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A living room of Italian design.
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DECORATORS AND DECORATORS 21
being purely professional and furnishing nothing but service, he is to secure an adequate living.
The field today is unquestionably enormously overcrowded. Decorators of every possible sort are here in great profusion. There are, no doubt, a growing number of the public who realize the advantage of employing a man or woman with taste and knowledge in working out their plans for the inside of their homes, just as they realize the necessity of an architect in the creation of the structure, but the two fields are not yet equalized nor is the function of the interior decorator or his place with relation to his client firmly fixed and accepted by society at large.
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CHAPTER III
DECORATORS AND TRADESMEN
THE objection to the decorative establishment of large dimensions is that it is often organized as a selling concern, with a capable business man at its head, surrounded by a force of office assistants, a corps of salesmen and, only as an incident of salesmanship, a group of decorative designers and selectors. The average visitor is handled by a man or woman who works mainly upon a commission basis, whose ambition is naturally to sell the largest possible bill of goods consistent with the profit on the transaction demanded by the organization. Questions of light and shade, design, period, color effect and combination are talked of more or less glibly by these selling representatives according to the cleverness and facility of their conversation, but any deeper understanding of decorative values is apt to be lacking. There is little incentive to the study nefcessary to master even one of the manifold decorative arts. Such mastery, when it exists, commands a lesser price than the ability to talk the prospective buyer into buying.
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