The House in Good Taste

My greatest difficulty in introducing chintzes here was to convert women who loved their plush and satin draperies to a simpler fabric. They were unwilling to give up the glories they knew for the charms they knew not. I convinced them by showing them results! My first large commission was the Colony Club, and I used chintzes throughout the Club: Chintzes of cool grapes and leaves in the roof garden, hand-blocked linens of many soft colors in the reading-room, rose-sprigged and English posy designs in the bedrooms, and so on throughout the building. Now I am using more chintz than anything else. It is as much at home in the New York drawing-room as in the country cottage. I can think of nothing more charming for a room in a country house than a sitting-room furnished with gray painted furniture and a lovely chintz. Not long ago I was asked to furnish a small sea-shore cottage. The whole thing had to be done in a month, and the only plan I had to work on was a batch of chintz samples that had been selected for the house. I extracted the colorings of walls, woodwork, furniture, etc., from these chintzes. Instead of buying new furniture I dragged down a lot of old things that had been relegated to the attic and painted them with a dull ground color and small designs adapted from the chintzes. The lighting fixtures, wall brackets, candle sticks, etc.--were of carved wood, painted in polychrome to match the general scheme. One chintz in particular I would like to have every woman see and enjoy. It had a ground of old blue, patterned regularly with little Persian "pears," the old rug design, you know. The effect of this simple chintz with white painted walls and furniture and woodwork and crisp white muslin glass curtains was delicious.