96 
House 
shall be 
no more 
Marthas 
This monogram is 
the symbol of Gen¬ 
eral Electric Com¬ 
pany, an organiza¬ 
tion of 100,000 men 
and women engaged 
in producing and 
improving the tools 
by which electricity 
does your work. 
Every town has its 
Marys and Marthas. 
Mary is freed from 
household drudgery; 
Martha is “cumbered 
about much serving.” 
Some day all the world 
will realize that most 
house work can be done 
by little electric motors, 
costing 3 cents an hour 
to run. Then there will 
be no more Marthas. 
GENERAL ELECTRIC 
WALLPAPERS for 
DINING 
(Continued from page 94) 
& Garden 
ROOMS 
bunches of foliage echoing the lines 
and spaces made by the woodwork and 
repeating the simplicity and dignity of 
the furniture. 
This is only one case, but often the 
cut-up room presents a similar prob¬ 
lem and this solution will be found 
most satisfactory. Landscape paper 
still further serves the purpose of 
making each wall space “count” for 
itself and at the same time tends to 
open up the space and make it take 
on a most pleasing air of largeness and 
dignity. 
For the room that is cut up hori¬ 
zontally by high wainscoting or plate 
rail, this is not so satisfactory. It is 
better to use here a paper with a 
good all-over movement or else one 
in tapestry effect, well covered in 
foliage that makes a rather solid mass 
of mildly varied tone and shape above 
the wood, lighter or darker according 
to the particular needs of the room. 
In the smaller rooms, the low ceiled 
country house dining room with white 
woodwork and wainscoting, the lighter 
papers in less formal style make a 
happy, cheerful setting quite in keeping 
with the character of the room. The 
older chintzes in gay reds and greens, 
birds, flowers, and foliage, the newer 
more lightly drawn and varied effects, 
are all good; and the reproductions 
of old scenic papers are especially 
adapted to rooms of this kind. 
Choose something with character and 
snap, something interesting. Avoid 
the simple little blends and all-overs 
which sink back innocuously into the 
background and present no spark of 
entertainment or interest. 
For the ordinary dining room with 
one or more fair-sized, unbroken wall 
spaces and an average amount of light 
there is nothing better than the tapestry 
or foliage paper, provided the furniture 
is not too delicate and restrained. If 
furniture on Sheraton or Adam lines 
is used, then the lighter, smaller, more 
conventional figures or the period 
papers would be the best choice. For 
the majority of our dining room furni¬ 
ture, however, the Chippendale, Hep- 
pelwhite or Windsor styles, or the or¬ 
dinary straight line pieces, the tapestry 
and foliage papers in cool grays or 
greens offer a happy solution and make 
a background interesting and pleasing. 
The breakfast room with its painted 
furniture presents another problem. 
This type of room may be as gay and 
joyous as one desires, and some of the 
papers designed for these rooms are 
positively alluring in their color and 
pattern. Rich gold backgrounds with 
red, orange, blue and deep purple 
flowers on them, cool grays with birds 
and flowers in pastel tones suggest a 
multitude of possibilities for the dec¬ 
oration of the furniture and woodwork 
If the space be small, these papers may 
be used over the whole surface, but 
they are better put into panels with 
the moldings colored in the ground 
tone of the paper and the accent color 
of the paper suggested in a thin line 
or band on one of the flat surfaces of 
the molding. 
The paneling of the dining room 
gives a splendid opportunity, even in 
the larger rooms, for these handsome 
bits of color and design. Used over 
the entire wall surface, they would 
make too much decoration. But placed 
within the frames, they serve, as the 
tapestries served in olden days, as rich 
and satisfying glints of color, texture, 
and pattern to brighten and beautify 
the room. For these larger rooms, the 
formal scroll, the tapestry, the heavier 
bird and flower, the scenic and the con¬ 
ventional period designs all panel well 
and make fitting pictures for the 
frames that await them. 
There is no reason to be afraid of 
pattern. Many people are fearful of 
its not being restful. Try it out in 
your dining room and rediscover for 
yourself that restfulness does not 
mean inactivity, apathy, stupidity. It 
means beautiful, rich and interesting 
combinations that please the eye and 
stimulate the imagination. This is 
far more satisfying and in the end 
restful than blank spaces that show 
no originality of thought and usually 
suggest a lazy attitude of mind. 
Imagine this amusing Persian de¬ 
sign in a small breakfast room. 
The colors are old blue, rose, 
yellow, green and mauve on 
white. From Robert Graves 
A charming paper for a small 
breakfast room is this Chinese 
design in green or blue on a 
white ground. Courtesy of 
the Thomas Strahan Company 
