First of all, I think a dining-room should be light, and gay.  The first thing to be considered is plenty of sunshine.  The next thing is the planning of a becoming background for the mistress of the house.  The room should always be gay and charming in color, but the color should be selected with due consideration of its becomingness to the hostess.  Every woman has a right to be pretty in her own dining-room.

I do not favor the dark, heavy treatments and elaborate stuff hangings which seem to represent the taste of most of the men who go in for decorating nowadays.  Nine times out of ten the dining-room seems to be the gloomiest room in the house.  I think it should be a place where the family may meet in gaiety of spirit for a pause in the vexatious happenings of the day.  I think light tones, gay wallpapers, flowers and sunshine are of more importance than storied tapestries and heavily carved furniture.  These things are all very well for the house that has a small dining-room and a gala dining-room for formal occasions as well, but there are few such houses.

We New Yorkers have been so accustomed to the gloomy basement dining-rooms of the conventional brown-stone houses of the late eighties we forgot how nice a dining-room can be.  Even though the city dining-room is now more fortunately placed in the rear of the second floor it is usually overshadowed by other houses, and can be lightened only by skilful use of color in curtains, china, and so forth.  Therefore, I think this is the one room in the city house where one can afford to use a boldly decorative paper.  I like very much the Chinese rice-papers with their broad, sketchy decorations of birds and flowers.  These papers are never tiresomely realistic and are always done in very soft colors or in soft shades of one color, and while if you analyze them they are very fantastic, the general effect is as restful as it is cheerful.  You know you can be most cheerful when you are most rested!

The quaint landscape papers which are seen in so many New England dining-rooms seem to belong with American Colonial furniture and white woodwork, prim silver and gold banded china.  These landscape papers are usually gay in effect and make for cheer.  There are many new designs less complicated than the old ones.  Then, too, there are charming foliage papers, made up of leaves and branches and birds, which are very good.

While we may find color and cheer in these gay papers for gloomy city dining-rooms, if we have plenty of light we may get more distinguished results with paneled walls.  A large dining-room may be paneled with dark wood, with a painted fresco, or tapestry frieze, and a ceiling with carved or painted beams, or perhaps one of those interesting cream-white ceilings with plaster beams judiciously adorned with ornament in low relief.  Given a large dining-room and a little money, you can do anything:  you can make a room that will compare favorably with the traditional rooms