Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

large or small. You can add an ell for a kitchen or not as you please. So of bay windows, dormer windows, and porches. Other impressive advantages of the structure are the great strength and the great economy of space going with it. Much saving of expense is also secured by the simplicity of this style of building when repairs become necessary, there being the fewest possible queer angles, breaks, turnings, pockets, gewgaws and places hard to get at.

It is with much hesitation that I approach the subject of interior house decoration. Tastes differ and many different methods for house beautification might be suggested each of which would be pleasing to highly cultivated people.

We need first of all to divest ourselves of the idea that beautifying the inside of a house need involve great expense. The truth is otherwise. Many a householder could make a truly elegant interior with half the expense to which he has gone to burden and disfigure his walls, ceilings and floors. Simplicity is a chief rule of art.

To this for our present purpose we may add cleanliness. Any bric-a-brac or adornment whatever which renders it hard to keep a room clean is out of order and contradicts the best taste. On this account I would not use a picture molding or allow any covering or ornament on any article of furniture so constructed or put on as to hide dust. I would eschew all carpets. They are dirt collectors and germ breeders. Use rugs if you can get them; if not, bare floors made as presentable as is convenient and kept clean.

Let us have no room, call it parlor or what not, too nice for daily use. Any part of your house good enough for you will please your callers whoever they are. One can suffer no more chilling or inhospitable treatment than to be shown into the best room of many a house. You feel yourself in a strange place, cold, lonely, uninhabited. Even if the room is perfect in its decoration and appointments the effect of its nonuse is frigidity. There is, of course, no impropriety in making certain rooms finer

than others, but all your rooms should be for you and your family. The habit of crowding the whole family life into the kitchen is vulgarizing in the extreme.

As far as possible avoid paint for interior wood work. Natural wood, if neatly finished, is more beautiful and in the end cheaper. On the other hand, when plastered walls need something beyond neat hard finish, it is in most cases better to use paint than paper.

Have ample light in every room. Many builders love darkness rather than light. Their architecture and esthetic deeds are evil. Light is the best adornment possible, basal to all the others, none of which will show to the best advantage in chiaroscuro. It is easy to drape a window so as to keep out too much light, a thing we need to do rather often in these prairie states where we have sunshine to burn; but it is not easy to enlarge a window once made or to tunnel the wall for a new one. The lighter your room is from out-of-doors the darker its walls and furnishings may be; the darker it

is the lighter they must be. The same rule holds to a certain extent for outside coloring -the brighter the light the darker the paint.

Many housewives worry themselves to a fever over the color displays in such color ornamentation as they wish to introduce upon the walls of rooms, in furniture, rugs and window shades. A few simple principles may be of service.

All true art is grounded in Nature, and today Nature is our best teacher in all art work. To make the colors and figures of your interior permanently pleasing and impressive, follow Nature. Let curves predominate over corners and peaks.

In producing her color effects you notice that mother Nature works several devices. She lays out vast expanses of some one dull hue or of several dull hues so blended that your eye catches the resultant tint rather than any constituent. The sky by day, a ripening grain field, the ocean, a lake or a river, or any late autumn landscape will illustrate. These dullish-colored scenes are surpassingly restful to eye and mind. They

awaken the sense of beauty in a massive and lasting way, probably being more causative of beauty delight on the whole than any of Nature's bright colors are. My eyes may be guilty of perjury, but they always swear that November is as beautiful a month as June.

Sometimes-and this is her second method-Nature dashes a great clump of color into one of those neutral backgrounds. This is illustrated by the sun against his day sky or reflected in a broad surface of water; an evergreen tree amid an autumn or winter forest or standing alone on a stubble or otherwise dun-colored field; poppies or other bright flowers springing up after harvest; black, white, or red cattle roaming the autumn prairie; the green trees against the red rocks on western slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Sometimes-call this, if you will, Nature's third method-two sharply contrasted bright colors are brought together in about equal masses. A butterfly's wing shows this scheme; so do the leaves and flowers

« AnteriorContinuar »