The House in Good Taste

by Elsie De Wolfe

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 on which we build. You have a right to make your dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of light and air. But one thing you must have: simplicity! It may be the simplicity of a marble floor and tapestried walls and a painted ceiling, it may be the simplicity of white paint and muslin and fine furniture, but simplicity it must have. The furniture that is required in a dining-room declares itself: a table and chairs. You can bring side tables and china closets into it, or you can build in cupboards and consoles to take their place, but there is little chance for other variation, and so the beginning is a declaration of order and simplicity.

A GEORGIAN DINING-ROOM IN THE WILLIAM ISELIN HOUSE

The easiest way to destroy this simplicity is to litter the room with displays of silver and glass, to dot the walls with indifferent pictures. If you are courageous enough to let your walls take care of themselves and to put away your silver and china and glass, the room will be as dignified as you could wish. Remember that simplicity depends on balance and space. If the walls balance one another in light and shadow, if the furniture is placed formally, if walls and furniture are free from mistaken ornament, the room will be serene and beautiful. In most other rooms we avoid the "pairing" of things, but here pairs and sets of things are most desirable. Two console tables are more impressive than one. There is great decorative value in a pair of mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards flanking a chimney-piece. You would not be guilty of a pair of wall fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies of the same portrait in a room. But when things "pair" logically, pair them! They will furnish a backbone of precision to the room.

The dining-room in the Iselin house is a fine example of stately simplicity. It is extremely formal, and yet there is about it none of the gloominess one associates with New York dining-rooms. The severely paneled walls, the fine chimney-piece with an old master inset and framed by a Grinling Gibbons carving, the absence of the usual mantel shelf, the plain dining-table and the fine old lion chairs all go to make up a Georgian room of great distinction.

The woman who cannot afford such expensive simplicity might model a dining-room on this same plan and accomplish a beautiful room at reasonable expense. Paneled walls are always possible; if you can't afford wood paneling, paint the plastered wall white or cream and break it into panels by using a narrow molding of wood. You can get an effect of great dignity by the use of molding at a few cents a foot. A large panel would take the place of the Grinling Gibbons carving, and a mirror might be inset above the fireplace instead of the portrait. The dining-table and chairs might give place to good reproductions of Chippendale, and the marble console to a carpenter-made one painted to match the woodwork.

The subject of proper furniture for a dining-room is usually settled by the house mistress before her wedding bouquet has faded, so I shall only touch on the out-of-ordinary things here. Everyone knows that a table and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind "go together." The trouble is that everyone knows these things too well, and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant departures from the usual.