DELIGHT IN THE HOME

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 233, 21 December 1927, Page 7

DELIGHT IN THE HOME

STYLE IN DECORATION Is the average house enjoyed by its occupants? The associations with home, ease, rest, welcome, must be laid aside to consider this question and the house must be viewed simply as living quarters, in which persons are spending by far the greatest part of their lives. Take the bedroom, in which the man who sleeps the average eight hours a day, will spend well over 20 years of his span of 70. Can a man enter that room with a feeling of pleasure that all is decoratively appropriate in colour and form? Does his eye wander round the room with delight after he has finished reading or does he turn out the light quickly to avoid an unpleasant drop back to mundane things? This is the importance of the decoratively vital house. Houses are no longer merely shelters to keep off the rain and the sun, nor collecting-rooms for antimacassars, aspidistras and Victorian frills. They are the most important part of the environment of the man and the woman, and especially of the child, and they may give satisfaction to the desire for beauty or breed a deathly indifference. The trouble is that most people have become so indifferent that they no longer see the things in their houses. The Browns have an oak suite in their dining-room because the Smiths have one or because it was going cheap. With radical and yet eminently senible ideas on the interior of houses. Decorations and Publicity, of No. 10 Vulcan Lane, are trying to prove that usefulness is an essential part of beauty. They resent the slavish copying of styles, which sprang from the need of some period of history. “Be your period,” is their solgan, and their designs are to as.lmilate the decorative schemes of past and also the modern ideas. Especially are they willing to construct and put into form the perhaps ethereal ideas of people who “want something different.” Furniture is planned and decorated, lampshades of delightful figures or in blended smdkes of colour made, boxes hand-painted, screens and overmantels designed, distinctive cushions sketched and elaborated. Besides these articles the talented people make silken shawls and scarves- of original design and blending of tints. They also do poster work and art publicity, one of the members of the firm having studied in London.