HOME THAT IS NOT DRAB

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1025, 16 July 1930, Page 6

HOME THAT IS NOT DRAB

UNUSUAL COLOUR SCHEME A BRIGHTER MAYFAIR Certain of the wives of American delegates to the Naval Conference were heard to exclaim at the drab exterior of London houses in Mayfair and elsewhere. They should have made a point of seeing the new house that the Hon. Mrs. Lionel Guest has just finished decorating in Stanhope Place, which is a glorious riot of butter-yellow, Wedgwood blue, jade green, several shades of pink and pale grey, states an English writer. The grey is what is technically called a “cement wash” on the outside picked out with bright blue. In a yellow basement yard stand jade green dustbins and in the ground floor bay window of the dining room, behind plain net curtains, stands a bowl of pink tulips. Mrs. Guest is a great believer in the soothing and peace-making influence of pale-blue, so this colour adorns nearly all her ceilings—though the decorator had to change it five times to get the right shade.

In the tiny blue and yellow' hall one Eets a glimpse of the pantry beyond —though this green room with pink curtains does not look like a pantry, and on the little bit of blank wall between the two windows an orchard scene of apple and wisteria blossom will be painted with ordinary paint varnished over to protect it from the weather.

More colour is provided all over the little house by the Bristol glass door knobs, that Mrs. Guest has in green, blue and red, and which she says have taken her years to collect. Her own sitting room, where live two bullfinches left to her by Princess Ilatzfieldt, is painted in that icy shade of Russian ballet pink and her bedroom is deep crushed strawberry, where, by the way, she has a dressingtable that is also a bookcase and a chest of drawers. Swedenborg flanks toilet scents and brushes and combs. Mrs. Guest is a great believer in labour-saving, and has devoted quite as much attention to the servants’ quarters as to the rest of the house, with the result that hey are quite the brightest and most compact in London. One of her ideas is to have a dustpan and brush hidden away somewhere in each room, so that extra dusting can be done by the mistress of the house when she sees a speck of dirt about. In Mr. Guests's workroom—where he constructed a telescope that is kept down at Ferring, their country home—there is one tied to the work table.

The real pride of Mrs. Guest’s heart, and that of her Danish cook, is the Danish anthracite stove in the hall that will burn for a whole weekend without being stoked or attended to.