Editorial 
House&Garden 
Vol. I. 
OCTOBER, 1901. 
No. 5. 
Wilson 
EDITED BY 
Eyre, Jr., Frank Miles 
Day, 
and Herbert C. Wise. 
Published Monthly by 
The Architectural Publishing Company 
929 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Penna. 
Price 
United States, Canada or Mexico, $5.00 per annum in 
advance; elsewhere in the Postal Union, $6.00. 
Single numbers, 50 cents. 
Copyrighted, iqoi, by The Architectural Publishing Company. 
Entered at the Philadelphia Post Office as Second Class Mail 
Matter, June, iqoi. 
Trade supplied by the Publishers. 
A RECENT English writer on domestic 
furniture, so modest as to leave no clue 
to the authorship of his excellent essay says 
that a living-room forms “ a scenic back¬ 
ground for the daily drama of home life ” 
and that architects admit that all its parts 
should be so coordinated as to form a rest¬ 
ful unity of effect. He goes on to point 
out that these parts do not produce such an 
effect “ when the furniture is an alien con¬ 
stituent and not a result of the same impulse 
of design that produced the rest of the dec¬ 
oration.” T his is a conception that archi¬ 
tects in America must take to heart. It is 
not enough for them to admit the truth of 
it as mere theory and to go on designing 
only the forms of the room and its fixed 
woodwork, conferring a little with a decorator 
of walls and ceilings, advising the owner of 
whom to buy his lighting fixtures and at last 
letting him do his worst as to all his movable 
furniture without giving him even a word of 
warning. 
Few architects have sufficient fertility and 
versatility to design the entire setting cf the 
life that is to go on within their houses. In 
our own country there comes to mind no one 
but Frank Lloyd Wright who has success¬ 
fully done the thing, who has designed every 
detail and determined every shade of color 
so as to contribute to the final effect, and 
who above all has done this not in one of the 
historic styles (a comparatively easy trick) 
but in a way at once modern and beautiful. 
In Europe the case is different. The vital 
movement that is there producing a new art 
in household design (think what we may of 
it) has brought to light many men to whom 
the opportunity of designing the whole scene 
and working out its very detail is sheer hap¬ 
piness. In England such men as Baillie 
Scott and Voysey are by no means alone, 
and on the Continent the number of their 
counterparts is constantly increasing. 
In advocating unity of design in all with¬ 
in a room or house let us not be understood 
as urging that the expression of the owner’s 
personality be suppressed. If the owner is 
not as the mass of men, if he have any per¬ 
sonality worth expressing then by all means 
let him surround himself with the things that 
express it whether we get unity of design or 
not. But if, as is the case nine times out of 
ten, the owner when left alone surrounds 
himself with the dreary furniture of com¬ 
merce and the tasteless bric-a-brac of hap¬ 
hazard selection, how much better off he 
would have been if his house could have 
been set in decent order for him by some 
one who knows the value of restraint and the 
restfulness of plain surfaces. But unity of 
design in the interior of a house is and must 
necessarily be at best a thing of rare occur¬ 
rence. The point we make is that it is now 
far less rare in Europe than it is here and 
that it is one of the essential ideas in the new 
movement in the arts of design. Why such 
a movement, arising as it does from a desire 
for the expression of beauty in terms of its 
own time and place, should have as yet such 
slight acceptance in America is hard to under¬ 
stand. Europe is casting off' the trammels 
of her outworn styles, yet here where the 
cry for the “ indigenous and inventive ” went 
forth for a brief space with such ardor we 
have made but little headway against the fal¬ 
lacy of archaeological correctness. 
26 
