PERIODS in furniture are amazingly interesting if one plunges into the story, not with tense nerves, but gaily, for mere amusement, and then floats gently, in a drifting mood. One gathers in this way many sparkling historical anecdotes, and much substantial data really not so cumbersome as some imagine!
To know anything at all about a subject one must begin at the beginning, and to make the long run seems a mere spin in an auto, let us at once remind you that the whole fascinating tale lies between the covers of one delightful book, the "Illustrated History of Furniture," by Frederick Litchfield, published by Truslove et Han-son, London, and by John Lane, New York.
There are other books many of them but first exhaust Litchfield and apply what he tells you as you wander through public and private collections of furniture.
If you care for furniture at all, this book, which tells all that is known of its history, will prove highly instructive.
One cannot speak of the gradual development of furniture and furnishing; it is more a case of waves of types, and the story begins on the crest of a wave in Assyria, about 3000 years before Christ! Yes, seriously, interior decoration was an art back in that period and can be traced without any lost links in the chain of evidence.
From Assyria we turn to Egypt and learn from the frescoes and bas-reliefs on walls of ruined tombs, that about that same time, 3000 B. C., rooms on the banks of the Nile were decorated more or less as they are today.
The cultured classes had beautiful ceilings, gilded furniture, cushions and mattresses of dyed linen and wools, stuffed with downy feathers taken from water fowl, curtains that were suspended between columns, and, what is still more interesting to the lover of furniture, we find that the style known as Empire when revived by Napoleon I was at that time in vogue.
Even more remarkable is the fact that parts of legs and rails of furniture were turned as perfectly (I quote Litchfield) as if by a modern lathe. The variety of beautiful woods used by the Egyptians for furniture included ebony, cedar, sycamore and acacia. Marquetry was employed as well as wonderful inlaying with ivory, from both the elephant and hippopotamus. Footstools had little feet made like lion's claws or bull's hoofs.
According to Austin Leyard, the very earliest Assyrian chairs, as well as those of Egypt, had the legs terminating in the same lion's feet or bull's hoofs, which reappear in the Greek, Roman, Empire and even Sheraton furniture of England (eighteenth century).
The first Assyrian chairs were made without backs and of beautifully wrought gold and bronze, an art highly developed at that time.
In Egypt we find the heads of animals capping the backs of chairs in the way that we now see done on Spanish chairs.
The pilasters shown on the Empire furniture, Plate XVI, capped by women's heads with little gold feet at base, and caryatides of a kind, were souvenirs of the Egyptian throne seats, which rested on the backs of slaves possibly prisoners of war.
These chairs were wonderful works of art in gold or bronze. We fancy we can see those interiors, the chairs and beds covered with woven materials in rich colors and leopard skins thrown over chairs, the carpets of a woven palm-fiber and mats of the same, which were used as seats.
Early Egyptian rooms were beautiful in line because simple; never crowded with superfluous furnishings. It is amusing to see on the very earliest bas-reliefs Egyptian belles and beaux reclining against what we know to-day as Empire rolls, seen also on beds in old French prints of the fourteenth century. Who knows, even with the Egyptians this may have been a revived style!
One talks of new notes in color scheme. The Bakst thing was being done in Assyria, 700 B.C.! Sir George Green proved it when he opened up six rooms of a king's palace and found the walls all done in horizontal stripes of red, yellow and green! Also, he states that each entrance had the same number of pilasters. Oh wise Assyrian King and truly neutral, if as is supposed, those rooms were for his six wives!
In furniture, the epoch-making styles have been those showing line, and if decorated, then only with such decorations as were subservient to line; pure Greek and purest Roman, Gothic and early Renaissance, the best of the Louis, Directoire and First Empire, Chippendale, Adam, Sheraton and Heppelwhite.
The bad styles are those where ornamentations envelop and conceal line as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco (baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and XV and the Victorian all examples of the same thing, i. e.: perfect line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the bad in extravagant exuberance of over-ornamentation.
There is a psychic connection between the outline of furniture and the inline of man.
Perfect line, chaste ornamentation, the elimination of the superfluous was the result of the Greek idea of restraint self-control in all things and in all expression. The immense authority of the lawmakers enforced simple austerity as the right and only setting for the daily life of an Athenian, worthy of the name.
There were exceptions, but as a rule all citizens, regardless of their wealth and station, had impressed upon them the civic obligation to express their taste for the beautiful, in the erecting of public buildings in their city of Athens, monuments of perfect art, by God-like artists, Phidias, Apelles, and Praxiteles.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
How To Know If Interior Design Is Right for You
Have you ever seen a beautiful house or office building and wondered who did the work? Have you ever wished that you could do some of the work that you’ve seen elsewhere? Many people wonder what it would be like to be an Interior Designer, but they rarely ever go beyond thinking about it.
If you really want to know if Interior Design is right for, this book will be your comprehensive guide to the ins and outs of the business. In this book, you will learn what it takes to be an Interior Designer, what it costs to get certified, you will get all the techniques on how to get started, and much, much more.
An interior Designer is a consultant. You are there to beautify any particular environment as well as provide your clients with the service of explaining why you are recommending, and doing the things that your project will require. You must educate your client about interior design as well as design.
You have obviously given the idea of being an Interior Designer serious thought or you wouldn’t be reading this. Of course, like most people, you are probably wondering whether or not it is the right choice for you. I can guarantee you, that after you’ve read this, you will know for sure if Interior Design is the right career choice for your future.
Interior Design can be a very lucrative job choice for the right person. You might be wondering exactly what an Interior Designer does. It is really simple. An Interior Designer creates, organizes, and designs commercial and/or residential properties. Basically, an interior designer works with the interior of a particular space, such as rooms, offices, boardrooms, and various other internal spaces. Here is a list of some of the places that interior designers can work in.
·Hotels
·Banks
·Restaurants
·Stadiums
·Arenas
This doesn’t seem very broad, but think of all of the other types of homes and businesses that I didn’t mention. The possibilities are truly endless in this field. Interior Designers do more than just decorate a space. In some cases they can add extra rooms, design patios and gazebos, add or remove wall space, and they spend a great deal of time networking with people.
Interior Designers are responsible for creating a comfortable and relaxed space for their clients to live and/or work in. It is your duty to offer clients the best work that their needs, and budget can give. People put a great deal of trust in you, and you must reward that with the best final result possible.
If you really want to know if Interior Design is right for, this book will be your comprehensive guide to the ins and outs of the business. In this book, you will learn what it takes to be an Interior Designer, what it costs to get certified, you will get all the techniques on how to get started, and much, much more.
An interior Designer is a consultant. You are there to beautify any particular environment as well as provide your clients with the service of explaining why you are recommending, and doing the things that your project will require. You must educate your client about interior design as well as design.
You have obviously given the idea of being an Interior Designer serious thought or you wouldn’t be reading this. Of course, like most people, you are probably wondering whether or not it is the right choice for you. I can guarantee you, that after you’ve read this, you will know for sure if Interior Design is the right career choice for your future.
Interior Design can be a very lucrative job choice for the right person. You might be wondering exactly what an Interior Designer does. It is really simple. An Interior Designer creates, organizes, and designs commercial and/or residential properties. Basically, an interior designer works with the interior of a particular space, such as rooms, offices, boardrooms, and various other internal spaces. Here is a list of some of the places that interior designers can work in.
·Hotels
·Banks
·Restaurants
·Stadiums
·Arenas
This doesn’t seem very broad, but think of all of the other types of homes and businesses that I didn’t mention. The possibilities are truly endless in this field. Interior Designers do more than just decorate a space. In some cases they can add extra rooms, design patios and gazebos, add or remove wall space, and they spend a great deal of time networking with people.
Interior Designers are responsible for creating a comfortable and relaxed space for their clients to live and/or work in. It is your duty to offer clients the best work that their needs, and budget can give. People put a great deal of trust in you, and you must reward that with the best final result possible.
Quick Tips on Pricing your Services
Every Interior Designer has to learn how to price their services. You have to do this so that you can give proper estimates to your clients. This will be invaluable to you as a service provider.
Many people find this to be a very difficult process because they don’t want to over price their clients, nor do they want to lose money on the deal. This can be very frustrating and stressful. However, if you know how to break down the costs it gets a lot easier, and helps you break it down to the client so that they are comfortable.
Since every job is different, every invoice will be different as well. There are different types of invoices that you should have. They each require a different layout and outline. This makes it easier to break down later for calculating the costs.
Costs and Labor
This type of invoice is for designers that have to hire outside contractors to help with the work. (usually when you need to hire people to do drywall for construction work etc)
Costs
This type of invoice is generally just for the costs of the extra furniture and accessories or lighting fixtures that are needed. It also covers the agreed upon extras like paint and wallpaper.
General
This is the type of invoice that only covers your prices as the designer. It deals with the work that you do alone. This invoice is always included with one of the others.
When trying to decide how to put a value to your services alone, that is pretty much up to you. It is best not to price yourself too high in the beginning because you are not a bankable name yet. There are two ways to charge your clients.
Hourly
This method is best for small or simple projects because they are more difficult to price on a per project basis. If you are a starter, you should start yourself at around $15-$20 an hour. At least until you establish yourself in the field. Once you are established you may charge as much as you’d like.
Per Project
This is generally reserved for projects of a larger scale. These are the projects that require the hiring of contractors and various others to help you. Since there is so much work involved, you cannot expect to charge by the hour.
Many people find this to be a very difficult process because they don’t want to over price their clients, nor do they want to lose money on the deal. This can be very frustrating and stressful. However, if you know how to break down the costs it gets a lot easier, and helps you break it down to the client so that they are comfortable.
Since every job is different, every invoice will be different as well. There are different types of invoices that you should have. They each require a different layout and outline. This makes it easier to break down later for calculating the costs.
Costs and Labor
This type of invoice is for designers that have to hire outside contractors to help with the work. (usually when you need to hire people to do drywall for construction work etc)
Costs
This type of invoice is generally just for the costs of the extra furniture and accessories or lighting fixtures that are needed. It also covers the agreed upon extras like paint and wallpaper.
General
This is the type of invoice that only covers your prices as the designer. It deals with the work that you do alone. This invoice is always included with one of the others.
When trying to decide how to put a value to your services alone, that is pretty much up to you. It is best not to price yourself too high in the beginning because you are not a bankable name yet. There are two ways to charge your clients.
Hourly
This method is best for small or simple projects because they are more difficult to price on a per project basis. If you are a starter, you should start yourself at around $15-$20 an hour. At least until you establish yourself in the field. Once you are established you may charge as much as you’d like.
Per Project
This is generally reserved for projects of a larger scale. These are the projects that require the hiring of contractors and various others to help you. Since there is so much work involved, you cannot expect to charge by the hour.
Treatment Of Bathrooms
SUMPTUOUS bathrooms are not modern inventions; on the contrary the bath was a religion with the ancient Greeks, and a luxury to the early Italians. What we have to say here is in regard to the bath as a necessity for all classes.
The treatment of bathrooms has become an interesting branch of interior decoration, whereas once it was left entirely to the architect and plumber.
First, one has to decide whether the bathroom is to be finished in conventional white enamel, which cannot be surpassed for dainty appearance and sanitary cleanliness. Equally dainty to look at and offering the same degree of sanitary cleanliness is a bathroom enameled in some delicate tone to accord a color with the bedroom with which it connects.
Some go so far as to make the bathroom the same color as the bedroom, even when this is dark. We have in mind a bath opening out of a man's bedroom. The bedroom is decorated in dull blues, taupe and mulberry.
The bathroom has the walls painted in broad stripes of dull blue and taupe, the stripes being quite six inches wide. The floor is tiled in large squares of the same blue and taupe; the tub and other furnishings are in dull blue enamel, and the wall-cabinets (one for shaving brushes, tooth brushes, etc., another for shaving cups, medicine glasses, drinking glasses, etc., and the third for medicines, soaps, etc.) are painted a dull mulberry.
Built into the front of each cabinet door is an old colored print covered with glass and framed with dull blue moulding and on the inside of each cabinet door is a mirror. One small closet in the bathroom is large enough to towels and holds a soiled clothesbasket. On the inside of both doors are full-length mirrors.
The criticism that mirrors in men's bathrooms are necessarily an effeminate touch, can be refuted by the statement that so sturdy a soldier as the Great Napoleon had his dressing room at Fontainebleau lined with them!
This fact reminds us that we have recently seen a most fascinating bathroom, planned for a woman, in which the walls and ceiling are of glass, cut in squares and fitted together in the old French way. Over the glass was a dull-gold trellis and twined in and out of this, ivy, absolutely natural in appearance, but made of painted tin.
The floor tiles, and fixtures were white enamel, and a soft moss-green velvet carpet was laid down when the bath was not used.
Bathroom fixtures are today so elaborate in number and quality, that the conveniences one gets are limited only by one's purse. The leading manufacturers have anticipated the dreams of the most luxurious.
Window-curtains for bathrooms should be made of some material, which will neither fade nor pull out of shape when washed. We would suggest scrim, Swiss, or China silk of a good quality.
When buying bath mats, bathrobes, bath-slippers, bath-towels, washcloths and hand-towels, it is easy to keep in mind the color scheme of your rooms, and by following it out, the general appearance of your suite is immensely improved.
For a woman's bathroom, Venetian glass bottles, covered jars and bowls of every size, come in opalescent pale greens and other delicate tints. See Plate XI. Then there are the white glass bottles, jars, bowls, and trays with bunches of dashing pink roses, to be obtained at any good department store.
Glass toilet articles come in considerable variety and at all prices, and to match any color scheme; so use them as notes of color on the glass shelves in your bathrooms. Here, too, is an opportunity to use your old Bristol or Bohemian glass, once regarded as inherited eyesores, but now unearthed, and which, when used to contribute to a color scheme, have a distinct value and real beauty.
The treatment of bathrooms has become an interesting branch of interior decoration, whereas once it was left entirely to the architect and plumber.
First, one has to decide whether the bathroom is to be finished in conventional white enamel, which cannot be surpassed for dainty appearance and sanitary cleanliness. Equally dainty to look at and offering the same degree of sanitary cleanliness is a bathroom enameled in some delicate tone to accord a color with the bedroom with which it connects.
Some go so far as to make the bathroom the same color as the bedroom, even when this is dark. We have in mind a bath opening out of a man's bedroom. The bedroom is decorated in dull blues, taupe and mulberry.
The bathroom has the walls painted in broad stripes of dull blue and taupe, the stripes being quite six inches wide. The floor is tiled in large squares of the same blue and taupe; the tub and other furnishings are in dull blue enamel, and the wall-cabinets (one for shaving brushes, tooth brushes, etc., another for shaving cups, medicine glasses, drinking glasses, etc., and the third for medicines, soaps, etc.) are painted a dull mulberry.
Built into the front of each cabinet door is an old colored print covered with glass and framed with dull blue moulding and on the inside of each cabinet door is a mirror. One small closet in the bathroom is large enough to towels and holds a soiled clothesbasket. On the inside of both doors are full-length mirrors.
The criticism that mirrors in men's bathrooms are necessarily an effeminate touch, can be refuted by the statement that so sturdy a soldier as the Great Napoleon had his dressing room at Fontainebleau lined with them!
This fact reminds us that we have recently seen a most fascinating bathroom, planned for a woman, in which the walls and ceiling are of glass, cut in squares and fitted together in the old French way. Over the glass was a dull-gold trellis and twined in and out of this, ivy, absolutely natural in appearance, but made of painted tin.
The floor tiles, and fixtures were white enamel, and a soft moss-green velvet carpet was laid down when the bath was not used.
Bathroom fixtures are today so elaborate in number and quality, that the conveniences one gets are limited only by one's purse. The leading manufacturers have anticipated the dreams of the most luxurious.
Window-curtains for bathrooms should be made of some material, which will neither fade nor pull out of shape when washed. We would suggest scrim, Swiss, or China silk of a good quality.
When buying bath mats, bathrobes, bath-slippers, bath-towels, washcloths and hand-towels, it is easy to keep in mind the color scheme of your rooms, and by following it out, the general appearance of your suite is immensely improved.
For a woman's bathroom, Venetian glass bottles, covered jars and bowls of every size, come in opalescent pale greens and other delicate tints. See Plate XI. Then there are the white glass bottles, jars, bowls, and trays with bunches of dashing pink roses, to be obtained at any good department store.
Glass toilet articles come in considerable variety and at all prices, and to match any color scheme; so use them as notes of color on the glass shelves in your bathrooms. Here, too, is an opportunity to use your old Bristol or Bohemian glass, once regarded as inherited eyesores, but now unearthed, and which, when used to contribute to a color scheme, have a distinct value and real beauty.
Questions for Consideration to be Interior Design
Am I Creative?
Creativity is a subtle, but important quality to have when considering interior design as a profession. Much of your advancement will depend on your ability to be original in your creative efforts to design any space. Clients will always want to keep a designer that can offer them something that nobody else has.
You will also need to be able to turn whatever items that they already have into works of art. Sometimes clients do not want to change everything, or buy new furnishings and draperies; they simply want to make whatever they do have look and feel different. Creative thinking is the only thing that is going to help here.
Colors are your friend, and creativity can help you in setting colors against one another. Many designers love to add color to a room and change things just using this method and perhaps adding accents to existing items.
Accents in a room can vary. You can create a great space by adding throw pillows, valances, and vases. This is the perfect career choice for a person that likes to be creative, abut not idle and/or isolated.
Am I Organized?
