Part 36
A Corner Closet.
Lack of closet room in a house is a fruitful theme for complaint in these days of contracted space. Architects there are who are willing to sacrifice every consideration, not excepting internal utility, for picturesque outside effects.
In such cases recourse must be had to wardrobes, but as these are expensive, the busy fingers of the housewife must be depended upon to improvise substitutes. If there is a corner in the room with sufficient space (sometimes the architect denies us this small boon) it may be utilized in the manner herewith described.
Two strips of wood as long as you desire and four inches wide by one inch thick are screwed in the angle of the wall about six feet from the floor; boards are cut off to fit in the corner and resting on these strips; this will form the roof. A brass or wooden rod is then run across the front of this board from wall to wall and from which the curtain is suspended by rings. Cretonne, chintz or printed cotton, will make a good list to choose from, and are inexpensive. One may screw upon the underside of the roof and on the cleats as many hooks as are required, and, if desired, a shelf may be introduced about fifteen inches below the roof, and on that attach the hooks. Such an emergency closet will often be found a great convenience, and the cost will be trifling. It will be well to stretch a piece of muslin or paper across the upper side of the roof to keep out the dust.
A home-made Japanese cabinet may be readily made of the common materials found about the house, such as boxes of hard or soft wood. The smoother the boxes, the better; but they can be planed, if they are not.
The shelves are so arranged as to accommodate the different sizes of Japanese bric-a-brac. The small cabinet in the upper left-hand corner is simply a smooth bit of the board, finished with two ornamental hinges, either brass or bronze. The escutcheon is of the same. The circular panel can be either of Lincrusta, bronzed, or to make it a little more unique, a circular hole can be cut in the door, and a pretty blue Japanese plate inserted, held in place at the back, and the door lined. The supports are easily obtained by a visit to a factory where they have a turning lathe. The ornamental finish at the bottom is of lightly carved wood, if one can do these things, or a strip can be purchased at a carpenter shop or wall paper store. Still another way out of the difficulty is to get just the length of Lincrusta and tack it on neatly.
Before the hinges and escutcheon are put on, the staining should be done, and the simplest way out of the difficulty is to purchase Pik-Ron, stain whatever color or wood you require, then afterward give it a coat of varnish, coach varnish giving a durable finish that is heavy and beautiful, or the whole cabinet may be covered with the stamped Japanese cotton goods in gilt and colors, each shelf being covered before being put in place, and the uprights gilded or stained. Still again, if the work is of pine, it may be stained a rich bronze, and left with dead finish, which is a very fair imitation of Japanese woodwork.
Piano Decoration.
An upright piano should be placed with its back to the room. This position is not only good from a decorative standpoint, but a performer likes to be shielded by the instrument. Here are enumerated various graceful ways to cover the polished bareness of this musical instrument.
To hang a square of tapestry over the back from a brass rod is exceedingly striking. If possible, let the painted subject relate to music or sentiment, and have it sufficiently large to cover the surface of the piano.
If the tapestry is very fine work its surface should be unspoiled by additions. Across the top of the piano lay a scarf of Liberty silk, or another painted panel. The only bric-a-brac that combines with this drapery is a pair of candelabra, the quainter in style the better.
Algerian stripes, Baghdad tapestry or Persian prints make good backgrounds. Their cost is $1.25 a yard, and width fifty inches. With this as a foundation many schemes may be carried out. Bas-relief heads in plaster can be swung on it without injuring the wood of the piano. Medallions of Beethoven, Mozart or Wagner can be purchased for $1 each. A long panel of cherubs goes well, or a line of Delft or Japanese plates.
A low settle has a comfortable resting place underneath this. Either a box seat upholstered in dark, contrasting stuff, or one of the $4.50 green wooden settles, sold to artists, would serve. A number of cushions placed on the seat against the piano add to the coziness and grace of the decoration.
Lighting.
Rooms should be lighted from the sides, if possible. The great central chandeliers, casting their downward shadows, age every face in the room by emphasizing every line, and bringing out every defect sharply.
Decorating.
In decorating a room a harmony of the shades of one color should be used. Beware of spotty effects. It should really, according to Edmond Russell, “be conceived, as a piece of music is, in a certain key. There should be sympathy and harmony. Even the pictures should be chosen with as much regard to their surroundings as to their individual merits.”
Another important item in the decoration of the home is considering the choice of ground tones with reference to the complexion of its hostess. Guests appear there but casually. She is always there, and no one should elect to occupy a room, whose color tones either totally efface what little color one may possess, or else, by an exaggeration of natural ruddiness, be made a rival of the setting sun.
The effect of color upon the appearance is so important that every change of color, changes not only the color of the skin, but that of the hair and eyes as well.
