Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1926)

Providing Yourself with the ■ The fifth of a series on how to use the motion picture to suggest furnishings in your home If you would be gay and feminine, look to the French for your inspiration. Furniture with curving lines, extreme daintiness and delicate colors are necessary in achieving the correct effect PROPERLY, a period room should be builded into a house. If your house is already builded, however, and you still desire period rooms, do not despair. You can have them if you will shop with sufficient care. That is one of the fine things about "period" furniture. It can be shopped for as leisurely as your time and pocketbook demand. It isn't like modern furniture that comes in sets and demands being purchased in units of three or five pieces. Acquired in this careful way, it brings to such furnishings a charm almost impossible to possess otherwise. Select the period that suits yourself. Any other course is disaster, or a home which looks like a dead philanthropist's gift to mankind. Furthermore, choose a period that is in the present mode. With the furniture of four centuries and several countries to select from, there is such a thing as style to be considered. Don't just dec ide to go Spanish or early English or late Normandy without first considering the fashions involved. Likewise consider your purse. The older a piece of furniture, the higher its price. There are one or two dealers in this country who actually have furniture that lias come down, more or less intact, from the Middle Ages. The prices on these pieces, however, are worth an automobile manufacturer's ransom. Most of the genuine antique pieces we have today are survivals of (lie Renaissance periods in Italy, Spain and England, Yet antiques, that can he proven genuine, have this advantage —every year increases their value. New. modern furniture after a few seasons1 knocking about is practically valueless no matter what the initial COSl may have been. With antique furniture every knock is a boost. At the moment (lie most popular " period styles" in American home furnishings are the Spanish and Italian modes of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the early American, dating back to the first set tiers of this country. I am not here touching upon the early American furnishings, as An Italian room, however, is more modish. The charm, intimacy and quaintness here created by Cedric Gibbons for "The White Sister" could be recreated easilv in an American home I wish to take them up as a separate article at some later date, the whole vogue being worthy of as much space as it can possibly lie given. Instead I am showing four rooms, one Italian, one Spanish, one English and one French, furnished in pieces of the same relative period in each country. Now for the relationship between the architectural background, the personality, and the period chosen. A decade a,uro the smart town house was furnished in some selection from the French cabinetmaker's stock. The furniture was light and frivolous, gilded generally, and set against a bright colored wall paper and pink taffeta hangings. If a few fat ("upids could be worked in somewhere, everybody liked that, too. During the same period women wore lots of hair and lots of dress goods, while their men went in for wide waistlines and heavy cigars. Today when our minds, according to the people of that decade, are much more frivolous, we are going in for furniture much more substantial and simple. That in its turn is a reflection of our increasing architectural simplicity. The Amer