Believe it or not, Interior Designers have to be extremely well organized to be able to handle all of the little details that go into doing a good job. You have to be able to keep track of your entire inventory, while keeping on top of other things also like, materials, tracking orders, employees, and making sure that you stay on or below the budget that your client set out for you.
It is no easy feat to try and keep track of all the things that have to be done; especially when you’ve got people constantly surrounding you. You must monitor what everyone is doing and still manage to keep up on what you should be doing. Do not forget that you also have to appear calm because your clients will likely be asking you a great deal of questions. If you are scattered and panicked, it will be difficult to answer all the questions and look cool at the same time.
The ability to know where everything is at, and where every person is at is another aspect of organization. It is very hard to keep jobs if you are constantly wondering where things, and employees are.
You will need to be very well organized if your design projects lead you to having to add or remove a room and/or wall. This type of work requires the use of blueprints. You must be able to read them as well as draw them up, you cannot do this without a great sense of organization.
How Good am I at Problem Solving?
The ability to problem solve is a necessity for an Interior Designer. As an Interior Designer, you will encounter glitches, and it is a must that you can deal with them. Many times, these glitches will need to be solved on the spot.
Your organizational skills will come in handy when you need to solve a problem as well. An organized workplace will help you to have an organized mind. Thoughts have a way of being cluttered when your work space is likewise.
Being able think quickly and under pressure is a definite asset to problem solving. Your problem is not going to get easier if it takes you too long to come up with a solution for it. Actually, waiting can just give the universe more time to make the problem get bigger.
Creativity is a subtle, but important quality to have when considering interior design as a profession. Much of your advancement will depend on your ability to be original in your creative efforts to design any space. Clients will always want to keep a designer that can offer them something that nobody else has.
You will also need to be able to turn whatever items that they already have into works of art. Sometimes clients do not want to change everything, or buy new furnishings and draperies; they simply want to make whatever they do have look and feel different. Creative thinking is the only thing that is going to help here.
Colors are your friend, and creativity can help you in setting colors against one another. Many designers love to add color to a room and change things just using this method and perhaps adding accents to existing items.
Accents in a room can vary. You can create a great space by adding throw pillows, valances, and vases. This is the perfect career choice for a person that likes to be creative, abut not idle and/or isolated.
Am I Organized?
Believe it or not, Interior Designers have to be extremely well organized to be able to handle all of the little details that go into doing a good job. You have to be able to keep track of your entire inventory, while keeping on top of other things also like, materials, tracking orders, employees, and making sure that you stay on or below the budget that your client set out for you.
It is no easy feat to try and keep track of all the things that have to be done; especially when you’ve got people constantly surrounding you. You must monitor what everyone is doing and still manage to keep up on what you should be doing. Do not forget that you also have to appear calm because your clients will likely be asking you a great deal of questions. If you are scattered and panicked, it will be difficult to answer all the questions and look cool at the same time.
The ability to know where everything is at, and where every person is at is another aspect of organization. It is very hard to keep jobs if you are constantly wondering where things, and employees are.
You will need to be very well organized if your design projects lead you to having to add or remove a room and/or wall. This type of work requires the use of blueprints. You must be able to read them as well as draw them up, you cannot do this without a great sense of organization.
How Good am I at Problem Solving?
The ability to problem solve is a necessity for an Interior Designer. As an Interior Designer, you will encounter glitches, and it is a must that you can deal with them. Many times, these glitches will need to be solved on the spot.
Your organizational skills will come in handy when you need to solve a problem as well. An organized workplace will help you to have an organized mind. Thoughts have a way of being cluttered when your work space is likewise.
Being able think quickly and under pressure is a definite asset to problem solving. Your problem is not going to get easier if it takes you too long to come up with a solution for it. Actually, waiting can just give the universe more time to make the problem get bigger.
Treatment Of A Guest Room
HERE we can indulge our tastes for beautiful quality of materials and fine workmanship, as well as good line and color, so we describe a room which has elegant distinction and atmosphere, yet is not a so-called period room rather a modern room, in the sense that it combines beautiful lines and exquisite coloring with every modern development for genuine comfort and convenience.
The walls are paneled and painted a soft taupe there are no pictures; simply one very beautiful mirror in a dull-gold frame, a Louis XVI reproduction.
The carpet made of dark taupe velvet covers the entire floor. The furniture is Louis XV, of the wonderful painted sort, the beautiful bed with its low head and foot boards exactly the same height, curving backward; the edges a waved line, the ground-color a lovely pistachio green, and the decoration gay old-fashioned garden flowers in every possible shade.
The bureau has three or four drawers and a bowed front with clambering flowers. These two pieces, and a delightful night table are exact copies of the Clyde Fitch set in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, at New York; the originals are genuine antiques, and their color soft from age. A graceful dressing table with winged mirrors, has been designed to go with this set, and is painted like the bureau. The glass is a modern reproduction of the lovely old eighteenth century mirror glass which has designs cut into it, forming a frame.
For chairs, all-over upholstered ones are used, of good lines and proportions; two or three for comfort, and a low slipper-chair for convenience. These are covered in a chintz with a light green ground, like the furniture, and flowered in roses and violets, green foliage and lovely blue sprays.
The window curtains are of soft, apple-green taffeta, trimmed with a broad puffing of the same silk, edged on each side by black moss-trimming, two inches wide. These curtains hang from dull-gold cornices of wood, with open carving, through which one gets glimpses of the green taffeta of the curtains.
In another suite we have a boudoir done in sage greens and soft browns. The curtains of taffeta, in stripes of the two colors. Two tiers of crème net form sash curtains.
The carpet is a rich mulberry brown, day-bed a reproduction of an antique, painted in faded greens with pannier fleur design on back, in lovely faded colors, taffeta cushions of sage green and an occasional note about the room of mulberry and dull blue. Electric light shades are of decorated parchment paper.
Really an enchanting nest, and as it is in a New York apartment, and occasionally used as a bedroom, a piece of furniture has been designed for it similar to the wardrobe shown in picture, only not so high. The glass door, when open, discloses a toilet table, completely fitted out, the presence of which one would never suspect.
The sash-curtains are of the very finest cream net, and the window shades are of glazed linen, a deep cream ground, with a pattern showing a green lattice over which climb pink roses. The shades are edged at the bottom with a narrow pink fringe.
The bed has a cover of green taffeta exactly like curtains, with the same trimming of puffed taffeta, edged with a black moss trimming.
The mantelpiece is true to artistic standards and realizes the responsibility of its position as keynote to the room. Placed upon it are a beautiful old clock and two vases, correct as to line and color.
Always be careful not to spoil a beautiful mantel or beautiful ornaments by having them out of proportion one with the other. Plate XXIV shows a mantel which fails as a composition because the bust, an original by Behest, beautiful in itself, is too heavy for the mantel it Stands on and too large for the mirror, which reflects it and serves as its background.
Keep everything in correct proportion to the whole. We have in mind the instance of some rarely beautiful walls taken from an ancient monastery in Parma, Italy. They were ideal in their original setting, but since they have been transported to America, no setting seems right. They belonged in a building where there was a succession of small rooms with low ceilings, each room perfect like so many pearls on a string. Here in America their only suitable place would be a museum, or to frame the tiny "devotional" of some precious Flower of Modernity.
The walls are paneled and painted a soft taupe there are no pictures; simply one very beautiful mirror in a dull-gold frame, a Louis XVI reproduction.
The carpet made of dark taupe velvet covers the entire floor. The furniture is Louis XV, of the wonderful painted sort, the beautiful bed with its low head and foot boards exactly the same height, curving backward; the edges a waved line, the ground-color a lovely pistachio green, and the decoration gay old-fashioned garden flowers in every possible shade.
The bureau has three or four drawers and a bowed front with clambering flowers. These two pieces, and a delightful night table are exact copies of the Clyde Fitch set in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, at New York; the originals are genuine antiques, and their color soft from age. A graceful dressing table with winged mirrors, has been designed to go with this set, and is painted like the bureau. The glass is a modern reproduction of the lovely old eighteenth century mirror glass which has designs cut into it, forming a frame.
For chairs, all-over upholstered ones are used, of good lines and proportions; two or three for comfort, and a low slipper-chair for convenience. These are covered in a chintz with a light green ground, like the furniture, and flowered in roses and violets, green foliage and lovely blue sprays.
The window curtains are of soft, apple-green taffeta, trimmed with a broad puffing of the same silk, edged on each side by black moss-trimming, two inches wide. These curtains hang from dull-gold cornices of wood, with open carving, through which one gets glimpses of the green taffeta of the curtains.
In another suite we have a boudoir done in sage greens and soft browns. The curtains of taffeta, in stripes of the two colors. Two tiers of crème net form sash curtains.
The carpet is a rich mulberry brown, day-bed a reproduction of an antique, painted in faded greens with pannier fleur design on back, in lovely faded colors, taffeta cushions of sage green and an occasional note about the room of mulberry and dull blue. Electric light shades are of decorated parchment paper.
Really an enchanting nest, and as it is in a New York apartment, and occasionally used as a bedroom, a piece of furniture has been designed for it similar to the wardrobe shown in picture, only not so high. The glass door, when open, discloses a toilet table, completely fitted out, the presence of which one would never suspect.
The sash-curtains are of the very finest cream net, and the window shades are of glazed linen, a deep cream ground, with a pattern showing a green lattice over which climb pink roses. The shades are edged at the bottom with a narrow pink fringe.
The bed has a cover of green taffeta exactly like curtains, with the same trimming of puffed taffeta, edged with a black moss trimming.
The mantelpiece is true to artistic standards and realizes the responsibility of its position as keynote to the room. Placed upon it are a beautiful old clock and two vases, correct as to line and color.
Always be careful not to spoil a beautiful mantel or beautiful ornaments by having them out of proportion one with the other. Plate XXIV shows a mantel which fails as a composition because the bust, an original by Behest, beautiful in itself, is too heavy for the mantel it Stands on and too large for the mirror, which reflects it and serves as its background.
Keep everything in correct proportion to the whole. We have in mind the instance of some rarely beautiful walls taken from an ancient monastery in Parma, Italy. They were ideal in their original setting, but since they have been transported to America, no setting seems right. They belonged in a building where there was a succession of small rooms with low ceilings, each room perfect like so many pearls on a string. Here in America their only suitable place would be a museum, or to frame the tiny "devotional" of some precious Flower of Modernity.
The Gothic Period
The Gothic Period is the pointed period, and dominated the art of Europe, from about the tenth to the fifteenth century. Its origin was Teutonic, its development and perfection French.
At first, the house of a feudal lord meant one large hall with a raised dais, curtained off for him and his immediate family, and subdivided into sleeping apartments for the women. On this dais a table ran crossways, at which the lord and his family with their guests, ate, while a few steps lower, at a long table running lengthwise of the hall, sat the retainers.
The hall was, also, the living room for all within the walls of the castle. Sand was strewn on the stone floor and the dogs of the knights ate what was thrown to them, gnawing the bones at their leisure. Wonderful tapestries hung from the walls surrounded this rude scene: woman’s record of man's deeds.
Later, we read of stairs and of another room known as the Parlor or talking-room, and here begins the sub-division of homes, which in democratic America has arrived at a point where more than 200 rooms are often sheltered under one private roof!
Oak chests figured prominently among the furnishings of a Gothic home, because the possessions of those feudal lords, who were constantly at war with one another, often had to be moved in haste.
As men's lives became more settled, their possessions gradually multiplied; but even at the end of the eleventh century bedsteads were provided only for the nobility, probably on account of expense, as they were very grand affairs, carved and draped. To that time and later belong the wonderfully carved presses or wardrobes.
Carved wood paneling was an important addition to interior decoration during the reign of Henry III (1216-72).
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England with Flanders led in the production of mediaeval art.
Hallmarks of the Gothic period are animals and reptiles carved to ornament the structural parts of furniture and to ornament panels. Favorite subjects with the wood carvers of that time were scenes from the lives of the saints (the Church dominated the State) and from the romances, chanted by the minstrels.
At first, the house of a feudal lord meant one large hall with a raised dais, curtained off for him and his immediate family, and subdivided into sleeping apartments for the women. On this dais a table ran crossways, at which the lord and his family with their guests, ate, while a few steps lower, at a long table running lengthwise of the hall, sat the retainers.
The hall was, also, the living room for all within the walls of the castle. Sand was strewn on the stone floor and the dogs of the knights ate what was thrown to them, gnawing the bones at their leisure. Wonderful tapestries hung from the walls surrounded this rude scene: woman’s record of man's deeds.
Later, we read of stairs and of another room known as the Parlor or talking-room, and here begins the sub-division of homes, which in democratic America has arrived at a point where more than 200 rooms are often sheltered under one private roof!
Oak chests figured prominently among the furnishings of a Gothic home, because the possessions of those feudal lords, who were constantly at war with one another, often had to be moved in haste.
As men's lives became more settled, their possessions gradually multiplied; but even at the end of the eleventh century bedsteads were provided only for the nobility, probably on account of expense, as they were very grand affairs, carved and draped. To that time and later belong the wonderfully carved presses or wardrobes.
Carved wood paneling was an important addition to interior decoration during the reign of Henry III (1216-72).
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England with Flanders led in the production of mediaeval art.
Hallmarks of the Gothic period are animals and reptiles carved to ornament the structural parts of furniture and to ornament panels. Favorite subjects with the wood carvers of that time were scenes from the lives of the saints (the Church dominated the State) and from the romances, chanted by the minstrels.
Sunrooms
THERE are countless fascinating schemes for arranging sunrooms. One, which we have recently seen near Philadelphia, was the result of enclosing a large piazza, projecting from an immense house situated in the midst of lawns and groves.
The walls are painted orange and striped with pale yellow; the floors are covered with the new variety of matting, which imitates tiles, and shows large squares of color, blocked off by black. The chintzes used are in vivid orange, yellow and green, in a stunning design; the wicker chairs are painted orange and black, and from the immense iridescent globes of electric light hang long, orange silk tassels.
Iron fountains, wonderful designs in black and gold, throw water over gold and silver fish, or gay water plants; while, in black and gold cages, vivid parrots and orange-colored canaries gleam through the bars. Iron vases of black and gold on tall pedestals, are filled with trailing ivy and bright colored plants. Along the walls are wicker sofas, painted orange and black, luxuriously comfortable with down cushions covered, as are some of the chair cushions, in soft lemon, sun-proofed twills.
Here one finds card-tables, tea-tables and smoking-tables, a writing-desk fully equipped, and at one end, a wardrobe of black and gold, hung with an assortment of silk wraps and "wooleys"for an un-provided and chilly guest, in early spring, when the steam heat is off and the glass front open.
Even on a grey, winter day, this orange and gold room seems flooded with sun, and gives one a distinctly cheerful sensation when entering it from the house.
Of course, if your porch-room is mainly for mid-summer use and your house in a warm region, then we commend instead of sun-producing colors, cool tones of green, grey or blue. If your porch floor is bad, cover it with dark-red linoleum and wax it. The effect is like a cool, tiled floor. On this you can use a few porch rugs.
Black and white awnings or awnings in broad, green-and-white stripes, or plain green awnings, are deliciously cool-looking, and rail-boxes filled with green and white or blue and pale pink flowers are refreshing on a summer day.
By the sea, where the air is bracing, and it is not necessary to trick the senses with a pretence at coolness, nothing is more satisfactory or gay than scarlet geraniums; but if they are used, care must be taken that they harmonize with the color of the awnings and the chintz on the porch.
Speaking of rail-boxes reminds us that in making over a small summer house and converting a cheap affair into one of some pretensions, remember that one of the most telling points is the character of your porch railing. So at once remove the cheap one with its small, upright slats and the insignificant and frail top rail, and have a solid porch railing (or porch fence) built with broad, top rail.
Then place all around porch, resting on iron brackets, rail-flower boxes, the tops of these level with the top of the rail, and paint the boxes the color of the house trimmings. Filled with running vines and gay flowers, nothing could be more charming.
Window boxes make any house lovely and are a large part of that charm which appeals to us, whether the house is a mansion in Mayfair or a Bavarian farmhouse. Americans are learning this.
The window and rail-boxes of a house look best when all are planted with the same variety of flowers.
Having given a certain air of distinction to your porch railing, add another touch to the appearance of your small, remodeled house by having the shutters hung from the top of the windows, instead of from the sides.
A charming variety of awning or sun-shades, to keep the sun and glare out of rooms, is the old English idea of a straw-thatching, woven in and out until it makes a broad, long mat which is suspended from the top of windows, on the outside of the house, being held out and permanently in place, at the customary angle of awnings.
We first saw this picturesque kind of rustic awnings used on little cottages of a large estate in Vermont, cottages once owned and lived in by laborers, but bought and put in comfortable condition to be used as overflow rooms for guests, in connection with the large family mansion (once the picturesque village inn).
The art of making these straw awnings is not generally understood in America. In the case to which we refer, one of the gardeners employed on the estate, chanced to be an old Englishman who had woven the straw window awnings for farmhouses in his own country.
The straw awnings, with window boxes planted with bright geraniums and vines, make an inland cottage delightfully picturesque and are practical, although the sea might destroy the straw awnings by high winds.
The walls are painted orange and striped with pale yellow; the floors are covered with the new variety of matting, which imitates tiles, and shows large squares of color, blocked off by black. The chintzes used are in vivid orange, yellow and green, in a stunning design; the wicker chairs are painted orange and black, and from the immense iridescent globes of electric light hang long, orange silk tassels.
