28 
House & Garden 
THE HIDDEN THINGS of INTERIOR DECORATION 
Showing that No Room Can Be More Lovely and Gracious and Mellow than 
the Personality of the WOman Who Graces It 
T HERE are two axioms common to every 
right-minded woman, two things she be¬ 
lieves she is, of all mortals, peculiarly qualified 
well and truly to do: first, that she is en¬ 
titled to write a book about Man; secondly, 
that she can decorate a house. 
So closely are these very natural convictions 
related that in private her thoughts go further 
and she decides, if the worst comes to the worst 
and John develops his mannishness to a de¬ 
gree of unbearable exasperations, she will wash 
her hands of him tomorrow, and next week be¬ 
come an Interior Decorator, — preferably in 
New York. 
“Can you beat it?” groans John helplessly, 
with characteristic disregard of elegance. 
“Why, John Henry!” says his mother in a 
shocked voice, “You know yourself Laura has 
a lovely eye for color, and I am sure the way 
she enameled the porch furniture and hem¬ 
stitched the guest-room towels. . . . ! 
“I know all that,” says John Henry doggedly, 
“but look at her own house. She never can lay 
her hands on anything she wants in a hurry; 
she never sits down awhile and stays quiet and 
thinks; and for all she is so smart and pretty 
to look at, I don’t see how she ever has got it 
into her head that two and two spell four.” 
“I don’t know what you are talking about, 
John. What has that got to do with interior 
decorating?” reproves his mother; and John 
Henry, who himself does not quite know but 
feels there is a connection somewhere—sub¬ 
sides into Man’s unconvinced silence, leaving 
the master-clue in his hand unfcllowed. 
H E has indeed enunciated one of the pro- 
foundest truths hidden in this highly 
technical and esoteric business of Interior 
Decorating. 
Whoever masters it knows once for all that 
a querulous, cross-grained personality will 
make a querulous, cross-grained room, and that 
a sweet nature blooming like a rose will make 
a benign and gracious house, though she her¬ 
self be color-blind and tone-deaf and impres¬ 
sion-proof. 
In the inexorable logic of the sum of Per¬ 
sonality alone lies the beautiful or unlovely 
result of the Decorated Interior. 
The most fashionable and expensive mathe¬ 
matician in the shape of a Fifth Avenue wizard 
cannot alter that total, nor can the most inex¬ 
perienced little bride fall short of it. Ignorance 
does not matter, since the primary requisites of 
a beautiful interior are within the reach of all 
of us, and are no more than Light, Air, Soap, 
Silence, Flowers, and a disciplined Soul. These 
things imply Sincerity, and nothing sincere ever 
was ugly or ever will be vulgar. 
T HERE is no period that evokes, and right¬ 
ly, such shuddering reprobation as the 
Late-Victorian—the ’80’s. Why? Because no 
fact was allowed to obtrude without a mental 
gloss and garnish on its unhappy head. Win¬ 
dows were swathed in plush grotesquely lined 
with satin to keep out the light; rooms were 
stifled with blotchy wall papers, turned wood¬ 
work “grilles,” “ingle-nooks,” and “cosy cor¬ 
ners” to keep out the air; on every vacant space 
MURIEL PIERS 
Junk miscalled bric-a-brac shrieked aloud 
against any effect of silence; flowers were a 
vagary and an extravagance. 
Now look at the lovely old houses of Ger¬ 
mantown and Salem of Colonial days. Their 
owners breasted storms that shook and tried 
their souls; they faced and made great decis¬ 
ions; they stood proclaimed for freedom and 
conviction at the price of innumerable tender 
associations. Today how inspiring are those 
stem bare walls, those stark wide floor-spaces! 
How just and austere the perfectly balanced 
lines of their essential and proudly made pieces 
of furniture! 
The American woman has here a noble prece¬ 
dent to guide her, and now that the time has 
come when her heart calls insistently upon the 
courage and the heroic ideals of her forefathers 
we believe she is preparing to compel her spirit 
to nobility and sacrifice worthily to follow in 
their paths. 
r 
S O it is that when word comes: “Please deco¬ 
rate my house for me,” we know that the 
actual unconscious request is: “Please draw a 
picture of my soul for me,” . . . and within 
human limitations that is what we proceed to 
do; and only to the extent to which we succeed 
in getting a Personality into a room, have we 
achieved that last and most elusive of decora¬ 
tive effects: Atmosphere. 
Who shall diagnose the intangible impres¬ 
sions and feelings by which we remember a 
house long after the details of its tables and 
chairs, its hangings and color-schemes have 
been forgotten? Yet who shall deny that ours 
is the high responsibility for the memories of 
the home, which our children garner hour by 
hour to be a source of weakness or of ennoble¬ 
ment through maturity to their dying day? 
