REFURNISHING THE HOUSE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19783, 26 April 1934, Page 12

REFURNISHING THE HOUSE

SUITING THE OLD TO THE NEW. Many people, in contemplating modern interior furnishings and wall treatments, and in comparing them with their own homes of a previous period feel that the business of bringing the house up to date is either hopelessly beyond them from the financial standpoint, or that they are inadequate to the demands of modern interior decorating, states an overseas writer. To be sure, there are new wall treatments, new ideas in flooring woods and their colours, new floor coverings, new pictures for the walls, new fabrics to coverings and curtains—even new blinds for the windows, or else no blinds at all. And all these things, taken together, would mean the practical removal of everything moveable that had ever been bought before. No use to have the walls and ceilings done over if the old pictures are to go back on the wall, we feel. Not a bit of use introducing a new chromiumplated lampstand unless the old silk shade is discarded and an opaque glass or parchment one substituted. Foolish to contemplate zebra striped fabric for upholstering the three-piece suite if it is to go with a patterned carpet of a different period. But there is a lesson to be learned from modern fabrics and modern hangings, and it is that they are not all new in conception. Many of them are copies of some of the oldest tapestries and fabric designs in existence. Even their mellowed colourings have been reproduced, so that they may blend in with old and faded rugs, with furniture that is no longer young, and with pictures and bric-a-brac belonging to an earlier period, if the owner of the pictures and bric-a-brac so desires it to be. Fabrics of this type have been used for some years abroad, where old houses are the rule rather than the exception, and where the introduction of completely modern furnishing throughout would not only be an impossibility, but an absurdity. All of which goes to prove their adaptability. The big manufacturers of textiles are recognising more and more the importance of art in industry, and employ leading artists and architects like John Nash and Duncan Grant take to designing fabrics, one can count on something good.