Iron fountains, wonderful designs in black and gold, throw water over gold and silver fish, or gay water plants; while, in black and gold cages, vivid parrots and orange-colored canaries gleam through the bars. Iron vases of black and gold on tall pedestals, are filled with trailing ivy and bright colored plants. Along the walls are wicker sofas, painted orange and black, luxuriously comfortable with down cushions covered, as are some of the chair cushions, in soft lemon, sun-proofed twills.
Here one finds card-tables, tea-tables and smoking-tables, a writing-desk fully equipped, and at one end, a wardrobe of black and gold, hung with an assortment of silk wraps and "wooleys"for an un-provided and chilly guest, in early spring, when the steam heat is off and the glass front open.
Even on a grey, winter day, this orange and gold room seems flooded with sun, and gives one a distinctly cheerful sensation when entering it from the house.
Of course, if your porch-room is mainly for mid-summer use and your house in a warm region, then we commend instead of sun-producing colors, cool tones of green, grey or blue. If your porch floor is bad, cover it with dark-red linoleum and wax it. The effect is like a cool, tiled floor. On this you can use a few porch rugs.
Black and white awnings or awnings in broad, green-and-white stripes, or plain green awnings, are deliciously cool-looking, and rail-boxes filled with green and white or blue and pale pink flowers are refreshing on a summer day.
By the sea, where the air is bracing, and it is not necessary to trick the senses with a pretence at coolness, nothing is more satisfactory or gay than scarlet geraniums; but if they are used, care must be taken that they harmonize with the color of the awnings and the chintz on the porch.
Speaking of rail-boxes reminds us that in making over a small summer house and converting a cheap affair into one of some pretensions, remember that one of the most telling points is the character of your porch railing. So at once remove the cheap one with its small, upright slats and the insignificant and frail top rail, and have a solid porch railing (or porch fence) built with broad, top rail.
Then place all around porch, resting on iron brackets, rail-flower boxes, the tops of these level with the top of the rail, and paint the boxes the color of the house trimmings. Filled with running vines and gay flowers, nothing could be more charming.
Window boxes make any house lovely and are a large part of that charm which appeals to us, whether the house is a mansion in Mayfair or a Bavarian farmhouse. Americans are learning this.
The window and rail-boxes of a house look best when all are planted with the same variety of flowers.
Having given a certain air of distinction to your porch railing, add another touch to the appearance of your small, remodeled house by having the shutters hung from the top of the windows, instead of from the sides.
A charming variety of awning or sun-shades, to keep the sun and glare out of rooms, is the old English idea of a straw-thatching, woven in and out until it makes a broad, long mat which is suspended from the top of windows, on the outside of the house, being held out and permanently in place, at the customary angle of awnings.
We first saw this picturesque kind of rustic awnings used on little cottages of a large estate in Vermont, cottages once owned and lived in by laborers, but bought and put in comfortable condition to be used as overflow rooms for guests, in connection with the large family mansion (once the picturesque village inn).
The art of making these straw awnings is not generally understood in America. In the case to which we refer, one of the gardeners employed on the estate, chanced to be an old Englishman who had woven the straw window awnings for farmhouses in his own country.
The straw awnings, with window boxes planted with bright geraniums and vines, make an inland cottage delightfully picturesque and are practical, although the sea might destroy the straw awnings by high winds.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Venetian Glass, Old And Modern
IF you have been in Venice then you know the Murano Museum and its beguiling collection of Venetian glass, that old glass so vastly more beautiful in line and decoration than the modern type of, say, fifteen years ago, when colors had become bad mixtures, and decorations meaningless excrescences.
A bit of inside information given out to some one really interested, led to a revival of pure line and lovely, simple coloring, with appropriate decorations or none at all. You may already know that romantic bit of history. It seems that when the museum was first started, about four hundred years ago, the glass blowers agreed to donate specimens of their work, provided their descendants should be allowed access to the museum for models.
This contract made it a simple matter for a connoisseur to get reproduced exactly what was wanted, and what was not in the market. Elegance, distinguished simplicity in shapes, done in glass of a single color, or in one color with a simple edge in a contrasting shade, or in one color with a whole nosegay of colors to set it off, appearing literally as flowers or fruit to surmount the stopper of a bottle, the top of a jar, or as decorations on candlesticks.
It was in the Museo Civico of Venice that we saw and fell victims to an enchanting antique table decorations formal Italian garden, in blown glass, once the property of a great Venetian family and redolent of those golden days when Venice was the playground of princes, and feasting their especial joy; days when visiting royalty and the world's greatest folk could have no higher honor bestowed upon them than a gift of Venetian glass, often real marvels mounted in silver and gold.
We never tired of looking at that fairy garden with its delicate copings, balustrades and vases of glass, all abloom with exquisite posies in every conceivable shade, wrought of glass a veritable dream thing.
Finally, nothing would do but we must know if it had ever been copied. The curator said that he believed it had, and an address was given us. How it all comes back! We arose at dawn, as time was precious, took our coffee in haste and then came that gliding trip in the gondola, through countless canals, to a quarter quite unknown to us, where at work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden.
This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jeweled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens have their faithful devotees, as is proved by the continuous procession of the dainty wonders, ever moving toward our sturdy shores.
A bit of inside information given out to some one really interested, led to a revival of pure line and lovely, simple coloring, with appropriate decorations or none at all. You may already know that romantic bit of history. It seems that when the museum was first started, about four hundred years ago, the glass blowers agreed to donate specimens of their work, provided their descendants should be allowed access to the museum for models.
This contract made it a simple matter for a connoisseur to get reproduced exactly what was wanted, and what was not in the market. Elegance, distinguished simplicity in shapes, done in glass of a single color, or in one color with a simple edge in a contrasting shade, or in one color with a whole nosegay of colors to set it off, appearing literally as flowers or fruit to surmount the stopper of a bottle, the top of a jar, or as decorations on candlesticks.
It was in the Museo Civico of Venice that we saw and fell victims to an enchanting antique table decorations formal Italian garden, in blown glass, once the property of a great Venetian family and redolent of those golden days when Venice was the playground of princes, and feasting their especial joy; days when visiting royalty and the world's greatest folk could have no higher honor bestowed upon them than a gift of Venetian glass, often real marvels mounted in silver and gold.
We never tired of looking at that fairy garden with its delicate copings, balustrades and vases of glass, all abloom with exquisite posies in every conceivable shade, wrought of glass a veritable dream thing.
Finally, nothing would do but we must know if it had ever been copied. The curator said that he believed it had, and an address was given us. How it all comes back! We arose at dawn, as time was precious, took our coffee in haste and then came that gliding trip in the gondola, through countless canals, to a quarter quite unknown to us, where at work in a small room, we came upon our glass blower and the coveted copy of that lovely table-garden.
This man had made four, and one was still in his possession. We brought it back to America, a gleaming jeweled cobweb, and what happened was that the very ethereal quality of its beauty made the average taste ignore it! However, a few years have made a vast difference in table, as well as all other decorations, and to-day the same Venetian gardens have their faithful devotees, as is proved by the continuous procession of the dainty wonders, ever moving toward our sturdy shores.
What Do I Need To Be Interior Design ?
The first thing that you are going to need if you want to be an interior designer is the passion for it. You must ask yourself is whether or not designing homes and/or properties is something that you could feel passionate about. To find out ask, yourself these questions.
Do you constantly rearrange the furniture in your own home?
Do you often have ideas about friends and families homes, and what would make them look better?
Are you finding that people often ask your opinion about their own homes, and what you think may make it look better?
Do you like planning the rearrangement of your home before you do it?
When decorating your own home, do you find yourself wondering how best to incorporate colors into your space?
If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, than you already have the passion to become an interior designer. These questions merely touched on the very thing that drew you to this book in the first place. It just helped you realize that you were right in doing so.
The second thing that may need to become an interior designer is the interest. This basically explores whether or not your actual interest is genuine. Many people consider a great many careers before they develop a genuine interest in choosing one. We know that you have the passion, but does that passion mean that you have enough interest to follow through? I have some more questions for you to answer if you really want to know if the interest is really there for you.
Do you feel the need to learn how best to coordinate the colors in your room before you seek to change them?
Do you seek outside advice from professionals on how best to accent a particular object or color?
Do you seek to know the history behind a particular style of décor when you notice one?
Do you find yourself wondering what sort of planning went in to the creation of a glorious room you’ve been in?
Would you prefer to read a design magazine above any other? (Modern Living, or Country Style Home)
Do you think that Martha Stewart is nothing compared to you?
Again, a yes answer to any of these questions means a yes to your interest. But there is another aspect of interior design that must be covered. You may wish to be a certified interior designer. If that is the case, you will need to get a formal education in this field.
Do you constantly rearrange the furniture in your own home?
Do you often have ideas about friends and families homes, and what would make them look better?
Are you finding that people often ask your opinion about their own homes, and what you think may make it look better?
Do you like planning the rearrangement of your home before you do it?
When decorating your own home, do you find yourself wondering how best to incorporate colors into your space?
If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, than you already have the passion to become an interior designer. These questions merely touched on the very thing that drew you to this book in the first place. It just helped you realize that you were right in doing so.
The second thing that may need to become an interior designer is the interest. This basically explores whether or not your actual interest is genuine. Many people consider a great many careers before they develop a genuine interest in choosing one. We know that you have the passion, but does that passion mean that you have enough interest to follow through? I have some more questions for you to answer if you really want to know if the interest is really there for you.
Do you feel the need to learn how best to coordinate the colors in your room before you seek to change them?
Do you seek outside advice from professionals on how best to accent a particular object or color?
Do you seek to know the history behind a particular style of décor when you notice one?
Do you find yourself wondering what sort of planning went in to the creation of a glorious room you’ve been in?
Would you prefer to read a design magazine above any other? (Modern Living, or Country Style Home)
Do you think that Martha Stewart is nothing compared to you?
Again, a yes answer to any of these questions means a yes to your interest. But there is another aspect of interior design that must be covered. You may wish to be a certified interior designer. If that is the case, you will need to get a formal education in this field.
What to expect when Getting Started Interior Designing
When you are just getting started in any business, you can expect to have to do a lot of leg work to get a clientele base. This is not easy, and requires a great deal of people skills from you. You will have to go out there and meet every person that you can think of.
You should expect to encounter a lot of rejection from consumers, as well as competition from other designers. Many times, a potential client will want to place your work and estimates against others. If you can, offer to outbid everyone that you can, but be careful because a client may not tell you the truth about the bids. It is good to try and check with the designers about their bids. Some will tell you.
As a new Interior Designer, you can expect to get a lot of resistance from potential clients. You can expect to spend a great deal of time and money on building up your name. You may have to lower your estimates at first. You may have to spend some money by advertising your services in your local newspaper or penny saver.
Here are a few good ideas on how you can get some attention for you and your business.
Set up a booth at your local mall. Have business cards and your portfolio on hand. Try and set up some of your best work around you and prop them up for all to see. Offer free estimates to any takers.
Do the same at any other community gatherings.
Offer to do small jobs for free with the addition of a paid space.
Insert flyers into you local newspaper.
Build your portfolio.
You should expect to encounter a lot of rejection from consumers, as well as competition from other designers. Many times, a potential client will want to place your work and estimates against others. If you can, offer to outbid everyone that you can, but be careful because a client may not tell you the truth about the bids. It is good to try and check with the designers about their bids. Some will tell you.
As a new Interior Designer, you can expect to get a lot of resistance from potential clients. You can expect to spend a great deal of time and money on building up your name. You may have to lower your estimates at first. You may have to spend some money by advertising your services in your local newspaper or penny saver.
Here are a few good ideas on how you can get some attention for you and your business.
Set up a booth at your local mall. Have business cards and your portfolio on hand. Try and set up some of your best work around you and prop them up for all to see. Offer free estimates to any takers.
Do the same at any other community gatherings.
Offer to do small jobs for free with the addition of a paid space.
Insert flyers into you local newspaper.
Build your portfolio.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Period Rooms
WE use the term "period rooms" with full knowledge of the difficulties involved, in defining Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Directoire, Jacobean, Empire, Georgian, Victorian and Colonial decorations. Each period certainly has its distinctive earmarks in line and typical decoration, but you must realize that a period gradually evolves, at first exhibiting characteristics of its ancestors, then as it matures, showing a definite new type, and, later, when the elation of success has worn off, yielding to various foreign influences. By way of example, note the Chinese decoration on some of the painted furniture of the Louis XVI type, the Dutch influence on Chippendale in line, and the Egyptian on Empire.
One fascinating way of becoming familiar with history is to delve into the origin and development of periods in furniture. The story of Napoleon is recorded in the unpretentious Directoire, the ornate Empire of Fontainebleau, while the conversion of round columns into obelisk-like pilasters surmounted by heads, the bronze and gilded-wood ornaments in the form of the Sphynx, are frank souvenirs of Egypt.
Every period, whether ascribed to England, France, Italy or Holland, has found expression in all adjacent countries. An Italian Louis XVI chair, mirror or appliqué is frequently sold in Paris or London as French and Empire furniture was "made in Germany." Periods have no restricted nationality; but nationality often declares itself in periods.
That is to say, lines may be copied; but workmanship is another thing. Apropos of this take the French Empire furniture, massive as much of it is, built squarely and solidly to the floor, but showing most extraordinary grace on account of the amazing delicacy of intricate designs, done by the greatest French sculptors of the time and worked out in metal by the trained hands of men who had a special genius for this art. At no other time, nor in any other country, has an equal degree of perfection in the fine chiseling of metals so much as Approached the standard attained during the Louis and the Empire periods.
If in your wandering, you happen upon a genuine bit of this work in silver or ormoulu, buy it The writer once found in a New Jersey antique shop, a rare Empire bronze vase, urn-shaped, a specimen of the very finest kind of this metal engraving. The price asked for it (in ignorance, of course) was $2.50! The piece would have brought $40 in Paris. But the quest of the antique is another story.
When one realizes the eternal borrowing of one country from another, the ever-recurring renaissance of past periods and the legitimate and illegitimate mixing of styles, it is no wonder that the amateur feels nervously uncertain, or frankly ignorant. Many a professional decorator hesitates to give a final judgment.
To take one case in point, we glibly speak of "Colonial" furniture, that term which covers such a multitude of sins, and inspiring virtues, too! We have the Colonial, which closely resembles the Empire, and we have what is sometimes styled the Chippendale Colonial, following Louis XIV, XV and XVI. The Chippendale of England. Our Colonial cabinet-makers used as models, beautiful pieces imported from England, Holland and France by the wealthier members of our communities.
Also a Chinese and Japanese influence crept in, on account of the lacquer and carved teak wood, brought home by our seafaring ancestors. It is quite possible that the carved teak wood stimulated the clever maker of some of the most beautiful Victorian furniture made in America, which is gradually finding its way into the hands of collectors.
Some of these cabinet-makers glued together and put under heavy pressure seven to nine layers of rosewood with the grain running at every angle, so as to produce strength. When the layers had been crushed into a solid block, they carved their open designs, using one continuous piece of wood for the ornamental rim of even large sofas.
The best of the Victorian period is attractive, but how can we express our opinion of those American monstrosities of the sixties or seventies, beds in rosewood and walnut, the head-boards covering the side of a room, bureaus proportionately huge, following out the idea that a piece of furniture to be beautiful must be very large and very expensive! It is to be hoped that wary cabinet-makers are to day rescuing the lovely rosewood and walnut wasted at that time.
The art of furniture making, like every other art, came into being to serve a clearly defined purpose. This must not be forgotten. A chair and a sofa are to sit on; a mirror, to reflect. Remember this last fact when hanging one.
It is important that your mirror reflect one of the most attractive parts of your room, and thus contributes its quota to your scheme of decoration. It is interesting to note that chairs were made with solid wooden seats when men wore armor, velvet cushions followed more fragile raiment, and tapestries while always mural decorations were first used in place of doors and partitions, in feudal castles, before there were interior doors and partitions.
Any piece of furniture is artistically bad when it does not satisfactorily serve its purpose. The equally fundamental law that everything useful should at the same time be beautiful cannot be repeated too often.
Period rooms which slavishly repeat, in every piece of furniture and ornament, only one type, have but a museum interest If your rooms are to serve as a home, give them a winning, human quality, keep before your mind's eye, not royal palaces which have become museums, but homes, built and furnished by men and women whose traditions and associations gave them standards of beauty, so that they bought the choicest furniture both at home and abroad.
In such a home, whether it be an intimate palace in Europe, a Colonial mansion in New England, or a Victorian interior of the best type, an extraneous period is often represented by some objet d'art as a delightful, because harmonious note of contrast.
For example, in a Louis XVI salon, where the color scheme is harmonious, one gradually realizes that one of the dominant ornaments in the room is a rare old Chinese vase, brought back from the Orient by one of the family and given a place of honor on account of its uniqueness.
One fascinating way of becoming familiar with history is to delve into the origin and development of periods in furniture. The story of Napoleon is recorded in the unpretentious Directoire, the ornate Empire of Fontainebleau, while the conversion of round columns into obelisk-like pilasters surmounted by heads, the bronze and gilded-wood ornaments in the form of the Sphynx, are frank souvenirs of Egypt.
Every period, whether ascribed to England, France, Italy or Holland, has found expression in all adjacent countries. An Italian Louis XVI chair, mirror or appliqué is frequently sold in Paris or London as French and Empire furniture was "made in Germany." Periods have no restricted nationality; but nationality often declares itself in periods.
