluence felt at the time with particu¬ 
larly happy results. He gives us ro¬ 
mantic Chinese Victorian gardens, 
painted on screens which he unex¬ 
pectedly converts into doors. This 
sort of thing is an entertaining habit 
of his, and he makes trays into tables, 
fire-screens into lamps, all with a deli¬ 
cacy of touch and in a whimsical fash¬ 
ion which recognizes our natural de¬ 
sire for something different from the 
Hewitt 
Victorian in feeling is this quaint chair covered with bright 
blue stuff. The beaded footstool is an old one, and the 
white alabaster lamp has a pale green painted shade with a 
shell design from an old chintz. Mrs. Buel, decorator 
Another view of the music room 
which shows a screen door, sepa¬ 
rating it from the library. The 
screen has a Chinese Victorian 
garden painted in gay colors, de¬ 
signed by Freund {Zodiac, Inc.) 
cut and dried decorations. It was he 
who conceived the ingenious method 
of disposing of the cumbersome and 
unalluring victrola, which method is 
illustrated on this page. 
In my wanderings through the city, 
I came upon a shop which takes great 
pride in a collection of Victorian 
touches, which are appropriate and de¬ 
lightful in our modem settings. From 
it comes the enchanting chair of grace¬ 
ful lines which calls to mind all the 
elegance and grace and courtliness of 
the “forties.” It is shown here, ac¬ 
companied by a quaint screen and a 
lamp and shade of shell design, which 
I found difficult to resist. And there, 
too, I discovered unexpectedly pleas¬ 
ant groups like the one at the head of 
page 33. 
On the other hand, one is occasion¬ 
ally confronted with a far different 
problem, such as using a Victorian 
house and making it livable—joyously 
so. They used to be gloomy holes. 
The rooms of vast heights were filled 
with ill-assorted and unrelated groups 
of walnut marble topped tables, and 
uncomfortably upholstered chairs, in 
the maze of which the unsuspecting 
visitor found himself completely lost. 
You remember the sort of picture 
Arnold Bennett draws for us, in one 
of his “Five Towns Tales.” “A cor¬ 
ner cupboard of oak, inlaid with 
maple and ebony, in a simple border 
{Continued on page 70) 
