Nothing so nice has happened in a long time as the revival of painted furniture, and the application of quaint designs to modern beds and chairs and chests.  You may find inspiration in a length of chintz, in an old fan, in a faded print—­anywhere!  The main thing is to work out a color plan for the background—­the walls, the furniture, and the rugs—­and then you can draw or stencil the chosen designs wherever they seem to belong, and paint them in with dull tones and soft colors, rose and buff and blue and green and a little bit of gray and cream and black.  Or, if you aren’t even as clever as that (and you probably are!) you can decorate your painted furniture with narrow lines of color:  dark green on a light green ground; dark blue on yellow; any color on gray or cream—­there are infinite possibilities of color combinations.  In one of the rooms shown in the illustrations the posy garlands on the chest of drawers were inspired by a lamp jar.  This furniture was carefully planned, as may be seen by the little urns on the bedposts, quite in the manner of the Brothers Adam, but delightful results may be obtained by using any simple modern cottage furniture and applying fanciful decorations.

Be wary of hanging many pictures in your bedroom.  I give this advice cheerfully, because I know you will hang them anyway (I do) but I warn you you will spoil your room if you aren’t very stern with yourself.  Somehow the pictures we most love, small prints and photographs and things, look spotty on our walls.  We must group them to get a pleasant effect.  Keep the framed photographs on the writing table, the dressing table, the mantel, etc., but do not hang them on your walls.  If you have small prints that you feel you must have, hang them flat on the wall, well within the line of vision.  They should be low enough to be examined, because usually such pictures are not decorative in effect, but exquisite in detail.  The fewer pictures the better, and in the guest-room fewer still!

I planned a guest-room for the top floor of a New York house that is very successful.  The room was built around a pair of appliques made from two old Chinese sprays of metal flowers.  I had small electric light bulbs fitted among the flowers, mounted them on carved wood brackets on each side of a good mantel mirror and worked out the rest of the room from them.  The walls were painted bluish green, the woodwork white.  Just below the molding at the top of the room there was a narrow border (four inches wide) of a mosaic-like pattern in blue and green.  The carpet rug is of a blue-green tone.  The hangings are of an alluring Chinoiserie chintz, and there are several Chinese color prints framed and hanging in the narrow panels between the front windows.  The furniture is painted a deep cream pointed with blue and green, and the bed covering is of a pale turquoise taffeta.