That is to say, lines may be copied; but workmanship is another thing. Apropos of this take the French Empire furniture, massive as much of it is, built squarely and solidly to the floor, but showing most extraordinary grace on account of the amazing delicacy of intricate designs, done by the greatest French sculptors of the time and worked out in metal by the trained hands of men who had a special genius for this art. At no other time, nor in any other country, has an equal degree of perfection in the fine chiseling of metals so much as Approached the standard attained during the Louis and the Empire periods.
If in your wandering, you happen upon a genuine bit of this work in silver or ormoulu, buy it The writer once found in a New Jersey antique shop, a rare Empire bronze vase, urn-shaped, a specimen of the very finest kind of this metal engraving. The price asked for it (in ignorance, of course) was $2.50! The piece would have brought $40 in Paris. But the quest of the antique is another story.
When one realizes the eternal borrowing of one country from another, the ever-recurring renaissance of past periods and the legitimate and illegitimate mixing of styles, it is no wonder that the amateur feels nervously uncertain, or frankly ignorant. Many a professional decorator hesitates to give a final judgment.
To take one case in point, we glibly speak of "Colonial" furniture, that term which covers such a multitude of sins, and inspiring virtues, too! We have the Colonial, which closely resembles the Empire, and we have what is sometimes styled the Chippendale Colonial, following Louis XIV, XV and XVI. The Chippendale of England. Our Colonial cabinet-makers used as models, beautiful pieces imported from England, Holland and France by the wealthier members of our communities.
Also a Chinese and Japanese influence crept in, on account of the lacquer and carved teak wood, brought home by our seafaring ancestors. It is quite possible that the carved teak wood stimulated the clever maker of some of the most beautiful Victorian furniture made in America, which is gradually finding its way into the hands of collectors.
Some of these cabinet-makers glued together and put under heavy pressure seven to nine layers of rosewood with the grain running at every angle, so as to produce strength. When the layers had been crushed into a solid block, they carved their open designs, using one continuous piece of wood for the ornamental rim of even large sofas.
The best of the Victorian period is attractive, but how can we express our opinion of those American monstrosities of the sixties or seventies, beds in rosewood and walnut, the head-boards covering the side of a room, bureaus proportionately huge, following out the idea that a piece of furniture to be beautiful must be very large and very expensive! It is to be hoped that wary cabinet-makers are to day rescuing the lovely rosewood and walnut wasted at that time.
The art of furniture making, like every other art, came into being to serve a clearly defined purpose. This must not be forgotten. A chair and a sofa are to sit on; a mirror, to reflect. Remember this last fact when hanging one.
It is important that your mirror reflect one of the most attractive parts of your room, and thus contributes its quota to your scheme of decoration. It is interesting to note that chairs were made with solid wooden seats when men wore armor, velvet cushions followed more fragile raiment, and tapestries while always mural decorations were first used in place of doors and partitions, in feudal castles, before there were interior doors and partitions.
Any piece of furniture is artistically bad when it does not satisfactorily serve its purpose. The equally fundamental law that everything useful should at the same time be beautiful cannot be repeated too often.
Period rooms which slavishly repeat, in every piece of furniture and ornament, only one type, have but a museum interest If your rooms are to serve as a home, give them a winning, human quality, keep before your mind's eye, not royal palaces which have become museums, but homes, built and furnished by men and women whose traditions and associations gave them standards of beauty, so that they bought the choicest furniture both at home and abroad.
In such a home, whether it be an intimate palace in Europe, a Colonial mansion in New England, or a Victorian interior of the best type, an extraneous period is often represented by some objet d'art as a delightful, because harmonious note of contrast.
For example, in a Louis XVI salon, where the color scheme is harmonious, one gradually realizes that one of the dominant ornaments in the room is a rare old Chinese vase, brought back from the Orient by one of the family and given a place of honor on account of its uniqueness.
Painted Furniture
PAINTED furniture is, at present, the vogue, so if you own a piece made by the Adam brothers of England, decorated by the hand of Angelica Kauffman, or Pergolesi, from Greek designs, now is the moment to "star" it.
Different in decoration, but equal in charm, is the seventeenth and eighteenth century painted lacquers of Italy, France, China and Japan. In those days great masters labored at cabinet making and decorating, while distinguished artists carved the woodwork of rooms, and painted the ceilings and walls of even private dwellings.
To day we have reproductions (good and bad) of the veteran types, and some commendable inventions, more or less classic in line, and original in coloring and style of decoration.
At times, one wishes there was less evident effort to be original. We long for the repose of classic color schemes and classic line. In art, the line and the combination of colors, which have continued most popular throughout the ages, are very apt to be those with which one cans livelongest and not tire. For this reason, a frank copy of an antique piece of painted furniture is generally more satisfactory than a modern original.
If you are using dull colored carpets and hangings, have your modern reproductions antiqued. If you prefer gay, cheering tones, let the painted furniture be bright. These schemes are equally interesting in different ways. It is stupid to decry new things, since every grey antique had its frivolous, vivid youth.
One American decorator has succeeded in making the stolid, uncompromising square ness of mission furniture take on a certain lightness and charm by painting it black and discreetly lining it with yellow and red. Yellow velour is used for the seat pads and heavy hangings, thin yellow silk curtains are hung at the windows, and the black woodwork is set off by Japanese gold paper.
In a large house, or in a summer home where there are young people coming and going, a room decorated in this fashion is both gay and charming and makes a pleasant contrast to darker rooms. Then, too, yellow is a lovely setting for all flowers, the effect being to intensify their beauty, as when flooded by sunshine.
Another clever treatment of the mission type, which we include under the heading Painted Furniture, is to have it stained a rich dark brown, instead of the usual dark green. Give your dealer time to order your furniture unfinished from the factory, and have stained to your own liking; or, should you by any chance be planning to use mission in one of those cottages so often built in Maine, for summer occupancy, where the walls are of unplastered, unstained, dove-tailed boards, and the floors are unstained and covered with matting rugs, try using this furniture in its natural color unfinished. The effect is delightfully harmonious and artistic and quite Japanese in feeling.
In such a cottage, the living room has a raftered ceiling, the sidewalls, woodwork, settles the fireplaces, open bookcases and floor, stain all dark walnut. The floor color is very dark, the sidewalls, woodwork and bookshelves are a trifle lighter, and the ceiling boards still lighter between the almost black, heavy rafters.
The mission furniture is dark brown, the hangings and cushions are of mahogany-colored corduroy, and the floor is strewn with skins of animals. There are no pictures, the idea being to avoid jarring notes in another key. Instead, copper and brass bowls contribute a note of variety, as well as large jars filled with great branches of flowers, gathered in the nearby woods. The chimney is exposed. It and the large open fireplace are of rough, dark mottled brick.
A room of this character would be utterly spoiled by introducing white as ornaments, table covers, window curtains or picture-mats; it is a color scheme of dull wood-browns, old reds and greens in various tones. If you want your friends photographs about you in such a room, congregate them on one or two shelves above your books.
Different in decoration, but equal in charm, is the seventeenth and eighteenth century painted lacquers of Italy, France, China and Japan. In those days great masters labored at cabinet making and decorating, while distinguished artists carved the woodwork of rooms, and painted the ceilings and walls of even private dwellings.
To day we have reproductions (good and bad) of the veteran types, and some commendable inventions, more or less classic in line, and original in coloring and style of decoration.
At times, one wishes there was less evident effort to be original. We long for the repose of classic color schemes and classic line. In art, the line and the combination of colors, which have continued most popular throughout the ages, are very apt to be those with which one cans livelongest and not tire. For this reason, a frank copy of an antique piece of painted furniture is generally more satisfactory than a modern original.
If you are using dull colored carpets and hangings, have your modern reproductions antiqued. If you prefer gay, cheering tones, let the painted furniture be bright. These schemes are equally interesting in different ways. It is stupid to decry new things, since every grey antique had its frivolous, vivid youth.
One American decorator has succeeded in making the stolid, uncompromising square ness of mission furniture take on a certain lightness and charm by painting it black and discreetly lining it with yellow and red. Yellow velour is used for the seat pads and heavy hangings, thin yellow silk curtains are hung at the windows, and the black woodwork is set off by Japanese gold paper.
In a large house, or in a summer home where there are young people coming and going, a room decorated in this fashion is both gay and charming and makes a pleasant contrast to darker rooms. Then, too, yellow is a lovely setting for all flowers, the effect being to intensify their beauty, as when flooded by sunshine.
Another clever treatment of the mission type, which we include under the heading Painted Furniture, is to have it stained a rich dark brown, instead of the usual dark green. Give your dealer time to order your furniture unfinished from the factory, and have stained to your own liking; or, should you by any chance be planning to use mission in one of those cottages so often built in Maine, for summer occupancy, where the walls are of unplastered, unstained, dove-tailed boards, and the floors are unstained and covered with matting rugs, try using this furniture in its natural color unfinished. The effect is delightfully harmonious and artistic and quite Japanese in feeling.
In such a cottage, the living room has a raftered ceiling, the sidewalls, woodwork, settles the fireplaces, open bookcases and floor, stain all dark walnut. The floor color is very dark, the sidewalls, woodwork and bookshelves are a trifle lighter, and the ceiling boards still lighter between the almost black, heavy rafters.
The mission furniture is dark brown, the hangings and cushions are of mahogany-colored corduroy, and the floor is strewn with skins of animals. There are no pictures, the idea being to avoid jarring notes in another key. Instead, copper and brass bowls contribute a note of variety, as well as large jars filled with great branches of flowers, gathered in the nearby woods. The chimney is exposed. It and the large open fireplace are of rough, dark mottled brick.
A room of this character would be utterly spoiled by introducing white as ornaments, table covers, window curtains or picture-mats; it is a color scheme of dull wood-browns, old reds and greens in various tones. If you want your friends photographs about you in such a room, congregate them on one or two shelves above your books.
Interior Design Tips And Hints
Interior design has often been the easiest form of self-expression. Somewhere in every person is an interior designer just waiting to jump out. This may seem unrealistic to some but most all forms of design are based in how we want our homes to feel. This brings along with it a picture of what our home is, what function it serves, and how we want to portray ourselves to others. The decorating process remains one of the great mysteries of the average person. How do we create the home we want to invite others into?
Many people have said that interior design is the process by which we connect with people, and connect with the world while staying safely within our own space. It is safe to say that through interior design, we connect with some energy, some force, and some thing that expresses who we are and how we want to live. And it is through this connecting process that we have the opportunity to use our homes to effect change in our lives.
If we choose, we can become more comfortable or more expressive. Through this process, we can show others how we like to live and invite them to share part of our lives. We can focus on comfort, style, and/or art, truthfully anything we want to express.
Here are the five steps to finding your style as well as some tips to implementing these styles.
Step 1: The decisions
Is your home are filled with trinkets, gadgets, and dust catchers? That you don’t need? Or are these things treasures possessions that you cannot part with for all the tea in china? These items (typically bought for time saving) end up costing us precious space in our homes. We can free up space otherwise saved for these items or display them as they are meant to show who and what you are to the world!
For example, imagine how much space is tied up in the books we bought but have never read? If you’re not going to read it, find another home for it. Donate to a library or give it to a friend that may find they will treasure it. A good rule of thumb is if you haven’t used something in a year, you don’t need it or want it. If the book is treasure for it’s beauty or worth then displaying it in a room would be much better then letting it collect dust in a box somewhere. We all need to make these decisions, love it or leave it!
Design tip #1: Most likely, it’s on your list of things to, go thru “things”, and has been there for months or even years. Sometimes we don’t know something unwanted because we have been putting up with it for so long and have gotten used to it. Like that pile of stuff in a basket by the sofa or a drawer in an old unused desk that you don’t really need anymore even when you have to walk around to get a wanted daily used items.
So make sure to take care of the things to do list! A good way to do this is to stand back and think about all the things you own and if you are unsure if you use an item. Place a dot sticker on it with the date. If you use that item within a year, remove the sticker. If you do not use the item within a year, find it a home somewhere that it will be used.
Step 2: Find your style
Create a clear idea of what it is you would like to portray of yourself. Perhaps you are a person into comfort and easy maintenance, or perhaps you are a creative individual who would like to use your home to highlight new projects, new relationships, or a new career. Whatever your personality, begin now by narrowing down the specific style you will be comfortable living with. Remember, being specific is the key here. Make a list of qualities, draw a picture, cut pictures out of magazines do whatever you can to get as specific a picture as you can. Find thing that inspire you.
Step 3: Assistance
The keyword here is ASK! Asking where someone got his or her ideas will not kill you! Look for ideas in the world around you. Sometimes we are afraid to ask where someone we admire shop for the beautiful things that fill their home, but if you admire someone’s interior then let them know it! Other kinds of collaboration can include asking for help to clean out your garage in order to build your new studio, asking friends to come over for a dinner party because you want to get a prospective on how your living space will be used and where people gather, or asking someone to look over your drawing and pictures, a new look into what you are trying to achieve can get some great ideas offered. You don’t have to do it alone!
Step 4: Confidence
The number one attitude you should have is confidence. This can be achieved by realizing that interior design is something you cannot fail at, become you are going to live in it! If you are comfortable, you can be confident and enjoy it. So take a look at the ideas you are coming up with and whether or not you are keeping them to use. Take a look at your ideas, pictures and drawings. They’re full of decisions you have made. Deciding what you really want gives a wonderful feeling. But don’t take my word for it try it out!
Interior decorating tip #2: Many stores have wallpaper books with great images to go with the wallpapers. And magazines have ideas, too
Step 5: Take the first step
Start arranging and stepping back to see what you have done! Buy something you love and put it in the place of honor and work from there. Once you have de-cluttered and arranged just go for it! Anyone can do interior decoration. If you want to go by a rule, look in books and follow the steps. Many good interior-decorating books will tell you the difference between art deco and Elizabethan and most have steps you can follow. So you have many options and can get your home to be comfortable for you. So jump in and let your personality shine!
These five steps are designed to help you be more open to your own style and the inspiration that the world holds for you. If you work with these steps, you will be able to find a balance of comfort and design while avoiding some of the stresses and find yourself in a real sense of home that you love. Good luck!
Many people have said that interior design is the process by which we connect with people, and connect with the world while staying safely within our own space. It is safe to say that through interior design, we connect with some energy, some force, and some thing that expresses who we are and how we want to live. And it is through this connecting process that we have the opportunity to use our homes to effect change in our lives.
If we choose, we can become more comfortable or more expressive. Through this process, we can show others how we like to live and invite them to share part of our lives. We can focus on comfort, style, and/or art, truthfully anything we want to express.
Here are the five steps to finding your style as well as some tips to implementing these styles.
Step 1: The decisions
Is your home are filled with trinkets, gadgets, and dust catchers? That you don’t need? Or are these things treasures possessions that you cannot part with for all the tea in china? These items (typically bought for time saving) end up costing us precious space in our homes. We can free up space otherwise saved for these items or display them as they are meant to show who and what you are to the world!
For example, imagine how much space is tied up in the books we bought but have never read? If you’re not going to read it, find another home for it. Donate to a library or give it to a friend that may find they will treasure it. A good rule of thumb is if you haven’t used something in a year, you don’t need it or want it. If the book is treasure for it’s beauty or worth then displaying it in a room would be much better then letting it collect dust in a box somewhere. We all need to make these decisions, love it or leave it!
Design tip #1: Most likely, it’s on your list of things to, go thru “things”, and has been there for months or even years. Sometimes we don’t know something unwanted because we have been putting up with it for so long and have gotten used to it. Like that pile of stuff in a basket by the sofa or a drawer in an old unused desk that you don’t really need anymore even when you have to walk around to get a wanted daily used items.
So make sure to take care of the things to do list! A good way to do this is to stand back and think about all the things you own and if you are unsure if you use an item. Place a dot sticker on it with the date. If you use that item within a year, remove the sticker. If you do not use the item within a year, find it a home somewhere that it will be used.
Step 2: Find your style
Create a clear idea of what it is you would like to portray of yourself. Perhaps you are a person into comfort and easy maintenance, or perhaps you are a creative individual who would like to use your home to highlight new projects, new relationships, or a new career. Whatever your personality, begin now by narrowing down the specific style you will be comfortable living with. Remember, being specific is the key here. Make a list of qualities, draw a picture, cut pictures out of magazines do whatever you can to get as specific a picture as you can. Find thing that inspire you.
Step 3: Assistance
The keyword here is ASK! Asking where someone got his or her ideas will not kill you! Look for ideas in the world around you. Sometimes we are afraid to ask where someone we admire shop for the beautiful things that fill their home, but if you admire someone’s interior then let them know it! Other kinds of collaboration can include asking for help to clean out your garage in order to build your new studio, asking friends to come over for a dinner party because you want to get a prospective on how your living space will be used and where people gather, or asking someone to look over your drawing and pictures, a new look into what you are trying to achieve can get some great ideas offered. You don’t have to do it alone!
Step 4: Confidence
The number one attitude you should have is confidence. This can be achieved by realizing that interior design is something you cannot fail at, become you are going to live in it! If you are comfortable, you can be confident and enjoy it. So take a look at the ideas you are coming up with and whether or not you are keeping them to use. Take a look at your ideas, pictures and drawings. They’re full of decisions you have made. Deciding what you really want gives a wonderful feeling. But don’t take my word for it try it out!
