The Business Of Decoration Previous Page (65)
There is a residence at Greenwich (and I know of no other anywhere) in which the ample spacings of the modern household have been discarded entirely. It is built like a medieval castle, on a high hill. One enters into a gloomy hall, low-ceilinged, stone-walled, and goes by means of a circuitous passage through several rooms, all low, some large, some small, but all heavy and sombre and austere. One imagines murders as a part of the routine of this domicile. Outside there is a pool entirely walled in, in which one might readily
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80INTERIOR DECORATING
bathe in the nude without being seen, and the waters of this flow down into a lily pond below, which in turn flows to a lower level into a duck pond. The landscape is completed with old stone and lead figures and a group of weeping willows. Inside the house there are only old Italian Renaissance pieces and the effect of the whole place is absolutely that of another world.
But let us return from the too intimate examination of these bizarre and extravagant abodes of the very few to the human and habitable houses of the respectable average. Let us consider another type of structure which has been written of scarcely at all in our books of decoration.
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Unfortunately, the colors which constitute the charm of this sun porch are not to be deciphered from the print. They are light yellow, vivid green .furniture and a touch of brilliant orange.
Page 80b
The more intimate corner corridor of the Hotel Chatham furnished with Adam mirrors and chandeliers but, as usual, with somewhat inappropriate furniture of an earlier period.
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CHAPTER V HOTELS
THE difference between the hotel and the home is the difference between the newspaper and the treasured book: the one is more various, it appeals to a larger number of tastes, it has a greater variety of uses, it is more spectacular and at the same time temporary; while the other is something to be turned to in moments of calm pleasurableness, or of intellectual disturbance, something to be fondly kept by one and used in the course of one's deeper development, adding as it does to the calmer but most fundamental satisfactions of life.
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