The House in Good Taste

Given plenty of chairs and sofas, and a few small tables to hold lights and flowers, you will need very little other furniture in the drawing-room. You will need a writing-table, but a very small and orderly one. The drawing room desk may be very elegant in design and equipment, for it must be a part of the decoration of the room, and it must be always immaculate for the visitor who wants to write a note. The members of the family are supposed to use their own desks, leaving this one for social emergencies. A good desk is a godsend in a drawing-room, it makes a room that is usually cold and formal at once more livable and more intimate. In my own drawing-room I have a small French writing-table placed near a window, so that the light falls over one's left shoulder. The small black lacquer desks that are now being reproduced from old models would be excellent desks for drawing-rooms, because they not only offer service, as all furniture should, but are beautiful in themselves. Many of the small tables of walnut and mahogany that are sold as dressing-tables might be used as writing-tables in formal rooms, if the mirrors were eliminated.