Interior decorating tip #2: Many stores have wallpaper books with great images to go with the wallpapers. And magazines have ideas, too
Step 5: Take the first step
Start arranging and stepping back to see what you have done! Buy something you love and put it in the place of honor and work from there. Once you have de-cluttered and arranged just go for it! Anyone can do interior decoration. If you want to go by a rule, look in books and follow the steps. Many good interior-decorating books will tell you the difference between art deco and Elizabethan and most have steps you can follow. So you have many options and can get your home to be comfortable for you. So jump in and let your personality shine!
These five steps are designed to help you be more open to your own style and the inspiration that the world holds for you. If you work with these steps, you will be able to find a balance of comfort and design while avoiding some of the stresses and find yourself in a real sense of home that you love. Good luck!
Interior Decorating For Apartments 101
So you have a small apartment. You are possibly wondering, how do I make my small space look comfortable and inviting with out looking cluttered? I have your answer. Actually several answers first of all start with looking around, notice the placement of windows and which way the light reflects in the rooms during different times of day. You do not want to blind someone, who could possibly be visiting, by that stunning sunset.
Also look at your current furniture and the colors that it is or is not. Some colors can make a room look small, clinical and cold. Good warm toned colors also make it more comfortable for you to live there. Browns, Reds, Yellows, and Oranges are great colors to open up space and make the room warm and inviting. Use accent rugs to help with the addition of colors as some Landlords do not allow you to paint. Sofa Covers are a great way to add color and save from wear and tear on your furniture.
When choosing a color scheme please note that you should choose something that is easy to clean i.e., browns and grays. White is not a good choice, unless you plan on never really living in your place. Try to look at the big picture, small living rooms means that you shouldn’t get a sectional sofa. Instead try a small love seat or futon couch.
Not only does the futon couch help with space but it can be converted to a bed for those single room apartments. If you are on a budget and don’t want to get rid of your current bed and you are in a studio apartment try a bed that looks like a bunk bed with out the lower bunk. That way you can store your dress and other articles under the bunk and enclose it with a curtain and no one can see your unmade bed up top. This is very useful for bachelors.
Try creating rooms with the use of decorative screens. It can make a single room look like two or more rooms are there. Also remember your curtains, they should be allowing the light in, the more light you allow in the bigger the space looks. Use a small bistro table as a dining table. It is intimate and makes for a great coffee talk spot. If you are lucky enough to have some one in your apartment remember to always hide your laundry. Laundry laying around makes the apartment appear cluttered and small.
Plants are a great way to make your room appear bigger. Try hanging them from the ceiling or by using hooks on the wall. Don’t forget the importance of mirrors. The use of mirrors can make your small apartment look large. Use a focal point and angle your mirror towards it, it gives the illusion of depth. Most importantly make sure you always have a clean space, it is always bigger when it is clean.
Ok so now you have gone and cleaned, you are noticing that the apartment still looks small. Question your storage. You need some ideas for storage you say? Well I am full of them. Look around and if you notice you have lots of magazines lying around get yourself a magazine holder. It is a handy little box that is decorative to your specific likes and it cleans up your tables of clutter. Get your self a footrest that has storage inside of it.
It is nice for when the surprise guest comes over and you need to store something quickly. A coffee table with storage underneath it is also a wise choice. The more storage you have that isn’t added clutter makes your life easier. Wall shelves help to eliminate tabletop mess. Put your collectible gnomes on a small wall shelf and look at all the free space you have just created for yourself. All of the suggestions presented here to you are easy do it yourself projects. You can get most of these easy to use items at your local all purpose store and hardware store.
Also look at your current furniture and the colors that it is or is not. Some colors can make a room look small, clinical and cold. Good warm toned colors also make it more comfortable for you to live there. Browns, Reds, Yellows, and Oranges are great colors to open up space and make the room warm and inviting. Use accent rugs to help with the addition of colors as some Landlords do not allow you to paint. Sofa Covers are a great way to add color and save from wear and tear on your furniture.
When choosing a color scheme please note that you should choose something that is easy to clean i.e., browns and grays. White is not a good choice, unless you plan on never really living in your place. Try to look at the big picture, small living rooms means that you shouldn’t get a sectional sofa. Instead try a small love seat or futon couch.
Not only does the futon couch help with space but it can be converted to a bed for those single room apartments. If you are on a budget and don’t want to get rid of your current bed and you are in a studio apartment try a bed that looks like a bunk bed with out the lower bunk. That way you can store your dress and other articles under the bunk and enclose it with a curtain and no one can see your unmade bed up top. This is very useful for bachelors.
Try creating rooms with the use of decorative screens. It can make a single room look like two or more rooms are there. Also remember your curtains, they should be allowing the light in, the more light you allow in the bigger the space looks. Use a small bistro table as a dining table. It is intimate and makes for a great coffee talk spot. If you are lucky enough to have some one in your apartment remember to always hide your laundry. Laundry laying around makes the apartment appear cluttered and small.
Plants are a great way to make your room appear bigger. Try hanging them from the ceiling or by using hooks on the wall. Don’t forget the importance of mirrors. The use of mirrors can make your small apartment look large. Use a focal point and angle your mirror towards it, it gives the illusion of depth. Most importantly make sure you always have a clean space, it is always bigger when it is clean.
Ok so now you have gone and cleaned, you are noticing that the apartment still looks small. Question your storage. You need some ideas for storage you say? Well I am full of them. Look around and if you notice you have lots of magazines lying around get yourself a magazine holder. It is a handy little box that is decorative to your specific likes and it cleans up your tables of clutter. Get your self a footrest that has storage inside of it.
It is nice for when the surprise guest comes over and you need to store something quickly. A coffee table with storage underneath it is also a wise choice. The more storage you have that isn’t added clutter makes your life easier. Wall shelves help to eliminate tabletop mess. Put your collectible gnomes on a small wall shelf and look at all the free space you have just created for yourself. All of the suggestions presented here to you are easy do it yourself projects. You can get most of these easy to use items at your local all purpose store and hardware store.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
How to Start your Interior Design Business
Starting any business is never simple, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as many people think. A lot of what is needed is actually fun. You have to understand that much of starting any business requires you to be a salesman. You have to build yourself and your company up.
You must get a business number and registration. You can check your government listings for the correct number. You must also check with your local accountant to see what needs to be done about taxes etc.
You must also decide if you are going to be a home business or if you are planning to run a studio for a lease. Make sure to purchase all of the necessary materials. Some items you can get for free if you know where to look. Here is a list of some of those materials.
What you will need:
- Color swatches for paints and fabrics ( you can get many of them for free from local paint stores if you ask)
- Fabric samples are a necessity (you can get them for free from your local furniture store)
- Interior design magazines for client perusal (it helps them get an idea of what they like)
- Furniture catalogues (free from furniture dealers and retailers)
- Fine arts catalogue, get them from art galleries
- Kitchen and bathroom catalogues. Basically get catalogues from everybody that deals with furniture, art, and lighting stores
- Photos of your work, and signed recommendations (remember you get them from family and friends when you are just starting out)
- Your portfolio (always have a copy of your portfolio)
Tips for Building a Portfolio with Little or no Professional Experience:
- Ask Friend or family to let you design a room in their house, and take pictures of your work for the portfolio.
- Get your friends and family to write letters of recommendation for you or list themselves as references.
- A leather binder, or photo album can be used to hold all of this information until you have better resources.
- If you have them, copies of your credentials should be placed at the front of your portfolio to assure your future clients that you are qualified.
- Put your best work forward. Do not show any work that you are not proud to have done.
There are of Course a couple of items that Interior designers always have on hand at all times. These are rather necessary, even if you are just starting out or want to get started.
Here is a list of some of the things that will be invaluable to you as you start your own Interior Design business. They are simply ways of helping you know what to do to get a possible client base.
Sellyourself
You will want to sell the public on your services and abilities. Do as much promotion as you can. Go everywhere that you can think of that hosts design events, and set yourself up as a contender.
Mingle
Try to meet as many different types of people as possible. Go to golf and country clubs with a load of business cards on hand. Be sure to have your portfolio on hand in case you get any bites. Go to all of the popular events in your area and start talking to people.
Start-Up Help
There are many places that you can go to get help with start up money. This only applies to people who are seeking to lease a studio outside of the home. Check your local government or business assistance programs.
Establish your Position
You want to ensure that you can let your community know that you are out there. Handing out flyers, offering special discounts or free services to your neighbors can let the people get a sample of your work. It is a good way to get your neighbors to spread the word.
Build your Clientele
I cannot express too much, the importance of approaching homeowners and businessmen with your ideas for refurbishing their spaces.
You must get a business number and registration. You can check your government listings for the correct number. You must also check with your local accountant to see what needs to be done about taxes etc.
You must also decide if you are going to be a home business or if you are planning to run a studio for a lease. Make sure to purchase all of the necessary materials. Some items you can get for free if you know where to look. Here is a list of some of those materials.
What you will need:
- Color swatches for paints and fabrics ( you can get many of them for free from local paint stores if you ask)
- Fabric samples are a necessity (you can get them for free from your local furniture store)
- Interior design magazines for client perusal (it helps them get an idea of what they like)
- Furniture catalogues (free from furniture dealers and retailers)
- Fine arts catalogue, get them from art galleries
- Kitchen and bathroom catalogues. Basically get catalogues from everybody that deals with furniture, art, and lighting stores
- Photos of your work, and signed recommendations (remember you get them from family and friends when you are just starting out)
- Your portfolio (always have a copy of your portfolio)
Tips for Building a Portfolio with Little or no Professional Experience:
- Ask Friend or family to let you design a room in their house, and take pictures of your work for the portfolio.
- Get your friends and family to write letters of recommendation for you or list themselves as references.
- A leather binder, or photo album can be used to hold all of this information until you have better resources.
- If you have them, copies of your credentials should be placed at the front of your portfolio to assure your future clients that you are qualified.
- Put your best work forward. Do not show any work that you are not proud to have done.
There are of Course a couple of items that Interior designers always have on hand at all times. These are rather necessary, even if you are just starting out or want to get started.
Here is a list of some of the things that will be invaluable to you as you start your own Interior Design business. They are simply ways of helping you know what to do to get a possible client base.
Sellyourself
You will want to sell the public on your services and abilities. Do as much promotion as you can. Go everywhere that you can think of that hosts design events, and set yourself up as a contender.
Mingle
Try to meet as many different types of people as possible. Go to golf and country clubs with a load of business cards on hand. Be sure to have your portfolio on hand in case you get any bites. Go to all of the popular events in your area and start talking to people.
Start-Up Help
There are many places that you can go to get help with start up money. This only applies to people who are seeking to lease a studio outside of the home. Check your local government or business assistance programs.
Establish your Position
You want to ensure that you can let your community know that you are out there. Handing out flyers, offering special discounts or free services to your neighbors can let the people get a sample of your work. It is a good way to get your neighbors to spread the word.
Build your Clientele
I cannot express too much, the importance of approaching homeowners and businessmen with your ideas for refurbishing their spaces.
How To Determine Character Of Hangings And Furniture
IN a measure, the materials for hangings and furniture-coverings are determined more or less by the amount one wishes to spend in this direction. For choice, one would say silk or velvet for formal rooms; velvets, corduroys or chintz for living rooms; leather and corduroy with rep hangings for a man's study or smoking-room; thin silks and chintz for bedrooms; chintz for nurseries, breakfast-rooms and porches.
In England, slipcovers of chintz (glazed cretonne) appear, also, in formal rooms; but are removed when the owner is entertaining. If the permanent upholstery is of chintz, then at once your room becomes informal. If you are planning the living-room for a small house or apartment, which must serve as reception-room during the winter months, far more dignity, and some elegance can be obtained for the same expenditure, by using plain velveteen, modern silk brocades in one color, or some of the modern reps to be had in very smart shades of all colors.
If your furniture is choice, rarely beautiful in quality, line and color, hangings and covers must accord. Genuine antiques demand antique silks for hangings and table covers; but no decorator, if at all practical, will cover a chair or sofa in the frail old silks, for they go to pieces almost in the mounting. Waive sentiment in this case, for the modern reproductions are satisfactory to the eye and improve in tone with age.
If you own only a small piece of antique silk, make a square of it for the centre of the table, or cleverly combine several small bits, if these are all you have, into an interesting cover or cushion. Nothing in the world gives such a note of distinction to a room as the use of rare, old silks, properly placed.
The fashion for cretonne and chintz has led to their indiscriminate use by professionals as well as amateurs, and this craze has caused a prejudice against them. Chintz used with judgment can be most attractive. In America the term chintz includes cretonne and stamped linen. If you are planning for them, put together, for consideration, all your bright colored chintz, and in quite another part of your room, or decorator's shop, the chintz of dull, faded colors, as they require different treatment. A general rule for this material bright or dull is that if you would have your chintz decorate, be careful not to use it too lavishly. If it is intended for curtains, then cover only one chair with it and cover the rest in a solid color. If you want chintz for all of your chairs and sofa, make your curtains, sofa cushions and lampshades of a solid color, and be sure that you take one of the leading colors in the chintz. Next indicate your intention at harmony, by "bringing together" the plain curtains or chairs, and your chintz, with a narrow fringe or border of still another color, which figures in the chintz. Let us suppose chintz to be black with a design in greens, mulberry and buff.
Make your curtains plain mulberry, edged with narrow pale green fringe with black and buff in it, or should your chintz be grey with a design in faded blues and violets and a touch of black, make curtains of the chintz, and cover one large chair, keeping the sofa and the remaining chairs grey, with the bordering fringe, or gimp, in one or two of the other shades, sofa cushions and the lamp shades in blues and violets (lining lamp shades with thin pink silk), and use a little black in the bordering fringe.
If you decide upon very brilliant chintz use it only in one chair, a screen, or in a valance over plain curtains with straps to hold them back, or perhaps a sofa cushion. Whether chintz is bright or dull, its pattern is important. As with silks, brocaded in different colors, therefore never use chintz where a chair or sofa calls for tufting. A tufted piece of furniture always looks best done in plain materials.
In using chintz in which both color and design are indefinite, the kind that gives more or less an impression of faded tapestry, you will find that the very indefiniteness of the pattern makes it possible to use the chintz with more freedom, being always sure of a harmonious background. The one thing to guard against is that on entering a room you must not be conscious either of several colors, or of any set design.
The story of the evolution of textiles (any woven material) is fascinating, and like the history of every art, runs parallel with the history of culture and progress in the art of living, physical, mental and spiritual.
In England, slipcovers of chintz (glazed cretonne) appear, also, in formal rooms; but are removed when the owner is entertaining. If the permanent upholstery is of chintz, then at once your room becomes informal. If you are planning the living-room for a small house or apartment, which must serve as reception-room during the winter months, far more dignity, and some elegance can be obtained for the same expenditure, by using plain velveteen, modern silk brocades in one color, or some of the modern reps to be had in very smart shades of all colors.
If your furniture is choice, rarely beautiful in quality, line and color, hangings and covers must accord. Genuine antiques demand antique silks for hangings and table covers; but no decorator, if at all practical, will cover a chair or sofa in the frail old silks, for they go to pieces almost in the mounting. Waive sentiment in this case, for the modern reproductions are satisfactory to the eye and improve in tone with age.
If you own only a small piece of antique silk, make a square of it for the centre of the table, or cleverly combine several small bits, if these are all you have, into an interesting cover or cushion. Nothing in the world gives such a note of distinction to a room as the use of rare, old silks, properly placed.
The fashion for cretonne and chintz has led to their indiscriminate use by professionals as well as amateurs, and this craze has caused a prejudice against them. Chintz used with judgment can be most attractive. In America the term chintz includes cretonne and stamped linen. If you are planning for them, put together, for consideration, all your bright colored chintz, and in quite another part of your room, or decorator's shop, the chintz of dull, faded colors, as they require different treatment. A general rule for this material bright or dull is that if you would have your chintz decorate, be careful not to use it too lavishly. If it is intended for curtains, then cover only one chair with it and cover the rest in a solid color. If you want chintz for all of your chairs and sofa, make your curtains, sofa cushions and lampshades of a solid color, and be sure that you take one of the leading colors in the chintz. Next indicate your intention at harmony, by "bringing together" the plain curtains or chairs, and your chintz, with a narrow fringe or border of still another color, which figures in the chintz. Let us suppose chintz to be black with a design in greens, mulberry and buff.
Make your curtains plain mulberry, edged with narrow pale green fringe with black and buff in it, or should your chintz be grey with a design in faded blues and violets and a touch of black, make curtains of the chintz, and cover one large chair, keeping the sofa and the remaining chairs grey, with the bordering fringe, or gimp, in one or two of the other shades, sofa cushions and the lamp shades in blues and violets (lining lamp shades with thin pink silk), and use a little black in the bordering fringe.
If you decide upon very brilliant chintz use it only in one chair, a screen, or in a valance over plain curtains with straps to hold them back, or perhaps a sofa cushion. Whether chintz is bright or dull, its pattern is important. As with silks, brocaded in different colors, therefore never use chintz where a chair or sofa calls for tufting. A tufted piece of furniture always looks best done in plain materials.
In using chintz in which both color and design are indefinite, the kind that gives more or less an impression of faded tapestry, you will find that the very indefiniteness of the pattern makes it possible to use the chintz with more freedom, being always sure of a harmonious background. The one thing to guard against is that on entering a room you must not be conscious either of several colors, or of any set design.
The story of the evolution of textiles (any woven material) is fascinating, and like the history of every art, runs parallel with the history of culture and progress in the art of living, physical, mental and spiritual.
