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Beauty in the Home

December 30, 1929
Detroit News Quilt History Project; Michigan State University Museum; Susan Salser
Detroit, Michigan, United States
A Beauty in the Home column discussing living rooms.
Clever Planning builds a successful room but accessories are what give it the lived in look that really makes a room more than a shell.

The sketch shown above illustrations this point. Here a small living room is given added interest through the wise use of accessories. Blue bowls and mauve colored china birds on the window will echo the blue and mauve tones in the chintz window hangings and on the stuffed chair.

For winter decoration in town where any suggestion of the garden is particularly welcome, growing plants or cut branches or ornamental leaves help the scheme immensely. A low bowl filled with mountain huckleberry, a graceful decorative shrub with dark, shiny green leaves deftly places, makes an already charming room seem more gracious. Laurel and eucalyptus also lend themselves well to this usage.

The treatment of the radiator in the living room shown above is worth careful scrutiny. One never seems to have enough room for all the books one owns. Hence this arrangement which any good carpenter can build. The radiator is concealed from view with a latticed frame, and shelves on both sides fill in the window recess. The top of this entire structure affords place doe the various accessories, as seen above.

Drapery Arrangement
I would like your opinion on front window draperies and curtains. There are three windows, thirty-four inches wide with an eighteen-inch space between each window. Would a twenty-seven-inch straight drapery at each end of the group and one between each window be better than just at the ends? The distance seems so far. Should I have separate glass curtain rods at each window or one long one?
Mrs. P

With eighteen inches of wall space separating your windows you should really have a separate treatment for each window that is one pair of glass curtains and one pair of over draperies. A twenty-seven-inch width space and the window cases and allow any fullness to speak of, and a strip of drapery material at each end would not be appropriate for windows arranged in this manner.

Courtesy of The Detroit News Archives.

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