Home Decorating Guide in 2017
Concave Interiors
The custom of appropriate and harmonious treatment of home decorating, interior decorations and suitable furniture, seems to have been in a great measure abandoned during the present century, owing perhaps to the indifference of architects of the time to this subsidiary but necessary portion of their work, or perhaps to a desire for economy, which preferred the cheapness of painted and artificially grained pine-wood, with decorative effects produced by wall papers, to the more solid but expensive though less showy wood-panelling, architectural mouldings, well-made panelled doors and chimney pieces, which one finds, down to quite the end of the last century, even in houses of moderate rentals. Furniture therefore became independent and " beginning to account herself an Art, transgressed her limits "... and " grew to the conceit that it could stand by itself, and, as well as its betters, went a way of its own."
Interior Design
The interiors, handed over from the builder, as it were, in blank, are filled up from the upholsterer ' s store, the curiosity shop, and the auction room, while a large contribution from the conservatory or the nearest florist gives the finishing touch to a mixture, which characterizes the present taste for furnishing a boudoir or a drawing room.