“Aim at a gold gown and you’ll get a sleeve,” says our grandmother’s proverb; so our wise woman knows what is best and aims for it, but contents herself with what she can get. For an American house, the best flooring, generally speaking, would be—for a vestibule—tiles of small pattern and modest color, such as yellow and brown, which would take no injury from muddy overshoes or dripping umbrellas; for the rest of the house hard wood floors (Southern pine is admirable), plain or very simply inlaid. Elaborate patterns in inlaid woods should be avoided, except in large rooms, and contrasts of colors, such as stripes of black walnut and hard pine, which make a narrow hallway look yet narrower; but a modest border might be inlaid around any room, hall, parlor, or bedroom with good effect, if desired, with a substantial oriental rug in the midst of it all. There can be nothing better than this.
But a cheap pine floor, if properly laid, can be stained and made to do good service, instead of hard wood, and a strip of cocoanut matting running the length of the hall is not to be despised; or, if cracks yawn too perceptibly to have the floor bare, it can be covered with a plain, self-colored drugget or carpet filling, or “two ply,” while a strip of bright carpet passes from the doorway up the stairs, and enlivens the hall. Or, simpler yet, the floor can be painted a serviceable yellow or gray, and a width of rag carpet can add warmth and color. There are pretty straw mattings in greens and reds and cream colors which, with the aid of rugs, serve admirably for floor coverings, but they are hardly durable enough for entry ways. Our wise woman bears in mind that a well-laid, hard wood floor will outlast many a drugget, or carpet, or coat of paint, or oil cloth, and she does up her hall floor, at first, in as durable a fashion as her purse will allow.
There is a certain fitness of things also to be observed. Good taste forbids her to step from an entry with stained or painted pine floor and rag carpet to a parlor with inlaid floors and Persian rugs. The rag carpet of the hall demands something correspondingly simple in the reception room; a floor stained or painted in the same fashion, or a straw matting, with perhaps a few breadths of “Morris” carpet, of warm color and quiet figure, sewed together to make a rug, and raveled at the ends for fringe.
As for walls, it is convenient to divide them with a chair rail or moulding of the same stuff as that used for mop-boards and door casings, fastened about four feet from the floor and running around the entry and up the side wall of the stairway. The wall below this moulding can be painted in oil a warm olive-brown or green, or a dull red, and, when so painted, can be washed like the woodwork.
A more expensive way would be to panel off this space with big cedar shingles of the sort that cost about $25 a thousand, provided the rest of the woodwork is repainted, or with wood corresponding with the finish of the room. Unpainted woodwork, even though made of soft pine, is far better from the housekeeper’s standpoint than that which is coated with paint. Pine, when oiled and varnished—not too heavily—assumes a rarely beautiful hue and shows the variety of its markings to very good effect. The wall space above could be papered with some figured pattern corresponding in color with that below the chair-rail, or dado, as it is called (if that is painted rather than paneled), but the wall-space should be of lighter tint than the dado, or it could be calcimined, or kalsomined, as they spell and pronounce it in New Jersey.
When paper is used, the pattern should not be so large as to make the room look small, nor so pronounced as to prevent the walls from serving as a fair back-ground for pictures and plants.
But suppose our prudent woman can afford neither chair-rail nor oil-painted dado, and yet would like to divide the wall space. Then let Mr. Kalsominer paint a dado of olive-brown or green, a wall space of much lighter shade, and a ceiling of cream color. He can also paint a band of dull red where the chair-rail should be, and then our wise woman, if she be also a woman of faculty, will take the little red paint pot into her own hand and will cut out of varnished paper some conventional leaf or flower, and using this as a stencil, with a stiff brush she will powder[A] this leaf or flower at regular intervals of about a foot all over the dado. Or, discarding the stencil, some simple arrangement of triple dots might be used that need only be indicated with a pencil point and then painted on, with a small brush, free hand. The kalsominer would double his prices if he did it, but the room will be twice as pretty if she does it herself. Or she may powder her lighter wall space with figures of the same dark shade as the dado, so harmonizing the upper and lower portions, while a yet darker brown line divides them. But the stenciling of a wall space requires too much step-ladder work for the ordinary woman. Last, and probably cheapest of all, she may use wall paper—the darkest shade below—of some stiff diaper or tile pattern, the lighter above, with border between; the ceiling being washed a lighter harmonizing color.
As to the furniture of the hall, it ought to begin outside the door, with a bench, or settle, or chair, at least, upon the piazza, or “stoop,” for any weary body to drop down upon while the door is undoing. A wide piazza gives room not only for a few chairs, and the picturesque and comfortable hammock, but for a table, as well, where the afternoon cup of tea can rest, or the work-basket with the weekly mending. A broad platform with awnings is a comfortable and picturesque addition to a house of plain and unattractive exterior. Happy and healthy are the households whose piazzas are their summer sitting-rooms.
The vestibule should have closets or some very plain and simple receptacle for umbrellas and India rubber shoes. In the hall proper comes up the vexed question of the hat tree. It is an ungainly, aggressive piece of furniture, and very cumbersome. If possible, let it be done away with. If there is a closet under the stairs for the family hats and coats, then the chance visitor can throw off his coat on the hall sofa or table. Hall chairs are useful, with a box seat holding whisk broom, hat brush, driving gloves, and things of that sort, and so is the table drawer; any of these contrivances are better than the hat tree, and so is a simple rail hidden away in some dark corner under the stairs, if there be no closet, with pegs attached for hats and coats. “There can be no reasonable law against making a hall chair both comfortable and suitable to its situation. The common Windsor high-backed arm-chair, made in the same wood as the table, and with a cushion covered with some bright colored material is well suited for this purpose; or a chair … with a high back and broad, low seat looks both severe enough to discourage unbecoming lounging, and yet sufficiently comfortable to secure a proper degree of rest for the weary.”
And where in the hall can hangings and stuffs be used to best advantage? Enter any house and look about for yourself. If the ground glass of the vestibule door be exposed and staring, the hall floor bare and cold, the hall chair hard and stiff, the doors to the reception or sitting-room all closed, rising black and grim before you, and the hall itself so dark that you can not see even where to lay down your companionable umbrella, does there not come over you a chill, as if you were being repelled by the spirit of inhospitality? The entrance hall gives you no hearty cheer of welcome. But warm up the floor with a rug, lay a restful and inviting cushion on the chair; open the door that leads to the room where the household gathers, or where your hostess is to receive you, or take it off the hinges bodily and lay it away, and hang instead a curtain that shall give a glimpse of the warmth and light within, while still shutting out the draught. Let soft silk or Madras muslin hang in full folds over the window in the door, and the stranger who enters no longer feels like a prisoner in Doubting Castle, whom Giant Despair has cast into a dungeon for trespassing on his grounds, but rather shall I not say, as if he had fallen upon the House Beautiful, built on purpose for the entertainment of pilgrims, where only the fair virgins Prudence, Piety and Charity would be his companions?