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An effort is being made, I am told, to prevent the wholesale dealers from selling to architects at a price that will enable them to do this, and this effort may successfully dispose of this type of competition. It is also possible for the architect to make up detail drawings of furniture and have these specially executed by small factories, and then sell them to clients at smaller prices than the decorators can make. This is natural enough, as the architect has only expenses for a drafting room and office; while the decorator generally has a number of other expenses which must be covered, such as larger quarters, delivery, etc., and, no matter how reasonable he may wish his charges to be, he cannot do business
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10INTERIOR DECORATING
on the basis of an architect's commission, especially in view of the fact that the bulk of his business is necessarily so much smaller in relation to any particular job than the gross amount of the structural work on which the architect's commission is figured.
This last named difficulty is widespread and lasting and it does not seem that any solution of it can be reached until affairs have become much better systematized than they can be today, for, ideally speaking, the architect is fundamentally, and supposedly exclusively, a professional man who sells nothing but his services, while the decorator is not only a man who should have professional training and should furnish professional service, but at the same time a business man who is expected to carry wares. It may be that at some future time we shall have the decorator's functions definitely separated between those of the decorative architect or interior architect who has nothing but an office and furnishes nothing but professional service and the selling company which furnishes nothing but skillfully executed merchandise, but such is not the case today and it seems impossible to create this separation at this time.
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