Furnishing the Home of Good Taste: A Brief Sketch of the Period Styles in Interior Decoration with Suggestions as to Their Employment in the Homes of TodayThroop, Lucy Abbot
History
Furnishing the Home of Good Taste: A Brief Sketch of the Period Styles in Interior Decoration with Suggestions as to Their Employment in the Homes of Today
Throop, Lucy Abbot
Interior decoration
When children are very small, it is necessary to have sides to the beds
to keep them from falling out. The beds should be placed so that the
light does not shine directly in the children's eyes in the morning, and
there should be plenty of fresh air. The rest of the night nursery
furniture should consist of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers, a
night table and some chairs. There should be a few pictures on the walls
hung low, and beautiful and interesting in subjects and treatment. The
fire should be well screened.
Pictures like the "Songs of Childhood," for instance, would be charming
simply framed. If there is only one nursery for both day and night use,
the room should be decorated as a day nursery and the bed-cover made of
white dimity with a border of the curtain stuff or made entirely of it.
_Curtains_
The modern window, with its huge panes of glass and simple framework,
makes an insistent demand for curtains. Without curtains windows of this
kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of
insecurity in having so many holes in the walls. The beautiful windows
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and
France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved
frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important
parts of the decorative scheme. Windows and doors were more than mere
openings in those days, but things have changed, and the hard lines of
our perfectly useful windows get on our nerves if we do not soften them
with drapery. In that hopeless time in the last century called "Early
Victorian," when black walnut reigned supreme, the curtains were as
terrifying as the curves of the furniture and the colors of the carpets.
Luckily most of us know only from pictures what that time was, but we
all have seen enough remnants of its past glories to be thankful for
modern ways and days. The over-draped, stuffy, upholstered nightmares
have entirely disappeared, and in their place have come curtains of a
high standard of beauty and practicality--simple, appropriate, and
serving the ends they were intended for.
The effect of curtains must be taken into account from both the outside
and the inside of the house. The outside view should show a general
similarity of appearance in the windows of each story, in the manner of
hanging the curtains and also of material. The shades throughout the
house should be of the same color, and if a different color is needed
inside for the sake of the color scheme, either two shades should be
used or they should be the double-faced kind. Shades should also be kept
drawn down to the same line, or else be rolled up out of sight, for
there is nothing that gives a more ill-kept look to a house than having
the shades and curtains at any haphazard height or angle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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