efficient.  He will not only plan a house that will meet the needs of your family, but he will give you inspiration for its interior.  He will concern himself with the moldings, the light-openings, the door-handles and hinges, the unconsidered things that make or mar your house.  Select for your architect a man you’d like for a friend.  Perhaps he will be, before the house comes true.  If you are both sincere, if you both purpose to have the best thing you can afford, the house will express the genius and character of your architect and the personality and character of yourself, as a great painting suggests both painter and sitter.  The hard won triumph of a well-built house means many compromises, but the ultimate satisfaction is worth everything.

I do not purpose, in this book, to go into the historic traditions of architecture and decoration—­there are so many excellent books it were absurd to review them—­but I do wish to trace briefly the development of the modern house, the woman’s house, to show you that all that is intimate and charming in the home as we know it has come through the unmeasured influence of women.  Man conceived the great house with its parade rooms, its grands appartements but woman found eternal parade tiresome, and planned for herself little retreats, rooms small enough for comfort and intimacy.  In short, man made the house:  woman went him one better and made of it a home.

The virtues of simplicity and reticence in form first came into being, as nearly as we can tell, in the Grotta, the little studio-like apartment of Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, away back in 1496.  The Marchioness made of this little studio her personal retreat.  Here she brought many of the treasures of the Italian Renaissance.  Really, simplicity and reticence were the last things she considered, but the point is that they were considered at all in such a restless, passionate age.  Later, in 1522, she established the Paradiso, a suite of apartments which she occupied after her husband’s death.  So you see the idea of a woman planning her own apartment is pretty old, after all.

The next woman who took a stand that revealed genuine social consciousness was that half-French, half-Italian woman, Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet.  She seceded from court because the court was swaggering and hurly-burly, with florid Marie-de-Medicis at its head.  And with this recession, she began to express in her conduct, her feeling, her conversation, and, finally, in her house, her awakened consciousness of beauty and reserve, of simplicity and suitability.