apestries and heavily
carved furniture. These things are all very well for the house that has
a small dining-room and a gala dining-room for formal occasions as well,
but there are few such houses.

We New Yorkers have been so accustomed to the gloomy basement
dining-rooms of the conventional brown-stone houses of the late eighties
we forgot how nice a dining-room can be. Even though the city
dining-room is now more fortunately placed in the rear of the second
floor it is usually overshadowed by other houses, and can be lightened
only by skilful use of color in curtains, china, and so forth.
Therefore, I think this is the one room in the city house where one can
afford to use a boldly decorative paper. I like very much the Chinese
rice-papers with their broad, sketchy decorations of birds and flowers.
These papers are never tiresomely realistic and are always done in very
soft colors or in soft shades of one color, and while if you analyze
them they are very fantastic, the general effect is as restful as it is
cheerful. You know you can be most cheerful when you are most rested!

The quaint landscape papers which are seen in so many New England
dining-rooms seem to belong with American Colonial furniture and white
woodwork, prim silver and gold banded china. These landscape papers are
usually gay in effect and make for cheer. There are many new designs
less complicated than the old ones. Then, too, there are charming
foliage papers, made up of leaves and branches and birds, which are very
good.

While we may find color and cheer in these gay papers for gloomy city
dining-rooms, if we have plenty of light we may get more distinguished
results with paneled walls. A large dining-room may be paneled with
dark wood, with a painted fresco, or tapestry frieze, and a ceiling with
carved or painted beams, or perhaps one of those interesting cream-white
ceilings with plaster beams judiciously adorned with ornament in low
relief. Given a large dining-room and a little money, you can do
anything: you can make a room that will compare favorably with the
traditional rooms on which we build. You have a right to make your
dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of
light and air. But one thing you must have: simplicity! It may be the
simplicity of a marble floor and tapestried walls and a painted ceiling,
it may be the simplicity of white paint and muslin and fine furniture,
but simplicity it must have.