A BEAUTIFUL DINING ROOM

I will give still another dining-room as an example of color, which, unlike the others, is not modern, but a sort of falling in of old gentility and costliness into lines of modern art—one might almost say it happened to be beautiful, and yet the happening is only an adjustment of fine old conditions to modern ideas. Yet I have known many as fine a room torn out and refitted, losing thereby all the inherent dignity of age and superior associations.

A beautiful city home of seventy years ago is not very like a beautiful city home of today; perhaps less so in this than in any other country. The character of its fineness is curiously changed; the modern house is fitted to its inmates, while the old-fashioned house, modelled upon the early eighteenth century art of England, obliged the inmates to fit themselves as best they might to a given standard.

The dining-room I speak of belongs to the period when Washington Square, New York, was still surrounded by noble homes, and almost the limit of luxurious city life was Union Square. The house fronts to the north, consequently the dining-room, which is at the back, is flooded with sunshine. The ceiling is higher than it would be in a modern house, and the windows extend to the floor, and rise nearly to the ceiling, far indeed above the flat arches of the doorways with their rococo flourishes. This extension of window-frame, and the heavy and elaborate plaster cornice so deep as to be almost a frieze, and the equally elaborate centre-piece, are the features which must have made it a room difficult to ameliorate.

I could fancy it must have been an ugly room in the old days when its walls were probably white, and the great mahogany doors were spots of color in prevailing spaces of blankness. Now, however, any one at all learned in art, or sensitive to beauty, would pronounce it a beautiful room. The way in which the ceiling with its heavy centre-piece and plaster cornice is treated is especially interesting. The whole of this is covered with an ochre-colored bronze, while the walls and door-casings are painted a dark indigo, which includes a faint trace of green. Over this wall-color, and joining the cornice, is carried a stencil design in two colored bronzes which seem to repeat the light and shadow of the cornice moldings, and this apparently extends the cornice into a frieze which ends faintly at a picture-molding some three feet below. This treatment not only lowers the ceiling, which is in construction too high for the area of the room, but blends it with the wall in a way which imparts a certain richness of effect to all the lower space.

The upper part of the windows, to the level of the picture-molding, is covered with green silk, overlaid with an appliqué of the same in a design somewhat like the frieze, so that it seems to carry the frieze across the space of light in a green tracery of shadow. The same green extends from curtain-rods at the height of the picture-molding into long under-curtains of silk, while the over-curtains are of indigo colored silk-canvas which matches the walls.

The portières separating the dining-room from the drawing-room are of a wonderfully rich green brocade—the color of which answers to the green of the silk under-curtains across the room, while the design ranges itself indisputably with the period of the plaster work. The blue and green of the curtains and portière each seem to claim their own in the mixed and softened background of the wall.

The color of the room would hardly be complete without the three beautiful portraits which hang upon the walls, and suggest their part of the life and conversation of to-day so that it stands on a proper plane with the dignity of three generations. The beautiful mahogany doors and elaboration of cornice and central ornament belong to them, but the harmony and beauty of color are of our own time and tell of the general knowledge and feeling for art which belongs to it.

I have given the color-treatment only of this room, leaving out the effect of carved teak-wood furniture and subtleties of china and glass—not alone as an instance of color in a sunny exposure, but as an example of fitting new styles to old, of keeping what is valuable and beautiful in itself and making it a part of the comparatively new art of decoration.

There is a dining-room in one of the many delightful houses in Lakewood, N.J., which owes its unique charm to a combination of position, light, color, and perhaps more than all, to the clever decoration of its upper walls, which is a fine and broad composition of swans and many-colored clusters of grapes and vine-foliage placed above the softly tinted copper-colored wall. The same design is carried in silvery and gold-colored leaded-glass across the top of the wide west window, as shown in illustration opposite page 222, and reappears with a shield-shaped arrangement of wings in a beautiful four-leaved screen.

The notable and enjoyable color of the room is seen from the very entrance of the house, the broad main hall making a carpeted highway to the wide opening of the room, where a sheaf of tinted sunset light seems to spread itself like a many-doubled fan against the shadows of the hall.

All the ranges and intervals, the lights, reflections, and darks possible to that most beautiful of metals—copper—seem to be gathered into the frieze and screen, and melt softly into the greens of the foliage, or tint the plumage of the swans. It is an instance of the kind of decoration which is both classic and domestic, and being warmed and vivified by beautiful color, appeals both to the senses and the imagination.

It would be easy to multiply instances of beautiful rooms, and each one might be helpful for mere imitation, but those I have given have each one illustrated—more or less distinctly—the principle of color as affecting or being affected by light.

NEXT: Decorating Details

BEGINNING: Principals of Home Decoration