The House in Good Taste

In a great room with a beamed ceiling and oak paneled walls a painted fresco or a frieze of tapestry or some fine fabric is a very fine thing, especially if it has a lot of primitive red and blue and gold in it, but in simple rooms--beware! Lately there has been a great revival of interest in wood paneling. We go abroad, and see the magnificent paneling of old English houses, and we come home and copy it. But we cannot get the workmen who will carve panels in the old patterns. We cannot wait a hundred years for the soft bloom that comes from the constant usage, and so our paneled rooms are apt to be too new and woody. But we have such a wonderful store of woods, here in America, it is worth while to panel our rooms, copying the simple rectangular English patterns, and it is quite permissible to "age" our walls by rubbing in black wax, and little shadows of water-color, and in fact by any method we can devise. Wood paneled walls, like beamed ceilings, are best in great rooms. They make boxes of little ones.