LAW OF APPROPRIATENESS IN HOME DECORATING

Best Practices in Home Decoration for Best Results

I have laid much stress upon the value of colour in interior decoration, but to complete the beauty of the home something more than happy choice of tints is required. It needs careful and educated selection of furniture and fittings, and money enough to indulge in the purchase of an intrinsically good thing instead of a medium one. It means even something more than the love of beauty and cultivation of it, and that is a perfect adherence to the law of appropriateness.

This is, after all, the most important quality of every kind of decoration, the one binding and general condition of its accomplishment. It requires such a careful fitting together of all the means of beauty as to leave no part of the house, whatever may be its use, without the same care for appropriate completeness which goes to the more apparent features. The cellar, the kitchen, the closets, the servants' bedrooms must all share in the thought which makes the genuinely beautiful home and the genuinely perfect life. It must be possible to go from the top to the bottom of the house, finding everywhere agreeable, suitable, and thoughtful furnishings. The beautiful house must consider the family as a whole, and not make a museum of rare and costly things in the drawing-room, the library, the dining-room and family bedrooms, leaving that important part of the whole machinery, the service, untouched by the spirit of beauty. The same care in choice of colour will be as well bestowed on the servants' floor as on those devoted to the family, and curtains, carpets and furniture may possess as much beauty and yet be perfectly appropriate to servants' use.

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