The House in Good Taste

by Elsie De Wolfe

MRS. JAMES WARREN LANE'S PAINTED DINING-TABLE

The painted table is very unusual. The legs and the carved under-frame are painted cream and pointed with blue, like the chairs, but the top is as gay as an old-fashioned garden, with stiff little medallions, and urns spilling over with flowers, and conventional blossoms picked out all over it. The colors used are very soft, blue and cream being predominant. The table is covered with a sheet of plate glass. This table is, of course, too elaborate for a simple dining-room, but the idea could be adapted and varied to suit many color and furniture schemes.

Painted furniture is a delight in a small dining-room. In the Colony Club I planned a very small room for little dinners that is well worth reproducing in a small house. This little room was very hard to manage because there were no windows! There were two tiny little openings high on the wall at one end of the room, but it would take imagination to call them windows. The room was on the top floor, and the real light came from a skylight. You can imagine the difficulty of making such a little box interesting. However, there was one thing that warmed my heart to the little room: a tiny ante-room between the hall proper and the room proper. This little ante-room I paneled in yellowish tan and gray. I introduced a sofa covered with an old brocade just the color of dried rose leaves—ashes of roses, the French call it—and the little ante-room became a fitting introduction to the dining-room within.

The walls of the rooms were paneled in a delicious color between yellow and tan, the wall proper and the moldings being this color, and the panels themselves filled with a gray paper painted in pinky yellows and browns. These panels were done by hand by a man who found his inspiration in the painted panels of an old French ballroom. As the walls were unbroken by windows there was ample space for such decoration. A carpet of rose color was chosen, and the skylight was curtained with shirred silk of the same rose. The table and chairs were of painted wood, the chairs having seats of the brocade used on the ante-room sofa. The table was covered with rose colored brocade, and over this, cobwebby lace, and over this, plate glass. There are two consoles in the room, with small cabinets above which hold certain objets d'art in keeping with the room.

Under the two tiny windows were those terrible snags we decorators always strike, the radiators. Wrongly placed, they are capable of spoiling any room. I concealed these radiators by building two small cabinets with panels of iron framework gilded to suggest a graceful metal lattice, and lined them with rose-colored silk. I borrowed this idea from a fascinating cabinet in an old French palace, and the result is worth the deception. The cabinets are nice in themselves, and they do not interfere with the radiation of the heat.

I have seen many charming country houses and farm houses in France with dining-rooms furnished with painted furniture. Somehow they make the average American dining-room seem very commonplace and tiresome. For instance, I had the pleasure of furnishing a little country house in France and we planned the dining-room in blue and white. The furniture was of the simplest, painted white, with a dark blue line for decoration. The corner cupboard was a little more elaborate, with a gracefully curved top and a large glass door made up of little panes set in a quaint design. There were several drawers and a lower cupboard. The drawers and the lower doors invited decorations a little more elaborate than the blue lines of the furniture, so we painted on gay little medallions in soft tones of blue, from the palest gray-blue to a very dark blue. The chair cushions were blue, and the china was blue sprigged. Three little pitchers of dark-blue luster were on the wall cupboard shelf and a mirror in a faded gold frame gave the necessary variation of tone.

A very charming treatment for either a country or small city dining-room is to have corner cupboards of this kind cutting off two corners. They are convenient and unusual and pretty as well. They can be painted in white with a colored line defining the panels and can be made highly decorative if the panels are painted with a classic or a Chinese design. The decoration, however, should be kept in variations of the same tone as the stripe on the panels. For instance, if the stripe is gray, then the design should be in dark and light gray and blue tones. The chairs can be white, in a room of this kind, with small gray and blue medallions and either blue and white, or plain blue, cushions.

Another dining-room of the same sort was planned for a small country house on Long Island. Here the woodwork was a deep cream, the walls the same tone, and the ceiling a little lighter. We found six of those prim Duxbury chairs, with flaring spindle-backs, and painted them a soft yellow-green. The table was a plain pine one, with straight legs. We painted it cream and decorated the top with a conventional border of green adapted from the design of the china—a thick creamy Danish ware ornamented with queer little wavy lines and figures. I should have mentioned the china first, because the whole room grew from that. The rug was a square of velvet of a darker green. The curtains were soft cream-colored net. One wall was made up of windows, another of doors and a cupboard, and against the other two walls we built two long, narrow consoles that were so simple anyone could accomplish them: simply two wide shelves resting on good brackets, with mirrors above. The one splendid thing in the room was a curtain of soft green damask that was pulled at night to cover the group of windows. Everything else in the room was bought for a song.