How To Analyze A Room As Professionals Do
LOOK carefully at the room, which you intend doing over. Cannot you, unaided, find out why all of your efforts, some of them expensive ones, have failed to make it attractive?
You say that the moment you enter your room you have an impression of confused disorder pervading the whole plaque. Has the mantel too many things on it, and are these objects placed without any plan as to orderly, balanced arrangement? This is true in most cases where the general impression made by a room is one of disorder. Perhaps your mantel ornaments are neither beautiful nor interesting, and are unrelated in shape and color to the other decorative objects in the room.
Until amateur decorators learn to make the mantels in their rooms the keynote of their decorative schemes, it is wise not to experiment beyond the rule of three ornaments. These must be absolutely in character with the other furnishings. That is, your Colonial room is not the place for French ornaments, nor your French room the place for Colonial ornaments and clock, unless you have made yourself so familiar with the characteristics of the styles that you. Recognize related periods and can therefore combine them. In a room with very inexpensive furniture and hangings use equally inexpensive ornaments. In every case harmony is beauty.
Suppose you continue the analysis of your room by asking yourself if it has too many things in it to be "restful"? Have you, perhaps, used furniture, which does not go together as to shapes, color of woods or the materials used as upholstery? Have you too many "spots" in the room? By which we mean, are there too many figured materials with different designs and colors, used as hangings and for furniture coverings? Is your figured material, chintz, cretonnes or brocade, all of one design and coloring, but have you used too much of it, so that the effect is confused and un-restful?
Have you figured and several-colored wallpaper and a chintz with different design and cpk oring? This is a mistake. It is possible to get wallpapers and chintzes to match if you insist on everything being figured. But remember that you’re figured hangings will look their best with plain walls and only one or two pieces of furniture covered with the chintz or brocade.
Is your room small and have you made the woodwork a sharp contrast in color to your walls? You will find that in any room, to paint the woodwork the same color as walls adds immensely to the appearance of its size.
If the thing that you object to in your room furnished with attractive up-to-date furnishings is shiny black walnut wood-work, of the days of our grandmothers, have some one sand-paper the whole of it and you will be amazed by the result. Under that varnished finish is a charming, dull, sable-brown.
Is it possible that your room, which is puzzling you, so would look better if there were no pictures at all on the walls? Is your room really wrong or are you ill and for that reason unfit to judge fairly? There are, no doubt, moods in which, for example, bare walls rest the nerves. There are other moods, which find one grateful for the diversion of pictures. These are points to have in mind when arranging rooms for those who are kept to the house by illness.
Are your large pieces of furniture so placed as to give the appearance of balance to your room? And have you provided yourself with a sufficient number of easily moved pieces such as small tables and chairs, so as to form "groups" which suggest that human beings are expected to live in and enjoy this room!
Is your desk where the light comes over your left shoulder to the page you are writing? Are the lights in the room where they will be of most use? Can you enjoy your open-fire and at the same time have a good light to read by? If you play cards can you light the table and also the hands of each player? Has your room for informal use books and enough of them! Books and an open-fire are the ideal foundation for a home-like room.
If the room under consideration is a bedroom, and you do not want to modify its character, have you provided not only a bed but also a sofa of some kind on which to rest during the day?
Is the "cold" atmosphere of this room you want to alter due to the lack of a few bright flowers? Do you love music and have you many musical friends and yet does your home lack a piano? If you are really a lover of music a piano is as much a part of your home as your desk is a natural feature in your sitting room.
See to it that your home, your rooms each one of them expresses the tastes of the family. This is how you make " atmosphere." It is wise to furnish slowly. Haste is responsible for most mistakes. Begin by owning good shapes and color-combinations, and as you can afford it, discard your things of no intrinsic value for beautiful shapes and colors with value.
You say that the moment you enter your room you have an impression of confused disorder pervading the whole plaque. Has the mantel too many things on it, and are these objects placed without any plan as to orderly, balanced arrangement? This is true in most cases where the general impression made by a room is one of disorder. Perhaps your mantel ornaments are neither beautiful nor interesting, and are unrelated in shape and color to the other decorative objects in the room.
Until amateur decorators learn to make the mantels in their rooms the keynote of their decorative schemes, it is wise not to experiment beyond the rule of three ornaments. These must be absolutely in character with the other furnishings. That is, your Colonial room is not the place for French ornaments, nor your French room the place for Colonial ornaments and clock, unless you have made yourself so familiar with the characteristics of the styles that you. Recognize related periods and can therefore combine them. In a room with very inexpensive furniture and hangings use equally inexpensive ornaments. In every case harmony is beauty.
Suppose you continue the analysis of your room by asking yourself if it has too many things in it to be "restful"? Have you, perhaps, used furniture, which does not go together as to shapes, color of woods or the materials used as upholstery? Have you too many "spots" in the room? By which we mean, are there too many figured materials with different designs and colors, used as hangings and for furniture coverings? Is your figured material, chintz, cretonnes or brocade, all of one design and coloring, but have you used too much of it, so that the effect is confused and un-restful?
Have you figured and several-colored wallpaper and a chintz with different design and cpk oring? This is a mistake. It is possible to get wallpapers and chintzes to match if you insist on everything being figured. But remember that you’re figured hangings will look their best with plain walls and only one or two pieces of furniture covered with the chintz or brocade.
Is your room small and have you made the woodwork a sharp contrast in color to your walls? You will find that in any room, to paint the woodwork the same color as walls adds immensely to the appearance of its size.
If the thing that you object to in your room furnished with attractive up-to-date furnishings is shiny black walnut wood-work, of the days of our grandmothers, have some one sand-paper the whole of it and you will be amazed by the result. Under that varnished finish is a charming, dull, sable-brown.
Is it possible that your room, which is puzzling you, so would look better if there were no pictures at all on the walls? Is your room really wrong or are you ill and for that reason unfit to judge fairly? There are, no doubt, moods in which, for example, bare walls rest the nerves. There are other moods, which find one grateful for the diversion of pictures. These are points to have in mind when arranging rooms for those who are kept to the house by illness.
Are your large pieces of furniture so placed as to give the appearance of balance to your room? And have you provided yourself with a sufficient number of easily moved pieces such as small tables and chairs, so as to form "groups" which suggest that human beings are expected to live in and enjoy this room!
Is your desk where the light comes over your left shoulder to the page you are writing? Are the lights in the room where they will be of most use? Can you enjoy your open-fire and at the same time have a good light to read by? If you play cards can you light the table and also the hands of each player? Has your room for informal use books and enough of them! Books and an open-fire are the ideal foundation for a home-like room.
If the room under consideration is a bedroom, and you do not want to modify its character, have you provided not only a bed but also a sofa of some kind on which to rest during the day?
Is the "cold" atmosphere of this room you want to alter due to the lack of a few bright flowers? Do you love music and have you many musical friends and yet does your home lack a piano? If you are really a lover of music a piano is as much a part of your home as your desk is a natural feature in your sitting room.
See to it that your home, your rooms each one of them expresses the tastes of the family. This is how you make " atmosphere." It is wise to furnish slowly. Haste is responsible for most mistakes. Begin by owning good shapes and color-combinations, and as you can afford it, discard your things of no intrinsic value for beautiful shapes and colors with value.
How To Create A Room
ONE so often hears the complaint, "I could not possibly set out alone to furnish a room! I don't know anything about periods. Why, a Louis XVI chair and an Empire chair are quite the same to me. Then the question of antiques and reproductions why any one could mislead me!"
If you have absolutely no interest in the arranging or rearranging of your rooms, house or houses, of course, leave it to a decorator and give your attention to whatever does interest you. On the other hand, as with bridge, if you really want to play the game, you can learn it. The first rule is to determine the actual use to which you intend putting the room. * Is it to be a bedroom merely, or a combination of bedroom and boudoir? Is it to be a formal reception-room, or a living room? Is it to be a family library, or a man's study? If it is a small flat, do you aim at absolute comfort, artistically achieved, or do you aim at formality at the expense of comfort?
If you lean toward both comfort and formality, and own a country house and a city abode, there will be no difficulty in solving the problem. Formality may be left to the town house or flat, while during weekends, holidays and summers you can revel in supreme comfort.
Every man or woman is capable of creating comfort. It is a question of those deep chairs with wide seats and backs, soft springs, thick, downy cushions, of tables and book-cases conveniently placed, lights where you want them, beds to the individual taste, double, single, or twins!
The getting together of a period room, one period or periods in combination, is difficult, especially if you are entirely ignorant of the subject. However, here is your cue. Let us suppose you need, or want, a desk, an antique desk. Go about from one dealer to the other until you find the very piece you have dreamed of; one that gives pleasure to you, as well as to the dealer. Then take an experienced friend to look at it. If you have every reason to suppose that the desk is genuine, buy it. Next, read up on the furniture of the particular period to which your desk belongs, in as serious a manner as you do when you buy a prize dog at the show.
Now you have made an intelligent beginning as a collector. Reading informs you, but you must buy old furniture to be educated on that subject. Be eternally on the lookout; the really good pieces, veritable antiques, are rare; most of them are in museums, in private collections or in the hands of the most expensive dealers. I refer to those unique pieces, many of them signed by the maker and in perfect condition because during all their existence they have been jealously preserved, often by the very family and in the very house for which they were made.
Our chances for picking up antiques are reduced to pieces which on account of reversed circumstances have been turned out of house and home, and, as with human wanderers, much jolting about has told upon them. Most of these are fortified in various directions, but they are treasures all the same, and have a beauty value in line color and workmanship and a wonderful fitness for the purposes for which they were intended. "Surely we are many men of many minds!"
If you have absolutely no interest in the arranging or rearranging of your rooms, house or houses, of course, leave it to a decorator and give your attention to whatever does interest you. On the other hand, as with bridge, if you really want to play the game, you can learn it. The first rule is to determine the actual use to which you intend putting the room. * Is it to be a bedroom merely, or a combination of bedroom and boudoir? Is it to be a formal reception-room, or a living room? Is it to be a family library, or a man's study? If it is a small flat, do you aim at absolute comfort, artistically achieved, or do you aim at formality at the expense of comfort?
If you lean toward both comfort and formality, and own a country house and a city abode, there will be no difficulty in solving the problem. Formality may be left to the town house or flat, while during weekends, holidays and summers you can revel in supreme comfort.
Every man or woman is capable of creating comfort. It is a question of those deep chairs with wide seats and backs, soft springs, thick, downy cushions, of tables and book-cases conveniently placed, lights where you want them, beds to the individual taste, double, single, or twins!
The getting together of a period room, one period or periods in combination, is difficult, especially if you are entirely ignorant of the subject. However, here is your cue. Let us suppose you need, or want, a desk, an antique desk. Go about from one dealer to the other until you find the very piece you have dreamed of; one that gives pleasure to you, as well as to the dealer. Then take an experienced friend to look at it. If you have every reason to suppose that the desk is genuine, buy it. Next, read up on the furniture of the particular period to which your desk belongs, in as serious a manner as you do when you buy a prize dog at the show.
Now you have made an intelligent beginning as a collector. Reading informs you, but you must buy old furniture to be educated on that subject. Be eternally on the lookout; the really good pieces, veritable antiques, are rare; most of them are in museums, in private collections or in the hands of the most expensive dealers. I refer to those unique pieces, many of them signed by the maker and in perfect condition because during all their existence they have been jealously preserved, often by the very family and in the very house for which they were made.
Our chances for picking up antiques are reduced to pieces which on account of reversed circumstances have been turned out of house and home, and, as with human wanderers, much jolting about has told upon them. Most of these are fortified in various directions, but they are treasures all the same, and have a beauty value in line color and workmanship and a wonderful fitness for the purposes for which they were intended. "Surely we are many men of many minds!"
Continuation Of Periods In Furniture
FROM Greece, culture, born on the wings of the arts, moved on to Rome, and at first, Roman architecture and decoration reproduced only the classic Greek types; but, as Rome grew, her arts took on another and very different outline, showing how the history of decorative art is to a fascinating degree the history of customs and manners.
Rome became prosperous, greedy, powerful and imperious, enslaving the civilized world, and, not having the restraining laws of Greece, waxed luxurious and licentious, and chafed, in consequence, at the austere rigidity of the Greek style of furnishing.
We know that in the time of Augustus Caesar the Romans had wonderful furniture of the most costly kind, made from cedar, pine, elm, olive, ash, ilex, beach and maple, carved to represent the legs, feet, hoofs and heads of animals, as in earlier days was the fashion in Assyria, Egypt and Greece, while intricate carvings in relief, showed Greek subjects taken from mythology and legend. Caesar, it is related, owned a table costing a million sectaries ($40,000).
But gradually the pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, and had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, it’s warm, glowing colors, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury that the new Roman craved.
The effect of this misalliance upon all Art, including interior decoration, was to cause its immediate decline. Elaboration and banal designs, too much splendor of gold and silver and ivory inlaid with gold, resulted in a decadent art, which reflected a decadent race and Rome, fell! Not all at once; it took five hundred years for the neighboring races to crush her power, but continuous hectoring did it, in 476 A. D. Then began the Dark Ages merging into the Middle Ages (fifth to fifteenth centuries).
Dark they were, but what picturesque and productive darkness! Rome fell, but the Car-loving Ian family arose, and with it the great nations of Western Europe, to give us, especially in France, another supreme flowering of interior decoration.
Britain was torn from the grasp of Rome by the Saxons, Danes and Normans, and as a result the great Anglo-Saxon race was born to create art periods. Mahomet appeared and scored as an epoch-maker, recording a remarkable life and a spiritual cycle.
The Moors conquered Spain, but in so doing enriched her arts a thousand fold, leaving the Alhambra as a beacon-light through the ages. Finally the crusades united all warring races against the infidels.
Blood was shed, but at the same time routes were opened up, by which the arts, as well as the commerce, of the Orient, reached Europe.
And so the Byzantine continued to contend with Gothic art that art which preceded from the Christian Church and stretched like a canopy over Western Europe, all through the Middle Ages. It was in the churches and monasteries that Christian art, driven from pillar to post by wars, was obliged to take refuge, and there produced that marvelous development known as the Gothic style, of the Church, for the Church, by the Church, perfected in countless Gothic cathedrals, crystallized glories lifting their manifold spires to heaven, ethereal monuments of an intrepid Faith which gave material form to its adoration, its fasting and prayer, in an unrivalled art.
There is one early Gothic chair, which has come down to us, Charlemagne's, made of gilt-bronze and preserved in the Louvre, at Paris. Any knowledge beyond this one piece, as to what Carlovingian furniture was like (the eighth century) we get only from old manuscripts which show it to have been the pseudo-classic, that is, the classic modified by Byzantine influence, and very like the Empire style of Napoleon I.
Here is the reason for the type. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Empire, when in 726 A. D., Emperor Leo III prohibited image worship, and the artists and artisans of his part of the world, in order to earn a livelihood, scattered over Europe, settling in the various capitals, where they were eagerly welcomed and employed.
Even so late as the tenth to fourteenth centuries the knowledge we have of Gothic furniture still comes from illustrated manuscripts and missals preserved in museums or in the national libraries.
Rome fell as an empire in the fifth century. In the eighth century, Venice asserted herself, later becoming the great, wealthy, Merchant City of Eastern Europe, the golden gate between Byzantium and the West (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). Her merchants visiting every country naturally carried home all art expressions, but, so far as we know, her own chief artistic output in very early days, was in the nature of richly carved wooden furniture, no specimens of which remain.
Rome became prosperous, greedy, powerful and imperious, enslaving the civilized world, and, not having the restraining laws of Greece, waxed luxurious and licentious, and chafed, in consequence, at the austere rigidity of the Greek style of furnishing.
We know that in the time of Augustus Caesar the Romans had wonderful furniture of the most costly kind, made from cedar, pine, elm, olive, ash, ilex, beach and maple, carved to represent the legs, feet, hoofs and heads of animals, as in earlier days was the fashion in Assyria, Egypt and Greece, while intricate carvings in relief, showed Greek subjects taken from mythology and legend. Caesar, it is related, owned a table costing a million sectaries ($40,000).
But gradually the pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, and had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, it’s warm, glowing colors, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury that the new Roman craved.
The effect of this misalliance upon all Art, including interior decoration, was to cause its immediate decline. Elaboration and banal designs, too much splendor of gold and silver and ivory inlaid with gold, resulted in a decadent art, which reflected a decadent race and Rome, fell! Not all at once; it took five hundred years for the neighboring races to crush her power, but continuous hectoring did it, in 476 A. D. Then began the Dark Ages merging into the Middle Ages (fifth to fifteenth centuries).
Dark they were, but what picturesque and productive darkness! Rome fell, but the Car-loving Ian family arose, and with it the great nations of Western Europe, to give us, especially in France, another supreme flowering of interior decoration.
Britain was torn from the grasp of Rome by the Saxons, Danes and Normans, and as a result the great Anglo-Saxon race was born to create art periods. Mahomet appeared and scored as an epoch-maker, recording a remarkable life and a spiritual cycle.
The Moors conquered Spain, but in so doing enriched her arts a thousand fold, leaving the Alhambra as a beacon-light through the ages. Finally the crusades united all warring races against the infidels.
Blood was shed, but at the same time routes were opened up, by which the arts, as well as the commerce, of the Orient, reached Europe.
And so the Byzantine continued to contend with Gothic art that art which preceded from the Christian Church and stretched like a canopy over Western Europe, all through the Middle Ages. It was in the churches and monasteries that Christian art, driven from pillar to post by wars, was obliged to take refuge, and there produced that marvelous development known as the Gothic style, of the Church, for the Church, by the Church, perfected in countless Gothic cathedrals, crystallized glories lifting their manifold spires to heaven, ethereal monuments of an intrepid Faith which gave material form to its adoration, its fasting and prayer, in an unrivalled art.
