BRIGHTENING THE HOME

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21755, 21 March 1934, Page 5

BRIGHTENING THE HOME

DECORATIVE HANDLES Those people ■who prefer to pass dark furniture by and to cheer their rooms with brightly-painted pieces should be handle-conscious. Thus they will bo assured of original effects, states an overseas writer.

.For instance, anyone may have a chest of drawers painted cream, or a chest of drawers painted skv-blue. But you can go one better and choose a cream-painted chest of drawers with sky-blue handles —not the old-lashioucd round ones, but up-to-date oblong affairs.

Other colour-combinations will suggest themselves to you —pale watergreen furniture with sapphire-blue handles, or furniture, coloured a warm peach, with cherry-coloured handles would make two interesting combinations.

Black, of course, is always useful to throw up a light or bright colour. For instance, long, black, rod-like handles on a forget-me-not blue chest or wardrobe would look most attractive.

On the other hand, ebony-black furniture seems to call particularly for silver handles. Very often it fulfils this obligation by being provided with handles of chromium-plated metal, but if you possess a piece that is nyt so provided, you can add an argent note to it by painting the handles with silver paint. Glass handles are, of course, extremely fascinating. If you can arrange to have a set of glass handles, crystal or coloured, fitted when you buy a piece of furniture, well and good. If not, you should keep them in mind as a future means of working a "seachange" on that particular piece of furniture, —in other words, of happily transforming it "into something rich and strange." And that, of course, is exactly what one wants to he able to do. And oven when sordid consideration of income-tax instalments cramps one's style for the major replenishments, it is enlivening to reflect that such small furbishings as repainted or replaced handles can help to put that ardently desired new face upon our hearth-gods and tho rooms over which they rule.