To me, the most beautiful wall is the plain and dignified painted wall, broken into graceful panels by the use of narrow moldings, with lighting fixtures carefully placed, and every picture and mirror hung with classic precision.  This wall is just as appropriate to the six-room cottage as to the twenty-room house.  If I could always find perfect walls, I’d always paint them, and never use a yard of paper.  Painted walls, when very well done, are dignified and restful, and most sanitary.  The trouble is that too few plasterers know how to smooth the wall surface, and too few workmen know how to apply paint properly.  In my new house on East Fifty-fifth Street I have had all the walls painted.  The woodwork is ivory white throughout the house, except in the dining-room, where the walls and woodwork are soft gray.  The walls of most of the rooms and halls are painted a very deep tone of cream and are broken into panels, the moldings being painted cream like the woodwork.  With such walls you can carry out any color-plan you may desire.

You would think that every woman would know that walls are influenced by the exposure of the room, but how often I have seen bleak north rooms with walls papered in cold gray, and sunshiny south rooms with red or yellow wall papers!  Dull tones and cool colors are always good in south rooms, and live tones and warm colors in north rooms.  For instance, if you wish to keep your rooms in one color-plan, you may have white woodwork in all of them, and walls of varying shades of cream and yellow.  The north rooms may have walls painted or papered with a soft, warm yellow that suggests creamy chiffon over orange.  The south rooms may have the walls of a cool creamy-gray tone.

Whether you paint or paper your walls, you should consider the placing of the picture-molding most carefully.  If the ceiling is very high, the walls will be more interesting if the picture-molding is placed three or four feet below the ceiling line.  If the ceiling is low, the molding should be within two inches of the ceiling.  These measurements are not arbitrary, of course.  Every room is a law unto itself, and no cut and dried rule can be given.  A fine frieze is a very beautiful decoration, but it must be very fine to be worth while at all.  Usually the dropped ceiling is better for the upper wall space.  It goes without saying that those dreadful friezes perpetrated by certain wall paper designers are very bad form, and should never be used.  Indeed, the very principle of the ordinary paper frieze is bad; it darkens the upper wall unpleasantly, and violates the good old rule that the floors should be darkest in tone, the side walls lighter, and the ceiling lightest.  The recent vogue of stenciling walls may be objected to on this account, though a very narrow and conventional line of stenciling may sometimes be placed just under the picture rail with good effect.

In a great room with a beamed ceiling and oak paneled walls a painted fresco or a frieze of tapestry or some fine fabric is a very fine thing, especially if it has a lot of primitive red and blue and gold in it, but in simple rooms—­beware!