STANDARDS OF LIVING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1938, Page 4

STANDARDS OF LIVING

A COMPLETE REORGANISATION. THE ERA OF SMALL HOMES. This is the era of the small home, as Mr Patmore, one of London’s leading decorators, points out. Even in England the outsize mansion, with its staff of 40 or 50 servants, is becoming almost as extinct as the dodo. Many of the great houses have become practically museums, while their owners live in small houses they have built for themselves on their estates. “The last decade,” as Mr Patmore says, “has witnessed a complete reorganisation of the ideas that govern our standards of living.” The reasons, as he points out, are various. The most important is economic. But there are others, such as the decline of a patriarchal habit of large family establishments and the ever-growing popularity of the week-end cottage. But whatever the reasons, the fact remains—we live in an age of flats and small homes. Mr Patmore discusses the problems of small-home furnishing and decoration in detail —the bedroom, the dining-room, and so on, down to the kitchen and the bathroom. And he illustrates the problem fully with a fine selection of photographs of actual solutions by himself and other leading designers in England and elsewhere.

He has a healthy tolerance when it comes to styles. His own taste is for modern interiors. But he provides a number of examples of period schemes and he believes that every decorator should be able to execute them. “In contemporary decoration . . . there is room for the old as well as the new,” he writes. Indeed, he shows that tolerance which is so often to be found among the moderns, in spite of widespread ideas to the contrary, and so seldom among the bigoted and exclusive champions of tradition. “The critics of modernity,” as he says, “seem to forget that it is always easier to attack than to create . . . . It has always struck me as a curious fact that if one admires something new, people automatically conclude that one must dislike the old. “Modern decoration,” he points out, “is a more difficult craft to master, because it demands creative ability.” The period style is accessible to “anyone who has the patience and industry to study past styles.”