Edmond Russell once studied a room with reference to complexions, mixing his paints to a relative hue with the general tone of complexions, making it duller and grayer, so that standing near it the skin looked clear and fresh beside it.
“I made the tone,” he said, “a little greener and colder than flesh, so that one looked lighter and warmer and was enriched by the contrast. Any who stood in front of that wall looked five or ten years younger than they were.”
In using a flower, or other design, for a frieze or dado, they should be conventionalized. This term is used to signify the modification of a real object with its surroundings. The more formal they are the better; no attempt at shading or perspective is necessary, and the square and compass should be used as much as possible in their designing.
In decorating a room, a dark floor is the beginning, and the walls grow lighter as the ceiling is approached. The richest effects should be congregated at the mantel, with the fire as its central object.
“The ability to combine is a rare one.” Ruskin writes truly that, “one rarely meets even an educated person who can select a good carpet, a wall paper, and a ceiling, and have them in harmony.” There is too much of a temptation to adopt beautiful things simply because they are beautiful, without pausing to consider the weightier matter of their eternal fitness, or remembering that a thing intrinsically beautiful in itself may become hideous by inharmonious proximity or combination with another beautiful object.
Home of the Soul.
A mystic German writer calls a house, properly ordered, the “home of the soul,” carrying out the idea that the house in which an orderly soul lives, is only an expansion of the body built and adorned out of her passing experiences. “All sorts of delicate affinities establish themselves between her and the lights and shadows of her abode; the particular picture on the wall; the scent of flowers at a particular window until she seems incorporated into it.”
In other words, one’s environments, as one’s dress, must be in harmony with their individual type, or a permanent discord will result; for instance, Emma Moffett Tyng speaks of a “pond-lily type of woman, soft color, gray blue eyes, pale brown eyes,” appealing to her as to the “effect” of the gorgeous, redecorated interior of her home, with flames of color in hangings and rugs, and “her Egyptian gown with its glow and glint of purple and gold. All these things were artistic and beautiful, and perfect in their relations to each other,” but in their relation to her nothing could have been worse. The woman, herself, was eclipsed, obliterated. “A Cleopatra, dark and flashing, would make the picture complete. But such a colorless woman needs repose in her surroundings; the low tones of blue and gray, the palest flush of the sunset heavens.”
Some Lovely Rooms.
Edmond Russell has treated two rooms exquisitely. A gold and ivory parlor, tinted, walls and ceiling in a grayish white with a greenish tinge, and this is mottled with gold flecked lightly over the surface. The broad frieze is adorned in free, simple style with leaves and blossoms of magnolia. Everything in this room should be light and delicate in color. The soft gold and ivory would be nullified by heavy walnut window casings; red and green carpet, red or blue plush furnishings, or vivid hangings would ruin the effect. Pictures in such a room should be preferably water-colors with pale gray mats, and gold or white frames. Oil paintings are only permissible when dreamy and vaporous in tint. Light, delicate colors in upholstery, creamy madras for curtains. The carpet may be a little darker, verging on some of the delicate, woody browns. Any bric-a-brac should be in pale shades of yellow or rose.
The tender lights of this room seem to clear and soften the complexion of the occupants.
Another is a dining-room of copper, bronze and terra cotta shades. A pale tint of copper to the background overlaid with dashes of bronze and strong copper color. The frieze is a succession of pine boughs, lightly fringed with their needles. Above the sideboard is a panel representing magnolia blossoms, and their heavy polished leaves, with brown in stem and shadows. The effect of this color scheme is to give a suggestion of warmth and cheer. The gold and copper used in flecking the wall are merely the two shades of the common bronze powder.
Still another nest of a sleeping-room comes to mind, a creation of Moscheles. Floor covered with white bearskin rugs, furnished with a delicate tint of robin’s-egg blue. Toilet table strewn with every imaginable luxury in old ivory and silver. Panels in the wardrobe and doors filled with paintings by Burne-Jones, classic figures given the preference.
These rooms are given as examples of harmony of coloring. Great expense is not always necessary to secure this artistic harmony. Money goes a long way, but good taste and ingenuity will go just as far, with a minimum of expenditure.
There is a little room, a symphony in green and gold, created by one girl’s taste, a pale seafoam green that is delightful to the eye. The woodwork, banded with a narrow strip of gilt, is of this color, and the enterprising young woman painted it all with her own hands. The curtains at the three windows are of the freshest and purest white muslin, prettily ruffled. They are the kind that always look as if they had just been laundered and they are tied back with pale green ribbons that make them look the more exquisitely neat. The floor is covered with plain matting, which particularly recommended itself, by the way, because it was inexpensive.
As to Furniture.
