THE MAKING OF HOMES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 184, 2 May 1929, Page 3

THE MAKING OF HOMES

CREATING A FEELING OF RESTFULNESS. One of the great London stores turned its furniture department for a few weeks into a number of model houses and placed in prominent positions placards bearing the inscription, “The art of living is the art of living at home.” Applauding this “inspired utterance,” a correspondent of the Birmingham “Post” observes:—“The choice of suitable furniture and skill in arranging it go a long way to create a feeling of restfulness and to make a man at home in his home. But even a man of business, whose primary object is to sell furniture, would admit that he could only give a strictly limited asistance to those who want to know how to make home happy. The qualities that are needed are moral; the furniture may help to develop them or keep them from decaying, but it cannot be a substitute for them. We may be experts in selecting the contents of our rooms and forming colour schemes to match them, but this will avail us little if we know nothing of the far more difficult art of bringing ourselves into harmony with those who share the house with us. Our companions are not, like our chairs, our pictures and our books, so many models in which we express ourselves; they are points of contact with our personality, and each of them may possibly represent ideas and tastes entirely at variance with our own. It is easy to live pencably with those whom we choose because we find ourselves at home with them; it is not so easy to create peace among those who are thrust, upon us. It is only by selfsacrifice and kindly forbearance that life at home can be harmonious and healthy. It is here that the greatest demand is made upon us; it is here that we have the widest scope for showing our power of self-repression and practising the art of living.”