NORWAY LEADS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21280, 25 February 1939, Page 22

NORWAY LEADS

BEAUTIFUL HOMES gCANDINAVIA leads the world in the beauty and practical advantages of her modem homes, but the strong individuality of the Norwegian housewife has made her give an original note to her decorative schemes which differentiates them in many ways from those of Denmark or Sweden.

To begin with, the women of Norway are fond of dark, rich colours, of somewhat heavy carving, and of fitments of hand-wrought iron. While other women, planning the furnishings of a new home, may begin with carpets and colour schemes generally the Norwegian woman enters at once into earnest conclave with the electricians over the question of original lighting fixtures. This is an important subject in a country where, in winter, the lights must be switched on as early as three in the afternoon. And Mrs. Norway is determined that, if artificial light mast be her portion, it will at least be set in a framework of beauty.

Down certain of the Norwegian valleys, blacksmiths, W’ho are also artists in hand-wrought iron, make a living out of candlesticks to be wired for electricity, and beautiful wall-brackets which support lamps of old-fashioned shape and modem capabilities. They even produce wall pictures of pierced and open wrought iron in open work design, such as the Chinese loved thousands of years ago, which hang, effective as large scale etchings, against tinted plaster walls. At the moment, Norway is swept by a wave of peasant fashions and the young woman who would have a really smart home is studying old peasant designs, going in for simple pine furniture, sometimes painted fantastically, and using as decoration, chiefly for flower holders, the massive old copper kettles and cooking pots which can still be picked up in the Oslo junk shops. Amid such simple, effective settings, anything sophisticated in the way of lighting would be out of place. Hence the vogue for the old-fashioned oil lamp of wink-

ing polished brass or copper, fastened by a finely hammered iron bracket in a comer of the room fitted with electricity, and masked by a simple parchment shade.

Above the table of the fashionable modern “peasant” dining-room you sometimes see suspended the arc of a spinning wheel—with electric candles radiating from the ends of the elaborately carved spokes. Norway cannot claim fine glass or porcelain comparable with the products of Orrefors in Sweden, or the Royal Copenhagen Manufactory of Denmark. But throughout the centuries she has excelled in metalwork, and the Oslo fashion for setting the table for a smart dinner party with dull pewter trenchers is but a hark back to the times when every Norwegian farmhouse hostess did the same.