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Page 48a
The author's tiny entrance hall, really not more than three feet by six feet. The console table is ten inches wide. The overdoor substitute for the ugly glass transom is rather interesting.
Page 48b
The chair in which most of this book was written is the piece de resistance of this photograph. Behind it are two French windows and a set of muntin divided mirrors set up to simulate an additional window.
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CHAPTER I THE SMALL APARTMENT
SINCE my book on Apartments was written in 1915 conditions have radically changed. At that time apartment-house owners were anxious to secure tenants and would do anything in reason, and often many things out of reason which decorators devised, to make their tenants happy, comfortable and satisfied. We decorators were never even then especially popular with the landlords, but they looked upon pleasing us as an inevitable evil, and they often tore down walls or built them, put in French doors or door-openings and made other structural alterations at our behest, as well as painting their apartments to suit us. Now the landlord is monarch, if not of all he surveys, at least of whatever he owns, and he can afford to tell his tenants politely, or even impolitely, to go elsewhere since he knows that there is probably no elsewhere to which the tenant can go. This makes apartment furnishing increasingly difficult for decorators.
The impermanence of tenantry, the constantly changing laws and the expensiveness of all kinds of building construction are other factors that operate against the achievement of decorative perfection. Builders of apartments have become more economical than ever in all but the most expensive structures. The architecture of apartments has not significantly
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50INTERIOR DECORATING
improved in the past five years; certainly not at all in proportion to its enormous advancement during the previous decade.
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