To most of us in America who must perforce lead workaday lives, the absence of beauty is a very distinct lack.  I think, indeed, that the present awakening has come to stay, and that before very long, we shall have simple houses with fireplaces that draw, electric lights in the proper places, comfortable and sensible furniture, and not a gilt-legged spindle-shanked table or chair anywhere.  This may be a decorator’s optimistic dream, but let us all hope that it may come true.

II

SUITABILITY, SIMPLICITY AND PROPORTION

When I am asked to decorate a new house, my first thought is suitability.  My next thought is proportion.  Always I keep in mind the importance of simplicity.  First, I study the people who are to live in this house, and their needs, as thoroughly as I studied my parts in the days when I was an actress.  For the time-being I really am the chatelaine of the house.  When I have thoroughly familiarized myself with my “part,” I let that go for the time, and consider the proportion of the house and its rooms.  It is much more important that the wall openings, windows, doors, and fireplaces should be in the right place and should balance one another than that there should be expensive and extravagant hangings and carpets.

My first thought in laying out a room is the placing of the electric light openings.  How rarely does one find the lights in the right place in our over-magnificent hotels and residences!  One arrives from a journey tired out and travel-stained, only to find oneself facing a mirror as far removed from the daylight as possible, with the artificial lights directly behind one, or high in the ceiling in the center of the room.  In my houses I always see that each room shall have its lights placed for the comfort of its occupants.  There must be lights in sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of the dressing-table, and so on.

Then I consider the heating of the room.  We Americans are slaves to steam heat.  We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat.  In my own houses I have a fireplace in each room, and I burn wood in it.  There is a heating-system in the basement of my house, but it is under perfect control.  I prefer the normal heat of sunshine and open fires.  But, granted that open fires are impossible in all your rooms, do arrange in the beginning that the small rooms of your house may not be overheated.  It is a distinct irritation to a person who loves clean air to go into a room where a flood of steam heat pours out of every corner.  There is usually no way to control it unless you turn it off altogether.  I once had the temerity to do this in a certain hotel room where there was a cold and cheerless empty fireplace.  I summoned a reluctant chambermaid, only to be told that the chimney had never had a fire in it and the proprietor would rather not take such a risk!