Home Decoration : Part 1

American Woman's Home
by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(Page 7 of 44)

Having duly arranged for the physical necessities of a healthful and comfortable home, we next approach the important subject of beauty in reference to the decoration of houses. For while the aesthetic element must be subordinate to the requirements of physical existence, and, as a matter of expense, should be held of inferior consequence to means of higher moral growth; it yet holds a place of great significance among the influences which make home happy and attractive, which give it a constant and wholesome power over the young and contributes much to the education of the entire household in refinement, intellectual development and moral sensibility.

Here we are met by those who tell us that of course they want their houses handsome and that, when they get money enough, they intend to have them so, but at present they are too poor and because they are poor they dismiss the subject altogether and live without any regard to it.

We have often seen people who said that they could not afford to make their houses beautiful, who had spent upon them, outside or in, an amount of money which did not produce either beauty or comfort and which, if judiciously applied, might have made the house quite charming.

For example, a man, in building his house, takes a plan of an architect. This plan includes, on the outside, a number of what Andrew Fairservice called "whigmaliries," which make the house neither prettier nor more comfortable and which take up a good deal of money. We would venture to say that we could buy the chromo of Bierstadt's "Sunset in the Yosemite Valley," and four others like it, for half the sum that we have sometimes seen laid out on a very ugly, narrow, awkward porch on the outside of a house. The only use of this porch was to cost money and to cause every body who looked at it to exclaim as they went by, "What ever induced that man to put a thing like that on the outside of his house?"

Then, again, in the inside of houses, we have seen a dwelling looking very bald and bare, when a sufficient sum of money had been expended on one article to have made the whole very pretty: and it has come about in this way.

We will suppose the couple who own the house to be in the condition in which people generally are after they have built a house - having spent more than they could afford on the building itself and yet feeling themselves under the necessity of getting some furniture. "Now," says the housewife, "I must at least have a parlor-carpet. We must get that to begin with and other things as we go on." She goes to a store to look at carpets. The clerks are smiling and obliging and sweetly complacent. The storekeeper, perhaps, is a neighbor or a friend and after exhibiting various patterns, he tells her of a Brussels carpet he is selling wonderfully cheap - actually a dollar and a quarter less a yard than the usual price of Brussels and the reason is that it is an unfashionable pattern and he has a good deal of it and wishes to close it off.

She looks at it and thinks it is not at all the kind of carpet she meant to buy, but then it is Brussels and so cheap! And as she hesitates, her friend tells her that she will find it "cheapest in the end - that one Brussels carpet will outlast three or four ingrains," etc., etc.

The result of all this is, that she buys the Brussels carpet, which, with all its reduction in price, is one third dearer than the ingrain would have been and not half so pretty. When she comes home, she will find that she has spent, we will say eighty dollars, for a very homely carpet whose greatest merit it is an affliction to remember - namely, that it will outlast three ordinary carpets. And because she has bought this carpet she can not afford to paper the walls or put up any window-curtains and can not even begin to think of buying any pictures.

Now let us see what eighty dollars could have done for that room. We will suppose, in the first place, she invests in thirteen rolls of wall-paper of a lovely shade of buff, which will make the room look sunshiny in the day-time and light up brilliantly in the evening. Thirteen rolls of good satin paper, at thirty-seven cents a roll, expends four dollars and eighty-one cents. A maroon bordering, made in imitation of the choicest French style, which can not at a distance be told from it, can be bought for six cents a yard. This will bring the paper to about five dollars and a half; and our friends will give a day of their time to putting it on. The room already begins to look furnished.

Then, let us cover the floor with, say, thirty yards of good matting, at fifty cents a yard. This gives us a carpet for fifteen dollars. We are here stopped by the prejudice that matting is not good economy, because it wears out so soon. We humbly submit that it is precisely the thing for a parlor, which is reserved for the reception-room of friends and for our own dressed leisure hours. Matting is not good economy in a dining-room or a hard-worn sitting-room; but such a parlor as we are describing is precisely the place where it answers to the very best advantage.

We have in mind one very attractive parlor which has been, both for summer and winter, the daily sitting-room for the leisure hours of a husband and wife and family of children, where a plain straw matting has done service for seven years. That parlor is in a city and these friends are in the habit of receiving visits from people who live upon velvet and Brussels; but they prefer to spend the money which such carpets would cost on other modes of embellishment; and this parlor has often been cited to us as a very attractive room.

And now our friends, having got therefore far, are requested to select some one tint or color which should be the prevailing one in the furniture of the room. should it be green? should it be blue? should it be crimson? To carry on our illustration, we will choose green and we proceed with it to create furniture for our room. Let us imagine that on one side of the fireplace there be, as there is often, a recess about six feet long and three feet deep. Fill this recess with a rough frame with four stout legs, one foot high and upon the top of the frame have an elastic rack of slats.

About the Author

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800 - 1878) was a noted educator, renowned for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of a kindergarten into children's education.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain.