As the drawing-room usually opens from the hall, it is better to keep both rooms in the same general scale of furnishing. The average sized drawing-room will need sofas, a small settee, two or three tables, one of them a gallery table if desired, chairs of different shapes and size, mirrors, a cabinet if one has rare pieces of old porcelain, and candelabra. Oriental rugs, a fire screen, ornaments, and pictures, but these last should not be of the modern impressionistic school. The woodwork should be white, or light, and the furniture covered with damask, needlework, brocade or tapestry.
The dining-room can be made most charming with corner cupboards and cabinet, a large mahogany table and side table and beautiful morocco covered chairs. Chippendale did not make sideboards in our sense of the word, but used large side tables. One of the modern designs which many like to use, for to them it seems a necessity, is a sideboard made in the style of Chippendale. The screen may be leather painted after "the Chinese taste," or it may be damask. The chairs may be covered with tapestry or damask if one does not care for morocco. Portraits are interesting in a dining-room, or old prints, or paintings, and if you can get the old dull gold carved frames, so much the better. They may also be set in panels.
The bedrooms may have either four-post canopy beds or low-posts beds. Chippendale's canopy beds had usually a carved cornice with the curtains hung from the inside. The other furniture should consist of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers to correspond with a chiffonier, a highboy, a sewing table, a bedside table, a comfortable sofa, a fireside or wing chair and other chairs according to one's need. The walls may be covered with either an old-fashioned or plain paper,—or paneled, with hangings and chair coverings of chintz or cretonne. The bed hangings may be of cretonne also, for it makes a very charming room, but if one objects to colored bed hangings, white dimity, or muslin or linen may be used.
It is the art of keeping the correct feeling which makes or mars a room of this kind, and no pieces of markedly modern and inharmonious furniture should be used. In furnishing a house in Georgian or Colonial manner one need not keep all the rooms in the same division of the period, for there is a certain general air of harmony and relationship about them all, and the common bond of mahogany makes it possible to have a Chippendale library, an Adam drawing-room, a Hepplewhite dining-room and a Sheraton hall, or any other combination desired. The spirit of all the eighteenth century cabinet-makers was one of honest construction and beauty of line and workmanship. When they took ideas from other sources they made them so distinctly their own, so essentially English that there is a family resemblance through all their work.
Adam decoration and furniture makes most delightful rooms. The painted satinwood furniture for dining-room, drawing-room and bedrooms, lends itself to lovely schemes with its soft golden tones, its delightfully woven cane chair backs and panels. A room on the sunny side of the house, with a soft old ivory colored wall, dull blue silk curtains, and a yellow and blue Chinese rug, would be most charming with this satinwood furniture.
Then, as I have said before, there are the many different shades of enameled and carved furniture and also beautiful natural wood. One can have more of a sideboard in an Adam than in a Chippendale room, as he used two pedestals, one at each end of a large serving-table. He often made tables to fit in niches, which is a charming idea.
An Adam mantel is very distinctive and one should be careful in having it correct. There are beautiful reproductions made. The lamp and candle shades should also be designed in the spirit of the time. There are lovely Adam designs in nearly all materials suitable for hangings and chair coverings. Oriental rugs or plain colored carpets appeal to us more than large-figured rugs. Adam sometimes had special rugs made exactly reproducing the design of the ceiling, but it is an idea that is better forgotten.
With Hepplewhite and Sheraton the same general ideas hold; keep to the spirit of the furniture, try to have a central idea in the house furnishing, so that the restful effect of harmony may be given.
