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Page 70a
The main hallway of a residence occupied both in winter and summer and furnished accordingly.
Page 70b
This bed, set on a platform and surmounted by a canopy, is entirely of taffeta, with no wood showing except in the crown at the top.
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COUNTRY HOUSES71
is to be employed; while in the latter case one requires more especially a practical grasp of the various elements in building construction, together with that keen and yet subtle sense of the fitness of things which is taste.
Taste is really nothing more or less than a deep-seated feeling for the beautiful, a powerful desire to surround one's self with beautiful things and to transform things that at present are ugly. This presupposes that one approaches the rebuilding of an old house with a very special reverence. If this is the case, one will not alter ruthlessly. One will not pull out an old thing, a mantel or a door or a porch, in order to replace it by something that has no advantage but the very doubtful one of being new. No, the man or woman who strongly desires to make his or her home a perpetual delight and a growing gratification, will proceed slowly.
Yet a certain amount of modernizing is needed in every house a generation old, and particularly in these, for they belong to the time when Victoria and all she stood for in art and decoration were tottering to a well-earned extinction.
Some older houses, dating back a hundred years or more, are far better designed than nine-tenths of the work that architects are doing today; but nine-tenths of the existing country homes are not fine old Colonial houses, but products of the Civil War period or the " awful eighties," both periods infinitely bad in art, no matter how good they may be supposed to have been in ethics. For this reason we need not be so fearful of adding new things to our old homes as we might very rightly tend to be if our old homes were all good products of the best builders of an earlier time.
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