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
If a room is badly proportioned it can often be improved by the simple
expedient of using a correct paper. If the room is too high for its size
the ceiling color may be brought down on the side wall for eighteen
inches or so and finished with a moulding. This stops the eye before it
reaches the ceiling and so makes the room seem lower. If the room is too
low a striped paper may be used which will make the room seem higher by
carrying the eye up to the ceiling where the paper is finished with a
moulding. Vertical lines give the appearance of height, horizontal
lines of width. Striped paper should not be used in narrow halls, for it
makes them seem narrower and gives one the feeling of being in a cage.
Two-toned striped papers of nearly the same color value, such as gray
and white, yellow and cream-white, and white and cream color, are better
to use than those of more marked contrast, although some of the green
and white and blue and white are charming and fresh looking for
bedrooms. Black and white is too eccentric for the average house; one
should beware of all eccentric papers. There are a few kinds of paper
which should be left severely alone, for they will spoil any room. One
of them has a plain general tone but a suggestion of other colors which
give it a blurred and mottled appearance which is singularly
disagreeable. Another is plain in color but has a lumpy effect like a
toad's back, and is really quite awful. Others are metallic papers, and
there is a heavy paper embossed in self color with a conventional design
which is apt to have a shining surface. Papers with dashes and little
flecks of gold should be avoided, for the gold gives the wall an
unstable and cheap appearance. Papers with small single figures repeated
all over the surface are apt to look as if a plague of flies or beetles
had arrived and are quite impossible to live with. Borders and cut out
borders have a commonplace appearance and are not in the best of taste.
And then there are papers with vulgarity of design. This quality is hard
to define clearly, for it may be only a slightly redundant curve or
other lack of true feeling for the beauty of line, or a bit too much, or
too little, color, or a bad combination of color, or a lack of knowledge
of the laws of balance and harmony and ornament, or a wrong surface of
texture to the paper. But whatever the cause, a vulgar paper will
vulgarize any room, no matter what is done in the way of furniture. It
will assert itself like an ill-bred person. Luckily both are easily
recognized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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