Every article of furniture in the room is of the prevailing green and there are no off shades, for they were all painted from the same can of paint. The bedstead was nothing but common pine, made to order at the factory, and it is of a quaint design that originated in the same fertile brain that is responsible for all the rest of the perfect appointments. The headboard is in the shape of a shield and there is painted thereon a spray of wild roses to bring to the sleeper over whom they bend sweet dreams of perpetual summer time. And the white counterpane and snowy pillows in the setting of green and gold make it a most inviting place of repose.
The chairs were resurrected from the débris in the family attic. There are two heavy old-fashioned ones of curly maple, and they are cushioned with a brocaded green and gold material that exactly match the green of the furniture. Then there is a comfortable little rocking chair cushioned with the same material and painted in green with many stripes of gold.
But it is the dressing table that is the most charming of all the unique devices that make the room attractive. It was a battered old washstand at first, but now it is a work of art. It is painted, of course, in green and gilt, and there is a spray of wild roses on the front. Above it is a green and gilt framed mirror with a spray of the favorite wild roses again overhanging the top part. Over mirror and washstand and all is draped a canopy of white muslin. Among the other articles that find place on the table is a little fairy lamp with a shade of green tissue paper that gives the softest light imaginable.
A comfortable green window seat in the corner is well supplied with pillows covered in green and gold brocade, and up and around the window there clambers an old English ivy.
There is an oddly fashioned bookcase in another corner. You would never guess it, of course, but it was constructed out of two dry goods boxes. It is painted green inside and out and fitted up with four shelves. A green silk curtain hangs from a brass rod, and about the edge of the bookcase is a gilt cornice. The top is covered with bric-a-brac.
For pictures there is an etching or two on the wall in green and gold frames, and you have a room the very sight of which is cool and refreshing, and which cost its owner some time and some planning, but very little money.
Pictures.
Be careful of the pictures and their relations to the walls. Rooms should rather be a setting for a beautiful moving picture of the shifting groups of people in it.
Too much gilding, too many gaudy oil paintings attract the eye and distract the mind.
There is a simple picture in my room, red curtains, a white-robed child kneeling, that is all, but everything in it harmonizes, and it harmonizes with the furnishings of the room, and my eye is often drawn toward it.
One authority objects to portraits as a decoration. “Their presence, if at all impressive, is too stimulating.”
Picture frames should never be so gorgeous as to distract the mind from the picture. “Frames are to protect the picture and relate it to the walls.”
Group etchings together and put engravings in the portfolio. Over low bookcases pictures should be large, and in this form they give a style to the room. Water colors look admirable if treated in this manner, and if two bookcases are put together so as to form one, divide the pictures by a bracket, on which place a jar of some unique pattern.
Small rooms require medium-size pictures, which can be hung one above the other, and three may even be placed on line with good effect. For an ideal head in oil the frame should be of broad gilt. Hang it in a good light, and on one side group two small water-color pieces in the fashionable white band frame. For an oblong picture a small sketch under it looks well equipped.
A very large and beautiful picture sometimes sets the keynote of color for the apartment. Otherwise, subordinate them as decorations to the colorings of the room, as in the ivory and gold room.
In a room where there are to be many pictures, give rather a neutral color to the walls, merely as a picture background. Where there are finely decorated walls pictures are rather out of place, since one decoration spoils the effect of the other.
Mottoes.
The motto, whose revival is noted in the above title, is the expression in architecture of some sentiment suitable to the place to which it is applied. It is more frequently and more noticeably in domestic architecture than elsewhere that the motto is found. Scarcely a country house of sufficient size to boast a hall and fireplace but announces in script or text a welcome to all guests or some appreciation of the comforts of its four walls. The favorite place for this motto is over the fireplace, either above or below the mantel shelf, and of all the old ones, “East or west, home is best,” with its variety of expressions, is the favorite. “A man’s house is his castle.”
“Home is the resort Of love, of joy, of peace.”
“A man’s best things are nearest him;” “Our house is ever at your service;” “You are very welcome;” “Take the goods the gods provide thee”—any one of these will as appropriately welcome the stranger as the friend.
Over the mantel of one’s private room the restful motto, “Duty done is the soul’s fireside,” may find appropriate place.
How to be Beautiful.
To begin at the beginning: to insure a good complexion strict attention must be paid to the diet. Wholesome, well-cooked food must be eaten; regular exercise in the open air is another point, and the body must be bathed three hundred and sixty-five times a year. It may be considered almost supererogatory to remark that not any amount of cerates, washes or powders will cover or obliterate blotches, pimples and blackheads caused by unwholesome food or uncleanly habits. We may not be able to afford elegantly-appointed bath-rooms, but we all can indulge in a daily bath.
