In America, where men are supposed to know nothing about matters of
taste and where women have their dresses planned for them, the
household decorator has become an important factor in domestic life.
Out of an even hundred rich men how many can say that they have had
anything to do with the selection or arrangement of the furnishings
for their homes? In theatre programs these matters are regulated and
due credit is given to the various firms who have supplied the myriad
appeals to the eye; one knows who thought out the combinations of
shoes, hats, and parasols, and one knows where each separate article
was purchased. Why could not some similar plan of appreciation be
followed in the houses of our very rich? Why not, for instance, a card
in the hall something like the following:
_This house was furnished and decorated according
to the taste of Marcel of the Dilly-Billy Shop_
or
_We are living in the kind of house Miss Simone
O'Kelly thought we should live in. The
decorations are pure Louis XV and
the furniture is authentic._
It is not difficult, of course, to differentiate the personal from the
impersonal. Nothing clings so ill to the back as borrowed finery and I
have yet to find the family which has settled itself fondly and
comfortably in chairs which were a part of some one else's aesthetic
plan. As a matter of fact many of our millionaires would be more at
home in an atmosphere concocted from the ingredients of plain pine
tables and blanket-covered mattresses than they are surrounded by the
frippery of China and the frivolity of France. If these gentlemen were
fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient confidence in their own taste to
give it a thorough test it is not safe to think of the extreme burden
that would be put on the working capacity of the factories of the
Grand Rapids furniture companies. We might find a few emancipated
souls scouring the town for heavy refectory tables and divans into
which one could sink, reclining or upright, with a perfect sense of
ease, but these would be as rare as Steinway pianos in Coney Island.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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