Harmony in Decoration 
By MARGARET GREENLEAF 
The following article is published in response to many requests. This address was delivered before the Conference on Home 
Economics, held at Lake Placid during the latter part of September. The illustrations used are made from photographs showing wall 
coverings and combinations advised for the various rooms of the small house, a floor plan of which is also reproduced. The color 
effect of these rooms, singly and relatively, has been carefully considered. The selection of the wall coverings has been almost entirely 
confined to those of English make.— Editor. 
N OT very many years ago the careful house¬ 
wife held the all-too-prevalent idea that 
heauty was of necessity, extravagance. In the 
furnishing and fitting up of her house, this seemed 
especially true. She turned her eyes reluctantly 
from the pretty light papers which attracted her 
and which would bring sunshine into a northern 
room and selected paper of snuff brown and stone 
gray picked out with flecks of gilt and lines of red, 
which from the day of putting in place would give 
the room a more somber and unlovely aspect than 
the lighter one would have done after years of use. 
When William Morris advised his followers to 
“have nothing in their houses which they did not 
know to be useful and believe to be beautiful,” he 
opened the door to an entirely new thought and 
found many followers, to whom this idea that the 
useful could be beautiful as well, was acceptable. 
To the man or woman with a true sense of beauty, 
this maxim is a safe guide. Where this sense is 
lacking, the last state of decoration of his house 
may be worse than the first. 
In the last decade there has been so strong and 
decided a movement along the lines of good inte¬ 
rior decoration that the veriest amateur, who desires 
to learn, may read and 
consult authorities upon 
th ese matters, and is 
sure to find sufficiently 
clear and helplul sug¬ 
gestions to guide him 
from the shoals. 
Suitability is the great 
fundamental principle 
to recognize in the deco¬ 
ration and furnishing 
of a house. In the ear¬ 
liest consideration of a 
properly designed house, 
it must be planned to 
suit the plot of ground 
on which it stands. 
I he house that suits the 
city lot would seem 
highly inappropriate, 
surrounded with great 
trees and set upon a 
sloping lawn. This, of course, is the architect’s care. 
Several years ago I was engaged upon syndicate 
newspaper work, which presented articles on prac¬ 
tical house furnishing, together with a correspond¬ 
ence department, in Sunday newspapers. As these 
articles appeared simultaneously in thirty-seven 
cities of the United States, you may readily imagine 
that my mail was large. I received letters from 
women in cities, towns and villages, from the coun¬ 
try and from far Western ranches. The scope of 
these inquiries was great. There was the woman 
who had turned her house over to some upholsterer 
firm, allowing them carte blanche for the whole. 
There was the Eastern woman who had gone West 
to live and found it difficult to adjust her artistic 
ideas to the crude environments of the Western 
town. There was the woman, suffering from the 
large figured wall-paper and the carpet in glowing 
colors and pronounced design, who realized that 
something was wrong in her best room, but did not 
know what; and there was the woman who went 
in for period furnishing, who, when she found her 
Fart nouveau dining-room did not satisfy her when 
seen from her Louis XV. drawing-room, plaintively 
asked, why ? She had had the best talent of the 
Western city in which 
she lived to furnish 
this house, and the re¬ 
sult was chaos. To the 
solving of each problem, 
the single word “suita¬ 
bility” could be brought. 
I hat was what was 
lacking. 
The wood finish and 
treatment of the walls 
of a room must be con¬ 
sidered of first impor¬ 
tance to its completed 
beauty. These form the 
background of the pic¬ 
ture. It is essential 
that these colors be 
entirely in accord, not 
only one with the other, 
hut they must be eare- 
fully considered in 
65 