A quick and simple method for the busy housekeeper, which need only occupy a few moments, is as follows: buy a yard of coarse Turkish toweling, and make of it two mittens. Have a bowl of warm water, in which dissolve some borax. This is soothing to tired nerves, besides rendering the skin soft and white. When ready, slip on one of the mittens, wet it thoroughly, rub well with soap, and quickly wash the body all over. All the impurities of the body are now on this mitten. Lay it to one side. Put on the other mitten, and wash the body again. The mittens may be washed and hung to dry, ready for the next bath. Rub the skin briskly with a rough towel until it glows.
If this treatment is followed daily, with a tub-bath weekly, you will not complain of those tired, nervous headaches, your face will lose its sallowness, and your walk will gain in sprightliness. Here let us say, for the benefit of those who are obliged to live in rented houses, or who have no facilities for a bath-room, that a folding bathtub is now offered. It folds up somewhat after the manner of a folding bed. When closed it looks like a cabinet, and is nicely finished in oak. In connection with it is a tank and heating apparatus. The water may be heated with gas, kerosene or gasoline.
Lemon juice, diluted, is a famous whitener for the skin, as are all vegetable acids, such as tomato, cucumber and watermelon. Oftentimes something is needed to heal as well as whiten. For this, take two tablespoonfuls of oatmeal and cook it with enough water to form a thin gruel, strain, and when cool add to two tablespoonfuls of the gruel one tablespoonful of lemon juice. Wash the face with this at night, allowing it to dry on the skin. This is excellent for a shiny face.
Another very soothing preparation to use at night is made of one ounce of glycerine, half an ounce of rosemary (fluid), and twenty drops of carbolic acid. This is excellent for any irritation of the skin, and also for prickly heat. The face must always be well washed with water and pure soap before applying any of these preparations. If the skin is oily, bathe with diluted camphor (a teaspoonful to a pint of water), but it is injurious to a naturally dry skin.
Treatment for a Rough Skin.
A wash for a rough face is two ounces of water, one ounce of glycerine, one ounce of alcohol, and half an ounce of gum of benzoin, to be dissolved in the alcohol first. Apply at night. For wrinkles—do we see some of you looking interested?—take some clippings of sheep’s wool and steep in hot alcohol. It is said that the grease thus obtained is identical with an element found in the human bile. I know that if rubbed on the skin it not only removes but prevents wrinkles, making the skin soft and pliable. These remedies all have the merit of being harmless, which cannot be said of all cosmetics.
Let us give one more recipe, and that is for brightening the eyes. When you are tired and warm, and your eyes are dull, take a cloth and wring it out of very hot water, as hot as you can bear it. Lie down for ten minutes with this cloth spread over your burning face and tired eyes. You will be surprised to see how the tired lines will fade out and how the eyes will shine, and when your “dearest” comes home he will pay you a compliment which will more than reward you.
Reducing Flesh.
The real mode of life and diet should be changed if the fat would be reduced. If necessary, procure a pair of scales and weigh the different foods that are taken into the system. Reduce the diet then to about four ounces of starch or sugar material per day, one and a half ounces of fat, taken chiefly in the form of butter, and about six or seven ounces of albuminous food, such as lean meat or fish. This is the minimum that should be resorted to, and the patient can take more of each at first and reduce the diet gradually to this point. The proportion of the different food compounds, however, with the exception of figs, dates, grapes and nuts, should also be eaten daily, and one-third of a pound of some of the following vegetables: asparagus, turnips, cucumbers, parsley, watercress, celery, kale or cabbage. Fluids have a fattening tendency, and they must be taken in small quantities.
The drinking should be confined to tea, coffee or water, and never should be taken at mealtime, nor within one hour of a meal. This is peremptory, for food will produce fat much quicker and surer when watered by some good beverage.
Refreshing Sleep.
What is the correct method to pursue in preparing for a trip into dreamland, for there is a right as well as a wrong way? The business of disrobing should be so systematized that attending to all the little niceties included in the process will become, after a while, second nature. There is something more to be done, let us assure you, in addition to putting your hair up in curl-papers and dabbing a bit of cold cream on your face, if you would wake up in the morning looking as fresh as a rose. In the first place, do not put off these important preparations until you are so heavy-lidded that you are ready to give everything belonging to the toilet the go by. And now for the first step. Early in the evening your sleeping apartments should be thoroughly aired by dropping the window from the top and raising it at the bottom.
The current of fresh air is especially important when the room has been, as so many sleeping apartments are, in constant use all day. Ten minutes will be quite sufficient for toning up the atmosphere. Now close the window and allow the room to become thoroughly warmed, that you may not experience a chill while taking a rub down. Prepare a big bowl of tepid water, into which you sprinkle a small quantity of ammonia or borax. Take a Turkish towel, which is much better than a sponge, wring it out as dry as possible, and, grasping a corner in each hand, give the spine a vigorous rubbing. Have at hand another Turkish towel, and as you bathe the body in sections, dry as quickly as possible.