Miss Morgan’s Louis XVI dressing-room
   Miss Marbury’s chintz-hung dressing-table
   A corner of my own boudoir
   Built-in bookshelves in a small room
   Mrs. C.W.  Harkness’s cabinet for objets d’art
   A banquette of the Louis XV period covered with needlework
   A Chinese Chippendale sofa covered with chintz
   The trellis room in the Colony Club
   Mrs. Ormond G. Smith’s trellis room at Center Island, New York
   Looking over the tapis vert to the trellis
   A fine old console in the Villa Trianon
   The broad terrace connects house and garden
   A proper writing-table in the drawing-room
   A cream-colored porcelain stove in a New York house
   Mr. James Deering’s wall fountain
   Fountain in the trellis room of Mrs. Ormond G. Smith

I

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN HOUSE

I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses.  Call it what you will—­awakening, development, American Renaissance—­it is a most startling and promising condition of affairs.

It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly aesthetic tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it should tell the time.  Home-makers are determined to have their houses, outside and in, correct according to the best standards.  What do we mean by the best standards?  Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes his home with a hopeless disregard of tradition.  We must accept the standards that the artists and the architects accept, the standards that have come to us from those exceedingly rational people, our ancestors.

Our ancestors built for stability and use, and so their simple houses were excellent examples of architecture.  Their spacious, uncrowded interiors were usually beautiful.  Houses and furniture fulfilled their uses, and if an object fulfils its mission the chances are that it is beautiful.

It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual castle in Spain, but it isn’t necessary to live among intolerable furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle.  There never was a house so bad that it couldn’t be made over into something worth while.  We shall all be very much happier when we learn to transform the things we have into a semblance of our ideal.

How, then, may we go about accomplishing our ideal?

By letting it go!

By forgetting this vaguely pleasing dream, this evidence of our smug vanity, and making ourselves ready for a new ideal.

By considering the body of material from which it is good sense to choose when we have a house to decorate.

By studying the development of the modern house, its romantic tradition and architectural history.