File:American homes and gardens (1905) (17530955923).jpg

Title: American homes and gardens
Identifier: americanhomesgar11905newy (find matches)
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic; Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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9—The Gem of the Collection 8—The Hopeless Average Dining-Room purposes. We see good dining-room furniture in a poor architectural setting. The dining-room shown in Fig. 5 is a much better design, for it has wainscot and cornice and breadth, all unalienable to the successful Colonial dining-room. Then the long win- dow is charming, the mirror and wall painting all right, and but for a few blemishes might rival No. 9. That hetero- geneous collection of plates and placques is very disturbing to the quiet and peace which otherwise reign. Be as original as you please in plotting your dining-room, but the originality must be confined within the iron-bound limits of historical precedent, and I have explained why in an earlier paper. Don't go in for freaks, although the freaks be, in a way, artistic successes. (See the remarkable painted dining-room from English Country Life, Fig. 7). This is very clever and well carried out, but it is not a dining-room. Upon the other hand, don't make your dining-room so strictly a dining-room as to ap- pear a solecism were one to sit in it at other than meal times. That is the " under- done " way of it. Have a little of the living-room atmosphere —some silent invitation, I will call it, to linger after the cloth has been removed—such a very comfortable, all around apart- ment, indeed, that one might wish to tarry at any time with book or even writing materials. Of course, if we were speak- ing of state dining-rooms (from English Country Life, Fig. 6), why that is something else, again; but these principles of home decoration are for Amer- icans of average means.

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