There is one early Gothic chair, which has come down to us, Charlemagne's, made of gilt-bronze and preserved in the Louvre, at Paris. Any knowledge beyond this one piece, as to what Carlovingian furniture was like (the eighth century) we get only from old manuscripts which show it to have been the pseudo-classic, that is, the classic modified by Byzantine influence, and very like the Empire style of Napoleon I.
Here is the reason for the type. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Empire, when in 726 A. D., Emperor Leo III prohibited image worship, and the artists and artisans of his part of the world, in order to earn a livelihood, scattered over Europe, settling in the various capitals, where they were eagerly welcomed and employed.
Even so late as the tenth to fourteenth centuries the knowledge we have of Gothic furniture still comes from illustrated manuscripts and missals preserved in museums or in the national libraries.
Rome fell as an empire in the fifth century. In the eighth century, Venice asserted herself, later becoming the great, wealthy, Merchant City of Eastern Europe, the golden gate between Byzantium and the West (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). Her merchants visiting every country naturally carried home all art expressions, but, so far as we know, her own chief artistic output in very early days, was in the nature of richly carved wooden furniture, no specimens of which remain.
French Furniture
THE classic periods in French furniture were those known as Francis I, Henry II and the three Louis,XIV, XV, and XVI. One can get an idea of all French periods in furnishing by visiting the collection in Paris belonging to the government, "Mobilier National," in the new wing of the Louvre.
It is always necessary to consult political history in order to understand artistic invasions. Turn to it now and you will find that Charles VIII of France held Naples for two years (1495-6), and when he went home took with him Italian artists to decorate his palaces. Read on and find that later Henry II married Catherine de Medici and loved Diane de Poitiers, and that, fortunately for France, both his queen and his mistress were patronesses of the arts. So France bloomed in the sunshine of royal favor and Greek influence, as few countries ever had.
Fontainebleau (begun by Francis I) was the first of a chain of French royal palaces, all monuments without and within, to a picturesque system of monarchy, Kings who could do no wrong, wafting scepters over powerless subjects, whose toil produced Art in the form of architecture, cabinetmaking, tapestry weaving, mural decoration, unrivalled porcelain, exquisitely wrought silver and gold plate, silks, lovely as flower gardens (showing the "pomegranate" and "vase" patterns) and velvets like the skies! And for what? Did these things represent the wise planning of wise monarchs for dependent subjects?
We know better, for it is only in modern times that simple living and small incomes have achieved surroundings of artistic beauty and comfort. The marvels of interior decoration during the classic French periods were created for kings and their queens, mistresses and favored courtiers.
Diane de Poitiers wished perhaps only dreamed and an epoch-making art project was born. Madame du Barry admired and made her own the since famous du Barry rose color, and the Sevres porcelain factories reproduced it for her. But how to produce this particular illusive shade of deep, purplish-pink became a forgotten art, when the seductive person of the king's mistress was no more.
If you would learn all there is to know concerning the sixteenth century furnishings in France read Edmund Bonneffe's "Sixteenth Century Furniture."
It was the Henry II interior decoration and architecture which first showed the Renaissance of pure line and classic proportion, followed by the never-failing reaction from the simple line to the undulating over-ornate when decoration repeated the elaboration of the most luxurious, licentious periods of the past.
One has but to walk through the royal palaces of France to see French history beguilingly illustrated, in a series of volumes open to all, the pages of which are vibrant with the names and personalities of men and women who will always live in history as products of an age of great culture and art.
The Louis XIV, XV and XVI periods in furniture are all related. Rare brocades, flowered and in stripes, bronze mounts as garlands, bow-
Knots and rosettes, on intricate inlaying, mark their common relationship. The story of these periods is that gradually decoration becomes over-elaborated and in the end dominates the Greek outline,
The three Louis mark a succession of great periods. Louis XIV, though beautiful at its best, is of the three the most ornate and is characterized in its worst stage by the extremely bowed (cabriole) legs of the furniture, ludicrously suggestive of certain debauched courtiers who surrounded the Grande Monarch.
Louis XV legs show a curve, also, but no longer the stodgy, squat cabriole of the overfed gallant. Instead we are entranced by an ethereal grace and lightness of movement in every line and decoration. Here cabriole means but a courtly knee swiftly bending to salute some beauty's hand. So subtly waving is the curving outline of this furniture that one scarcely knows where it begins or ends, and it is the same with the decorations exquisitely delicate waving traceries of vines and flora, gold on gold, inlay, or paint in delicate tones.
All this gives to the Louis XV period supremacy over Louis XVI, whose round, grooved, tapering straight legs, one tires of more quickly, although fine gold and lovely paint make this type winning and beloved.
From Louis XVI we pass to the Directoire, when, following the Revolution, the voice of the populace decried all ostentation and everything savoring of the superfluous. The Great Napoleon in his first period affected simplicity and there were no longer bronze mounts, in rosettes, garlands and bow-knots, elaborate inlaying, nor painted furniture with lovely flowering surfaces; in the most severe examples not even fluted legs! Instead, simple but delicately proportioned furniture with slender, squarely cut, chastely tapering legs, arms and backs, was the fashion.
In fact, the Directoire type is one of ideal proportions, graceful outlines with a flowing movement and the decoration when present, kept well within bounds, entirely subservient to the main structural material. One feels an almost Quaker-like quality about the Directoire, whether of natural wood or plain painted surface.
With Napoleon's assumption of regal power and habits, we get the Empire (he had been to Rome and Egypt), pseudo-classic in outline and richly ornamented with mounts in ormoulu characteristic of the Louis.
The Empire period in furniture was dethroned by the succeeding regime.
When we see old French chairs with leather seats and backs, sometimes embossed, in the Portuguese style, with small regular design, put on with heavy nails and twisted or straight stretchers (pieces of wood extending between legs of chairs), we know that they belong to the time of Henry IV or Louis XIII. Some of the large chairs show the shell design in their broad, elaborate stretchers.
The beautiful small side tables of the Louis and First Empire called consoles, were made for the display of their marvelously wrought pieces of silver, hammered and chiseled by hand, "museum pieces," indeed, and lucky is the collector who chances upon any specimen adrift.
It is always necessary to consult political history in order to understand artistic invasions. Turn to it now and you will find that Charles VIII of France held Naples for two years (1495-6), and when he went home took with him Italian artists to decorate his palaces. Read on and find that later Henry II married Catherine de Medici and loved Diane de Poitiers, and that, fortunately for France, both his queen and his mistress were patronesses of the arts. So France bloomed in the sunshine of royal favor and Greek influence, as few countries ever had.
Fontainebleau (begun by Francis I) was the first of a chain of French royal palaces, all monuments without and within, to a picturesque system of monarchy, Kings who could do no wrong, wafting scepters over powerless subjects, whose toil produced Art in the form of architecture, cabinetmaking, tapestry weaving, mural decoration, unrivalled porcelain, exquisitely wrought silver and gold plate, silks, lovely as flower gardens (showing the "pomegranate" and "vase" patterns) and velvets like the skies! And for what? Did these things represent the wise planning of wise monarchs for dependent subjects?
We know better, for it is only in modern times that simple living and small incomes have achieved surroundings of artistic beauty and comfort. The marvels of interior decoration during the classic French periods were created for kings and their queens, mistresses and favored courtiers.
Diane de Poitiers wished perhaps only dreamed and an epoch-making art project was born. Madame du Barry admired and made her own the since famous du Barry rose color, and the Sevres porcelain factories reproduced it for her. But how to produce this particular illusive shade of deep, purplish-pink became a forgotten art, when the seductive person of the king's mistress was no more.
If you would learn all there is to know concerning the sixteenth century furnishings in France read Edmund Bonneffe's "Sixteenth Century Furniture."
It was the Henry II interior decoration and architecture which first showed the Renaissance of pure line and classic proportion, followed by the never-failing reaction from the simple line to the undulating over-ornate when decoration repeated the elaboration of the most luxurious, licentious periods of the past.
One has but to walk through the royal palaces of France to see French history beguilingly illustrated, in a series of volumes open to all, the pages of which are vibrant with the names and personalities of men and women who will always live in history as products of an age of great culture and art.
The Louis XIV, XV and XVI periods in furniture are all related. Rare brocades, flowered and in stripes, bronze mounts as garlands, bow-
Knots and rosettes, on intricate inlaying, mark their common relationship. The story of these periods is that gradually decoration becomes over-elaborated and in the end dominates the Greek outline,
The three Louis mark a succession of great periods. Louis XIV, though beautiful at its best, is of the three the most ornate and is characterized in its worst stage by the extremely bowed (cabriole) legs of the furniture, ludicrously suggestive of certain debauched courtiers who surrounded the Grande Monarch.
Louis XV legs show a curve, also, but no longer the stodgy, squat cabriole of the overfed gallant. Instead we are entranced by an ethereal grace and lightness of movement in every line and decoration. Here cabriole means but a courtly knee swiftly bending to salute some beauty's hand. So subtly waving is the curving outline of this furniture that one scarcely knows where it begins or ends, and it is the same with the decorations exquisitely delicate waving traceries of vines and flora, gold on gold, inlay, or paint in delicate tones.
All this gives to the Louis XV period supremacy over Louis XVI, whose round, grooved, tapering straight legs, one tires of more quickly, although fine gold and lovely paint make this type winning and beloved.
From Louis XVI we pass to the Directoire, when, following the Revolution, the voice of the populace decried all ostentation and everything savoring of the superfluous. The Great Napoleon in his first period affected simplicity and there were no longer bronze mounts, in rosettes, garlands and bow-knots, elaborate inlaying, nor painted furniture with lovely flowering surfaces; in the most severe examples not even fluted legs! Instead, simple but delicately proportioned furniture with slender, squarely cut, chastely tapering legs, arms and backs, was the fashion.
In fact, the Directoire type is one of ideal proportions, graceful outlines with a flowing movement and the decoration when present, kept well within bounds, entirely subservient to the main structural material. One feels an almost Quaker-like quality about the Directoire, whether of natural wood or plain painted surface.
With Napoleon's assumption of regal power and habits, we get the Empire (he had been to Rome and Egypt), pseudo-classic in outline and richly ornamented with mounts in ormoulu characteristic of the Louis.
The Empire period in furniture was dethroned by the succeeding regime.
When we see old French chairs with leather seats and backs, sometimes embossed, in the Portuguese style, with small regular design, put on with heavy nails and twisted or straight stretchers (pieces of wood extending between legs of chairs), we know that they belong to the time of Henry IV or Louis XIII. Some of the large chairs show the shell design in their broad, elaborate stretchers.
The beautiful small side tables of the Louis and First Empire called consoles, were made for the display of their marvelously wrought pieces of silver, hammered and chiseled by hand, "museum pieces," indeed, and lucky is the collector who chances upon any specimen adrift.
Fads In Collecting
IN a New York home one room is devoted to a so-called panler fleuri collection which in this case means that each article shows the design of a basket holding flowers or fruit The collection is today so unique and therefore so valuable, that it has been willed to a museum, but its creation as a collection, was entirely a chance occurrence. The design of a basket trimmed with flowers happened to appeal to the owner, and if we are not mistaken, the now large collection had its beginning in the casual purchase of a little old pendant found in a forgotten corner of Europe.
The owner wore it, her friends saw it, and gradually associated the panler fleuri with her, which resulted in many beautiful specimens of this design being sought out for her by wanderers at home and abroad. Today this collection includes old silks, laces,
Jewellery, wax pictures, old prints, some pieces of antique furniture, snuffboxes and ornaments in glass, china, silver, etc.
Every museum is the result of fads in collecting, and when one considers this heading, which sounds so trifling and unimportant to the layman, means all that it will not seem strange that we strongly recommend it as a dissipation!
At first, quite naturally, the collector makes mistakes; but it is through his mistakes that he learns, and absolutely nothing gives such a zest to a stroll in the city, a tramp in the country, or an unexpected delay in an out-of-the-way town, as to have this collecting bee in your bonnet.
How often when traveling we have rejoiced when the loss of a train or a mistake in timetable, meant an unexpected opportunity to explore for junk in some old shop, or, perhaps, to bargain with a pretty peasant girl who hoarded a beloved heirloom, of entrancing interest to us (and worth a pile of money really), while she lived happily on cider and cheese!
It is doubtless the experience of every lover of the old and the curious, that one never regrets the expenses incurred in this quest of the antique, but one does eternally regret one's economies.
The writer suffers now, after years have elapsed, in some cases, at the memory of treasures resisted when chanced upon in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia where not! Always one says, "Oh, well, I shall come back again!" But there are so many "pastures green," and it is often difficult to retrace one's steps.
Then, too, these fads open our eyes and ears, so that in passing along a street on foot, in a cab or on a bus, or in glancing through a book, or, perhaps, in an odd corner of an otherwise colorless town, where fate has taken us, we find "grist for our mill” just the right piece of furniture for the waiting place!
Know what you want, really want it, and you will find it some time, somewhere, somehow!
As a stimulus to beginners in collecting, as well as an illustration of that perseverance required of every keen collector, we cite the case of running down an Empire dressing table.
It was our desire to complete a small collection of Empire furniture for a suite of rooms, by adding to it as a supplement to the bureau, a certain type of Empire dressing table. It is no exaggeration to say that Paris was dragged for what we wanted the large well-known antique shops and the smaller ones of the Latin Quarter being both ransacked.
Time was flying, the date of our sailing was approaching, and as yet the coveted piece had not been found. Three days before we left, a fat, red-faced, jolly cabby, after making a vain tour of the junk shops in his quarter, demanded to know exactly what it was we sought. When told, he looked triumphant, bade us get into his cab, lashed his horse and after several rapidly made turns, dashed into an out-of-the-way street and drew up before a sort of junk store-house, full of rickety, dusty odds and ends of furniture, presided over by a stupid old woman who sat outside the door, knitting, wrapped head and all in a shawl.
We entered and, there, to our immense relief, stood the dressing table! It was grey with dust, the original Empire green silk, a rusty grey and hanging in shreds on the back of the original glass. There was a marble top set into the wood and grooved in a curious way. The whole was intact except for a loose back leg, which gave it a swaying, tottering appearance.
We passed it in silence being experienced traders! Then, after buying several little old picture frames, while Madame continued her knitting, we wandered close to the coveted table and asked what was wanted for that broken bit "of no use as it stands."
"Thirty francs" (six dollars) was the answer. Later a well-known New York dealer offered seventy-five dollars for the table in the condition in which we found it, and repaired as it is to-day it would easily bring a hundred and fifty, anywhere!
As it happened, the money we went out with had been spent on unexpected finds, and neither our good-natured cabby nor we were in possession of thirty francs! In fact, cabby was rather staggered to hear the price, having offered to advance what we needed. He suggested sending it home "collect" but Madame would not even consider such an idea.
However, at last our resourceful juju came to the rescue. If the ladies would seat themselves in the cab, he could place the table in front of them, with the cover of the cab raised, and Madame of the shop could lock her door and mounting the box by the side of our cocker, she might drive with us to our destination and collect the money herself! He promised to bring her home safely again!
As we had only the next day for boxing and shipping, there was no alternative. Before we had even taken in our grotesque appearance, the horse was galloping, as only a Paris cab horse can gallop, toward our abode in Avenue Henri Martin, past carriages and autos returning from the Bois, while inside the cab we sat, elated by our success and in that whirl of triumphant absorbing joy which only the real collector knows.
The owner wore it, her friends saw it, and gradually associated the panler fleuri with her, which resulted in many beautiful specimens of this design being sought out for her by wanderers at home and abroad. Today this collection includes old silks, laces,
Jewellery, wax pictures, old prints, some pieces of antique furniture, snuffboxes and ornaments in glass, china, silver, etc.
Every museum is the result of fads in collecting, and when one considers this heading, which sounds so trifling and unimportant to the layman, means all that it will not seem strange that we strongly recommend it as a dissipation!
At first, quite naturally, the collector makes mistakes; but it is through his mistakes that he learns, and absolutely nothing gives such a zest to a stroll in the city, a tramp in the country, or an unexpected delay in an out-of-the-way town, as to have this collecting bee in your bonnet.
How often when traveling we have rejoiced when the loss of a train or a mistake in timetable, meant an unexpected opportunity to explore for junk in some old shop, or, perhaps, to bargain with a pretty peasant girl who hoarded a beloved heirloom, of entrancing interest to us (and worth a pile of money really), while she lived happily on cider and cheese!
It is doubtless the experience of every lover of the old and the curious, that one never regrets the expenses incurred in this quest of the antique, but one does eternally regret one's economies.
The writer suffers now, after years have elapsed, in some cases, at the memory of treasures resisted when chanced upon in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia where not! Always one says, "Oh, well, I shall come back again!" But there are so many "pastures green," and it is often difficult to retrace one's steps.
Then, too, these fads open our eyes and ears, so that in passing along a street on foot, in a cab or on a bus, or in glancing through a book, or, perhaps, in an odd corner of an otherwise colorless town, where fate has taken us, we find "grist for our mill” just the right piece of furniture for the waiting place!
Know what you want, really want it, and you will find it some time, somewhere, somehow!
As a stimulus to beginners in collecting, as well as an illustration of that perseverance required of every keen collector, we cite the case of running down an Empire dressing table.
