The Guest Room

Southland Times, Issue 22895, 21 May 1936, Page 15

The Guest Room

CHEER AND COMFORTS It is usually at the end of a tiring journey by train or by car that the guest arrives, whether in town or in country. Therefore the first function of the guest room is to cheer; the second to comfort.

A red carpet is a dheerful note which at once gives warmth and makes it unnecessary to provide a coal fire. A tiny portable electric fire has a red surround to match. Cool and clean are white walls and ceiling. Curtains are of white cotton patterned with amusing little “burning bushes” in red and green and piped with red. This is a very inexpensive washable material. Red percale, which is 50 inches wide and costs under 3/- a yard has been machine quilted in white to make an original bedspread for a divan and left plain and piped with white for the dressing table skirts. It is a splendid colour for resisting town smuts and dust. Instead of a bedside table a wooden shelf, painted white, has been fixed to the wall, and just above is a ilttle sconce light on an ironwork bracket which has been painted white. Two of these sconce lights have been used for the dressing table. They use little electricity. Somewhere in the guest room the perfect hostess puts a small tin of biscuits—but in a painted tin from a mul tiple store so that the guests shall not feel self-consciously greedy—packets of safety pins, needles and a reel of black and white cotton and a folder of assorted silk for darning stockings. Every guest room should have its hot water bottle, and the cover should match the