W HEN I was a child and was taken to a 
certain house to be carefully ushered in 
by the butler,—who was pantry-boy when my 
father was born and still serves and befriends 
his grandchildren,—how safe I felt the moment 
I stepped across the threshold of the drawing 
room. Permanence, repose, gaiety and good¬ 
breeding,—-so I always see that drawing room 
in retrospect. But how was it done? What 
was the secret medium of its magic? Primarily, 
of course, it was the unconscious mirror of its 
occupants; their house could not be other than 
they were. 
Let me see if I can recreate that picture, even 
as Peter Ibbetson recreated his dreams. It ran 
the width of the house, a room rather long than 
wide, with three French windows opening on 
to the brick-floored verandah, where wistaria 
and white jasmine hung low, and whence, be¬ 
tween crescent-shaped beds of heavenly roses, 
paths led to the tennis-lawn that a deeply-en¬ 
gaged gardener seemed to me eternally engaged 
in cutting and rolling. The verandah kept the 
room shadowy, mysterious, cool; but my grand¬ 
mother’s love of surfaces was made manifest 
in the delicate robin’s-egg blue of the water- 
color walls and her delight in color danced in 
the gay stiff-glazed chintzes that rejoiced the 
finger-tips and provided a porcelain-like lumi¬ 
nosity along the level of childish eyes. The 
Georgian white marble fireplace in its sim¬ 
plicity of a Sevres clock and two Battersea 
enamel candlesticks was an awe-inspiring 
shrine at one end of the room, admirably bal¬ 
anced by the Queen Anne cabinet on the oppo¬ 
site wall. The spaces between the French win¬ 
dows held two more fine cabinets of old 
French and English china; along the extended 
wall opposite was a grand piano, beneath three 
be-wigged family portraits in bright pink coats 
and oval gold frames. Flanking the fire and 
facing one another across the black bearskin 
rug were,—according to national custom im¬ 
memorial,—great armchairs by the side of Sir 
Charles his revolving book-table and student 
lamp; by Her Ladyship her workstand and its 
delicate and rare porcelain bowl that in sum¬ 
mer was always full of the roses she loved, 
and in winter held the delicious pot-pourri she 
herself mixed of rose-petals, verbena, lavender 
and mysteriously fragrant salts. 
She was an active woman of many interests, 
public and personal, and long after her six¬ 
tieth anniversary her garden in summer saw 
her at six every morning working among her 
roses, but in the serene later years the dusk 
found her reposeful. Tea-time was heralded 
by old West’s entry with a special folding- 
table, compact and low. There was no “tea- 
wagon” in that house, nor indeed in any house 
that I have known, except for use on lawns 
and in gardens where its presence is inoffens¬ 
ive and more or less logical; elsewhere let us 
obliterate it with the rocking-chairs and the 
lace curtains and the gas-logs . . .! 
Now do we see that this room,—not structur¬ 
ally bad to start with,—had two of the essen¬ 
tials of success: it was architecturally, that is to 
say symmetrically, furnished; and it mirrored 
and reflected personalities worth reflecting, per¬ 
sonalities that had come broadened and un¬ 
soured through Life’s stern school. 
In the room where Her Ladyship slept in a 
carved Chippendale four-post bed with French 
brocade tester and valance, there were on the 
walls only two pictures: an Andrea del Sarto, 
and Leonardo da Vinci’s incomparable Madon¬ 
na and St. Anne with the Holy Child. Over the 
fireplace hung a beautifully chased tall silver 
mirror, tilted a little forward so that it reflected 
the bed with its pretty gay silk spread and the 
chintz-covered sofa at its foot, where the fine 
Indian shawl lay folded, that was so soft to 
wrap around any grandchild who was ailing, 
or naughty, or only sad and needing to be loved. 
In the bay-window looking over the lawn, stood, 
Fnglish-fashion, her petticoated dressing-table 
wdth its triple-fold mirror. Under her feet 
was the little hassock covered in needlework— 
two birds and a bunch of flowers,—that she 
herself had cross-stitched on her wedding-jour¬ 
ney in a sailing-ship round Cape of Good 
Hope when the young Victoria was newly-come 
to the throne of England. That journey round 
Africa took six months on a ship crowded with 
troops going out to the First Chinese War, and 
the homesick little bride’s main solace was the 
cageful of canary-birds she took from Scotland 
to start her own new home in India! 
Those were the days when Philadelphia 
(Continued on page 54) 
