74 
H o u s p. & 
Garden 
DIGNITY IN A MAN’S ROOM 
There Will Be No Loss of Masculine Prestige If the Rooms Occupied 
By the Male Members of the Family are Made Individual and Interesting 
JOHN G. HAMILTON 
W E NEVER seem to grow tired of 
talking about rooms reflecting the 
personalities of their occupants. 
Reams have been written on the subject and 
in view of this, it is curious how few men’s 
rooms are ever allowed to be masculine, to 
really represent a man’s tastes and inclina¬ 
tions in the matter of furnishing the space 
he is allowed to have for his own. Perhaps 
the explanation lies in the fact that the dec¬ 
oration of a house is, as a rule, left to the 
woman of the family and when she conies 
to the man’s room or rooms, her interest is 
apt to flag a bit. The result has been that 
men’s rooms have been either the dumping 
ground for all the unwanted furniture of 
the house or else have been done in a man¬ 
ner to suggest a feminine boudoir. Both 
methods, of course, are hopelessly wrong 
and betray a lack of imagination, more 
than anything else. 
A room need not be costly to be attrac¬ 
tive. The most distinctive room I have ever 
seen was in a log cabin. There was noth¬ 
ing of great value in it, but there was char¬ 
acter in everything and one felt that the 
room was lived in by a man of intelligence 
and that he and his friends enjoyed being 
there and being intelligent. I could not help 
comparing it to other rooms I have seen 
where large sums were spent on the furni¬ 
ture and decorations and which were quite 
lacking in charm, comfort and beauty. It 
is rather unusual to And an American man’s 
room that is not uninteresting and ugly. 
The furniture is nearly always too large in 
scale for the room, the chairs and sofas are 
over upholstered, having great thick backs 
and overhanging arms and nearly always 
are covered in either imitation leather, bad 
imitation tapestry or a cheap cotton velour. 
Upholstered furniture can be good in line, 
correct in scale and still be comfortable for 
any man, and there are materials made that 
are not imitations and are not expensive 
which are nice in texture, scale and design. 
Can a jumble of useless, meaningless 
things—no matter how smart these things 
may be at the moment—ever give real 
A dignified man’s sitting room in a 
New York house has restful propor¬ 
tions, paneled walls painted a neutral 
green, a sofa done in old English cre¬ 
tonne and mahogany and leather chairs 
charm or comfort to a room? What possible 
chance has a room of being harmonious 
when no thought has been given to it as a 
whole ? When furniture, pictures and hang¬ 
ings have been selected perhaps for their in¬ 
trinsic beauty and with no thought of their 
ultimate relation to each other, or to the 
walls surrounding them. Under such condi¬ 
tions a room has not the slightest chance of 
being anything but a hodgepodge. It may 
to a certain extent reflect the taste of the 
owner, but it cerainly does not do him credit 
and with a little care and thought before¬ 
hand, the result might be equally interest¬ 
ing and far more restful and harmonious. 
In doing a room we should be able to 
visualize it completely finished before start¬ 
ing the scheme, in the same manner that an 
architect must know the house he intends to 
build before he starts his drawings, other¬ 
wise the result is disastrous. We must know 
color, its value and the important part it 
plays in a room. I have seen rooms fur¬ 
nished beautifully that have been entirely 
spoiled by the wrong color used on the 
v r alls. This brings us to a question of back¬ 
ground, the most important part of the 
Drix Duryea 
