Home Decorating

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 81, 6 April 1938, Page 14

Home Decorating

VALUABLE TRAINING. A. three months’ course of training in interior decoration, especially intended for brides, is a feature of a I London school which specialises in interior and stage decoration classes. Feminine intuition and natural good taste, it is now realised, are less than half the battle in successfully decorating and furnishing a home, states a London writer. Tho ability to sketch a room with the furniture in position, to prepare a colour scheme, to draw up an estimate, to design pelmets, built-in clothes fitments, and to supervise workmen may in future schemes of feminine education be included in the last year’s curriculum. At present it is all too often acquired after years of painful and costly experience as a houseowner and home-maker.

Three months has been chosen for the bride’s course, as being the average length of modern engagement, and the hours, 10 to 12 in the morning and 2 till 4 in the afternoon, have also been calculated to leave sufficient spare time for house-hunting, trousseau-shopping and visits. The care of old furniture, how to choose it —with those cheques that every bride hopes to receive among her wedding presents —and how to arrange it are one of the principal lessons in this bridal course.

Brides are taken during this course to museums and to famous rooms in private houses as well as to auction sales and antique galleries, and they learn some of the subtle art of “picking up old bits”—an art which is now so popular as to necessitate a ear-park in the neighbourhood of the Caledonian Market. Other features of this course include papering, distempering, and painting of rooms, upholstery, and classes in elementary architecture and perspective. There are also courses extending over a year or six months. Hero is taught | the designing of textiles and furniture. I Pupils often take up posts in tho salons of London interior decorating experts when they have completed their

courses, and recently a number of students were asked to decorate and furnish a show flat in a block outside Loudon to a given sum of money. Visits are paid to wholesale houses for patterns of materials from curtains and covers, and the last few weeks of the training are spent as a rule in the studio of a decorative expert where genuine orders for customers have to be carried out and clients’ houses visit-

ed for measurements and estimates Whether or not the ex-debutants in-

tends to take up interior decoration as a profession, this gives her confidence in her own judgment and abilities.