THE GAY HOUSE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 260, 2 November 1929, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE GAY HOUSE.

USE OF COLOURS,

(By E.S.J.)

How would you do your house if you were suddenly set down in an empty tenement with unlimited pots of paint? Would you try to outrival the sun in his (brilliance or merely repeat the platitudes of paint used 'by all the other myriads? To many home-makers let the question rest there. What would you do ? Think it out. Here is what one English woman says she would do if given the chance:— . The Right Tint For Walls. ,»

I would paint those walls, she says, with three coats of beautiful warm rich paint, that lovely but hard to achieve yellow with a tinge of orange in it; pure yellow is too bilious and pure orange too violent, Ibut by dint of standing over a painter whilst he mixes his paint, and insisting on him experimenting with a little red in his yellow, a little more, a little less, it is possible to get that orangey-yellow which is so neutral and yet so definite, so warm and yet so coolly clear. In rooms with walls of this shade, you can introduce blue, yellow, orange, and red with equal success; you can make the room suggest warmth or coolness as you please.

When the walls are not good enough to paint, and some walls, particularly in new houses, aren't, a plain paper of this shade is procurable, cheaper and almost as effective. But it must be a really plain paper, devoid even of those faint linings or water-marks with which so many decorators with old-fashioned tendencies like to try. and compromise between "a good old-fashioned patterned paper" and modernity. And wherever I painted the walls —which would be wherever I could —I would paint the ceilings in the same colour. Not even inferior walls should stop me painting the kitchen and scullery and bathrooms of the house, both walls and ceilings, for such rooms cry aloud for paint. '.•'.» /

I would have all doors and woodwork painted so that they formed a definite part of the colour scheme of each room. Why should doors always be brown when they v are not white? And the most undistinguished of doors can be made to seem more interesting than they really are when they are painted in two shades, such as dark blue with the beading round the panels picked out in a lighter blue, or black with yellow panels. But such colour schemes I would keep for the outside of the doors; inside they should harmonise with the walls and, ceiling, become part of the colour scheme by blending into the'whole.

Break Away from the Conventional. The keynote of the "house that is different" should be its unexpectedness. Nothing should be taken for granted, such as that baths are always white and. staircases always either white or brown. I would cheerfully instal a pink of a black bath if it suited the colour scheme I had planned for it, and planning a blue stair-carpet I would be likely to paint the staircase green—so that every time I ran up and down stairs I would be reminded of a bluebellcarpeted wood in young spring. ,