It was our desire to complete a small collection of Empire furniture for a suite of rooms, by adding to it as a supplement to the bureau, a certain type of Empire dressing table. It is no exaggeration to say that Paris was dragged for what we wanted the large well-known antique shops and the smaller ones of the Latin Quarter being both ransacked.
Time was flying, the date of our sailing was approaching, and as yet the coveted piece had not been found. Three days before we left, a fat, red-faced, jolly cabby, after making a vain tour of the junk shops in his quarter, demanded to know exactly what it was we sought. When told, he looked triumphant, bade us get into his cab, lashed his horse and after several rapidly made turns, dashed into an out-of-the-way street and drew up before a sort of junk store-house, full of rickety, dusty odds and ends of furniture, presided over by a stupid old woman who sat outside the door, knitting, wrapped head and all in a shawl.
We entered and, there, to our immense relief, stood the dressing table! It was grey with dust, the original Empire green silk, a rusty grey and hanging in shreds on the back of the original glass. There was a marble top set into the wood and grooved in a curious way. The whole was intact except for a loose back leg, which gave it a swaying, tottering appearance.
We passed it in silence being experienced traders! Then, after buying several little old picture frames, while Madame continued her knitting, we wandered close to the coveted table and asked what was wanted for that broken bit "of no use as it stands."
"Thirty francs" (six dollars) was the answer. Later a well-known New York dealer offered seventy-five dollars for the table in the condition in which we found it, and repaired as it is to-day it would easily bring a hundred and fifty, anywhere!
As it happened, the money we went out with had been spent on unexpected finds, and neither our good-natured cabby nor we were in possession of thirty francs! In fact, cabby was rather staggered to hear the price, having offered to advance what we needed. He suggested sending it home "collect" but Madame would not even consider such an idea.
However, at last our resourceful juju came to the rescue. If the ladies would seat themselves in the cab, he could place the table in front of them, with the cover of the cab raised, and Madame of the shop could lock her door and mounting the box by the side of our cocker, she might drive with us to our destination and collect the money herself! He promised to bring her home safely again!
As we had only the next day for boxing and shipping, there was no alternative. Before we had even taken in our grotesque appearance, the horse was galloping, as only a Paris cab horse can gallop, toward our abode in Avenue Henri Martin, past carriages and autos returning from the Bois, while inside the cab we sat, elated by our success and in that whirl of triumphant absorbing joy which only the real collector knows.
Different Types of Interior Designers
Interior Designers rarely work in every field. It is common for them to pick areas to specialize in. By choosing a specialty, you can further enhance your skills and abilities in that mode of design. It will certainly make for a better portfolio, and will allow you the time to become an expert designer in that field. Here are some of the specialty fields that you can go into.
Sometimes designers choose to specialize in residential areas, and sometimes they choose to specialize in commercial properties. Some even narrow their field that they specialize in by only doing work for certain types of homes and businesses.
It is also quite common for designers to refuse to specialize at all. Some will work wherever the work is. This leaves the field a little bit wider for them, but specializing is a more professional route to take. It is also better for your portfolio in the long run.
Residential Interior Designer
These designers do most of their work in people’s homes. They design various rooms inside and around the home. There is a lot of freedom in this type of field because clients generally let their designers have free reign to let their creativity create a beautiful space for them. You can do inside work, patios, guest houses, and even garages.
Many Interior Designers prefer this type of work because it is less stressful, and the deadlines are usually a little bit more relaxed. Homeowners rarely harass you to keep them posted on every aspect of what you are doing, so it can be a rewarding specialty. When you are allowed to create something that makes both you and the client happy, the feeling is much better.
The money that can be made doing residential design can be a little bit less lucrative at times, but there are always wealthy people that can use a great interior designer as well. Sometimes, the work for residential areas can be quite small also. This type of work is generally for the designer that is in love with the aspect of being creative, rather than the need to be rich. If you are thinking of Interior Design as a means of expressing your creativity, this could be the right place for you.
Commercial Interior Designer
Designers that specialize in commercial property and work do projects for businesses. The type of business varies greatly. You can do work for banks, hotels, restaurants, law firms; you name it. Any business that you can dream of is open to this specialty.
Good people skills and negotiation techniques are a vital aspect of this specialty as well. After all, you are dealing with business people. They respond well to a good business person. You could be required to design an office space, a hallway, lobby, and possibly and entire interior building. The possibilities are endless here.
This is a specialty where your ability to estimate the value of your own work will come in handy because many businesses accept bids from the designers that they are interested in working with. Also, you will often have to work under specific instructions as to what the client is looking for, so listening skills will be important here.
This type of specialty can be very lucrative if you can establish a good rapport with your client. Doing a good job will lead to a steady, return client, and your ability to satisfy this client will often guarantee you more work as the client’s word of mouth can lead to other businesses desiring your services.
You may also have to work a little more closely with your client in this field as well because business people like to be on top of things to ensure that they are done right. It may be a little bit annoying at times, but it is worth it in the end.
These are not the only branches of specialty. Some designers can choose any sub branch to specialize in as well. There are quite a few and all of them are intended for the designer that has a particular forte in the field. They also offer great employment opportunities for the designer that would like to make extra money on the side. They are as listed below.
Kitchen and Bath
This is a branch that you may wish to specialize in if you are quite adept at it, or if you have a general knack for it already. There are a great many possibilities in this branch because these are areas of the house that are often in need of dramatic change, and they are high traffic areas. You should have knowledge in cabinetry and plumbing for this particular branch.
Windows and Draperies
This seems like a small area to specialize in, but the windows of a house or building play a big role in the overall structure. They are a source of energy efficiency in every home, and they are often changed on a yearly basis. Basic heating and cooling knowledge helps, as well as dry walling, and space management.
Lighting
The lighting of any area is often a bit more complicated than plugging a lamp into a socket. Often, it is the addition of special lighting that can completely change a room’s environment. Some small additions or subtle lighting can change the way a room feels. Lighting is an often overlooked sub branch of Interior Design.
Sometimes designers choose to specialize in residential areas, and sometimes they choose to specialize in commercial properties. Some even narrow their field that they specialize in by only doing work for certain types of homes and businesses.
It is also quite common for designers to refuse to specialize at all. Some will work wherever the work is. This leaves the field a little bit wider for them, but specializing is a more professional route to take. It is also better for your portfolio in the long run.
Residential Interior Designer
These designers do most of their work in people’s homes. They design various rooms inside and around the home. There is a lot of freedom in this type of field because clients generally let their designers have free reign to let their creativity create a beautiful space for them. You can do inside work, patios, guest houses, and even garages.
Many Interior Designers prefer this type of work because it is less stressful, and the deadlines are usually a little bit more relaxed. Homeowners rarely harass you to keep them posted on every aspect of what you are doing, so it can be a rewarding specialty. When you are allowed to create something that makes both you and the client happy, the feeling is much better.
The money that can be made doing residential design can be a little bit less lucrative at times, but there are always wealthy people that can use a great interior designer as well. Sometimes, the work for residential areas can be quite small also. This type of work is generally for the designer that is in love with the aspect of being creative, rather than the need to be rich. If you are thinking of Interior Design as a means of expressing your creativity, this could be the right place for you.
Commercial Interior Designer
Designers that specialize in commercial property and work do projects for businesses. The type of business varies greatly. You can do work for banks, hotels, restaurants, law firms; you name it. Any business that you can dream of is open to this specialty.
Good people skills and negotiation techniques are a vital aspect of this specialty as well. After all, you are dealing with business people. They respond well to a good business person. You could be required to design an office space, a hallway, lobby, and possibly and entire interior building. The possibilities are endless here.
This is a specialty where your ability to estimate the value of your own work will come in handy because many businesses accept bids from the designers that they are interested in working with. Also, you will often have to work under specific instructions as to what the client is looking for, so listening skills will be important here.
This type of specialty can be very lucrative if you can establish a good rapport with your client. Doing a good job will lead to a steady, return client, and your ability to satisfy this client will often guarantee you more work as the client’s word of mouth can lead to other businesses desiring your services.
You may also have to work a little more closely with your client in this field as well because business people like to be on top of things to ensure that they are done right. It may be a little bit annoying at times, but it is worth it in the end.
These are not the only branches of specialty. Some designers can choose any sub branch to specialize in as well. There are quite a few and all of them are intended for the designer that has a particular forte in the field. They also offer great employment opportunities for the designer that would like to make extra money on the side. They are as listed below.
Kitchen and Bath
This is a branch that you may wish to specialize in if you are quite adept at it, or if you have a general knack for it already. There are a great many possibilities in this branch because these are areas of the house that are often in need of dramatic change, and they are high traffic areas. You should have knowledge in cabinetry and plumbing for this particular branch.
Windows and Draperies
This seems like a small area to specialize in, but the windows of a house or building play a big role in the overall structure. They are a source of energy efficiency in every home, and they are often changed on a yearly basis. Basic heating and cooling knowledge helps, as well as dry walling, and space management.
Lighting
The lighting of any area is often a bit more complicated than plugging a lamp into a socket. Often, it is the addition of special lighting that can completely change a room’s environment. Some small additions or subtle lighting can change the way a room feels. Lighting is an often overlooked sub branch of Interior Design.
Avoid In Interior Decoration
|E all know the saying that it is only those who have mastered the steps in dancing who can afford to forget them. It is the same in every art. Therefore let us state at once, that all rules may be broken by the educated the masters of their respective arts. For beginners we give the following rules as a guide, until they get their bearings in this fascinating game of making pictures by manipulating lines and colors, as expressed in necessary furnishings.
Avoid crowding your rooms, walls or tables, for in creating a home one must produce the quality of restfulness by order and space.
As to walls, do not use a cold color in a north or shaded room. Make your ceilings lighter in tone than the sidewalls, using a very pale shade of the same color as the sidewalls.
Do not put a spotted (figured) surface on other spotted (figured) surfaces. A plain wallpaper is the proper, because most effective, background for pictures.
Avoid the mistake of forgetting that table decoration includes all china, glass, silver and linen used in serving any meal. In attempting the decoration of your dining-room table avoid anything inappropriate to the particular meal to be served and the scale of service. Do not have too many flowers on your table, or flowers not in harmony with the rest of the setting, in variety or color.
Do not use peasant china, no matter how decorative in itself, on fine damask or rare lace. By so doing you strike a false note. The background it demands is crash or peasant lace.
Avoid crowding your dining table or giving it an air of confusion by the number of things on it, thus destroying the laws of simplicity, line and balance in decoration.
Avoid using on your walls as mere decorations articles such as rugs or priests' vestments primarily intended for other purposes.
Avoid the misuse of anything in furnishing. It needs only knowledge and patience to find the correct thing for each need. Better do without than employ a makeshift in decorating.
Inappropriateness and elaboration can defeat artistic beauty but intelligent elimination never can beware of having about too many vases, or china meant for domestic use. The proper place for table china, no matter how rare it is, is in the dining room. If very valuable, one can keep it in cabinets.
Useless bric-a-brac in a dining room looks worse than it does anywhere else. Your dining room is the best place for any brasses, copper or pewter you may own.
If sitting room and dining-room connect by a wide opening, keep the same color scheme in both, or, in any case, the same depth of color. This gives an effect of space. It is not uncommon when a house is very small, to keep all of the walls and woodwork, and all of the carpets, in exactly the same color and tone. If variety in the color-scheme is desired, it may be introduced by means of cretonnes or silks used for hangings and furniture covers.
Avoid the use of thin, old silks on sofas or chair seats. Avoid too cheap materials for curtains or chair covers, as they will surely fade.
Avoid too many small rugs in a room. This gives an impression of restless disorder and interferes with the architect's lines. Do not place your rugs at strange angles; but let them follow the lines of the walls.
Avoid placing ornaments or photographs on a piano, which is in sufficiently good condition to be used.
Avoid the chance of ludicrous effects. For example, keep a plain background behind your piano. Make sure that, when listening to music you are not distracted by seeing a bewildering section of a picture above the pianist's head, or a silly little vase dodging, as he moves, in front of, above, or below his nose!
Avoid placing vases, or a clock, against a chimneypiece already elaborately decorated by the architect, as a part of his scheme in using the moulding of panel to frame a painting over the mantel. In the old palaces one sees that a bit of undecorated background is provided between mantel and the architect's decoration. If your room has a long wall space, furnish it with a large cabinet or console, or a sofa and two chairs.
Avoid blotting out your architect's cleverest points by thoughtlessly misplacing hangings. Whoever decorates should always keep the architect's intention in mind.
Avoid having an antique clock, which does not go, and is used merely as an ornament. Make your rooms alive by having all the clocks running. This is one of the subtleties, which marks the difference between an antique shop, or museum, and a home.
Avoid the desecration of the few good antiques you own, by the use of a too modern color scheme. Have the necessary modern pieces you have bought to supplement your treasures, stained or painted a dull dark color in harmony with the antiques, and then use dull colors in the floor coverings, curtains and cushions. If you have no good old ornaments, try to get a few good shapes and colors in inexpensive reproductions of the period to which your antiques belong.
Avoid the mistake of forgetting that every room is a "stage setting," and must be a becoming and harmonious background for its OCCUT pants.
Avoid arranging a Louis XVI bedroom, with fragile antiques and delicate tones, for your husband of athletic proportions and elemental tastes. He will not only feel, but also look out of place. If he happens to be fond of artistic things, give him these in durable shades and shapes.
Avoid the omission of a thoroughly masculine sitting room, library, smoking-room or billiard-room for the man, or men, of the house.
Avoid crowding your rooms, walls or tables, for in creating a home one must produce the quality of restfulness by order and space.
As to walls, do not use a cold color in a north or shaded room. Make your ceilings lighter in tone than the sidewalls, using a very pale shade of the same color as the sidewalls.
Do not put a spotted (figured) surface on other spotted (figured) surfaces. A plain wallpaper is the proper, because most effective, background for pictures.
Avoid the mistake of forgetting that table decoration includes all china, glass, silver and linen used in serving any meal. In attempting the decoration of your dining-room table avoid anything inappropriate to the particular meal to be served and the scale of service. Do not have too many flowers on your table, or flowers not in harmony with the rest of the setting, in variety or color.
Do not use peasant china, no matter how decorative in itself, on fine damask or rare lace. By so doing you strike a false note. The background it demands is crash or peasant lace.
Avoid crowding your dining table or giving it an air of confusion by the number of things on it, thus destroying the laws of simplicity, line and balance in decoration.
Avoid using on your walls as mere decorations articles such as rugs or priests' vestments primarily intended for other purposes.
Avoid the misuse of anything in furnishing. It needs only knowledge and patience to find the correct thing for each need. Better do without than employ a makeshift in decorating.
Inappropriateness and elaboration can defeat artistic beauty but intelligent elimination never can beware of having about too many vases, or china meant for domestic use. The proper place for table china, no matter how rare it is, is in the dining room. If very valuable, one can keep it in cabinets.
Useless bric-a-brac in a dining room looks worse than it does anywhere else. Your dining room is the best place for any brasses, copper or pewter you may own.
If sitting room and dining-room connect by a wide opening, keep the same color scheme in both, or, in any case, the same depth of color. This gives an effect of space. It is not uncommon when a house is very small, to keep all of the walls and woodwork, and all of the carpets, in exactly the same color and tone. If variety in the color-scheme is desired, it may be introduced by means of cretonnes or silks used for hangings and furniture covers.
Avoid the use of thin, old silks on sofas or chair seats. Avoid too cheap materials for curtains or chair covers, as they will surely fade.
Avoid too many small rugs in a room. This gives an impression of restless disorder and interferes with the architect's lines. Do not place your rugs at strange angles; but let them follow the lines of the walls.
Avoid placing ornaments or photographs on a piano, which is in sufficiently good condition to be used.
Avoid the chance of ludicrous effects. For example, keep a plain background behind your piano. Make sure that, when listening to music you are not distracted by seeing a bewildering section of a picture above the pianist's head, or a silly little vase dodging, as he moves, in front of, above, or below his nose!
Avoid placing vases, or a clock, against a chimneypiece already elaborately decorated by the architect, as a part of his scheme in using the moulding of panel to frame a painting over the mantel. In the old palaces one sees that a bit of undecorated background is provided between mantel and the architect's decoration. If your room has a long wall space, furnish it with a large cabinet or console, or a sofa and two chairs.
Avoid blotting out your architect's cleverest points by thoughtlessly misplacing hangings. Whoever decorates should always keep the architect's intention in mind.
Avoid having an antique clock, which does not go, and is used merely as an ornament. Make your rooms alive by having all the clocks running. This is one of the subtleties, which marks the difference between an antique shop, or museum, and a home.
Avoid the desecration of the few good antiques you own, by the use of a too modern color scheme. Have the necessary modern pieces you have bought to supplement your treasures, stained or painted a dull dark color in harmony with the antiques, and then use dull colors in the floor coverings, curtains and cushions. If you have no good old ornaments, try to get a few good shapes and colors in inexpensive reproductions of the period to which your antiques belong.
Avoid the mistake of forgetting that every room is a "stage setting," and must be a becoming and harmonious background for its OCCUT pants.
Avoid arranging a Louis XVI bedroom, with fragile antiques and delicate tones, for your husband of athletic proportions and elemental tastes. He will not only feel, but also look out of place. If he happens to be fond of artistic things, give him these in durable shades and shapes.
Avoid the omission of a thoroughly masculine sitting room, library, smoking-room or billiard-room for the man, or men, of the house.
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