Design Your Home Anew

These are successive chapters which a young artist-architect, endowed with the qualities that fit him to take up such a subject — one of great concern to the Arab woman — has resolved to write especially for The Woman's Voice. And you, Madam, may send him, through this magazine, whatever you wish to know and to have explained concerning matters of the arrangement of the home and its interior design.

The house — or, as it is expressed in English, "The Home" — how many feelings it awakens in our souls and our hearts! It is a part of our lives, binding us to it by the childhood memories it stirs in us, and by the hopes pinned upon building it for ourselves anew in the future.

And this house comprises contents of every sort: small and large, new and old, bought or hired; until, when it is complete and finished, you look at it, and behold, it is an exact copy of the house in which you grew up and were reared in its bosom under your parents' care.

Beware, then, lest your house appear devoid of order, cleanliness, and taste, or lest there show upon it a cast of gloom and constriction. For such an atmosphere affects, among other things, your children: they grow up carrying in their souls that gloom and that lack of the sense of taste, order, and cleanliness.

We often fail to grasp the effect of the atmosphere which a house creates upon the life of the family and the upbringing of the children. And often, too, we fail to appreciate the importance of the house in that it reflects the personality of those who live in it. When we enter a house, for instance, we notice at once the stamp of personality that marks its inhabitants: whether they are rich or poor, educated or unlettered, happy or wretched, and so on.

It may occur to you, Madam, that the beauty and elegance of a house come from the sumptuous furnishings it contains. This is a mistake, for the value of the furnishings and their quantity have nothing to do with the beauty and elegance of the house. How many a house of simple furnishings has stirred our admiration and delighted us with its splendid atmosphere, and how many a house of costly, sumptuous furnishings has stifled our breath and roused in our refined tastes feelings of displeasure and disgust. What matters, then, is not that you buy an expensive vase for flowers and set it in the wrong place in the house, filled with flowers chosen and arranged without taste; what matters is that you buy a vase, however cheap it may be, and set it in its right place, where the eye rests upon it with comfort and is taken by the flowers in it.

And so it is with the furnishings: their high price is worth nothing if you do not surround them with refined taste and breathe into them the warmth of your affection

and your love.

And now, Madam, I have tried to lay before you a few observations, namely:
First, that the house reflects the mentality of those who live in it and bears the stamp of their personality. And second — that the house is the handiwork of the woman who undertakes its care and keeping: with all its contents it will become either a place dear to hearts, or a place where hearts find what stirs their gloom and their unease. And third: that the house is a token of a people's progress and of its level of civilization.

How much, then, Madam, will you contribute to raising the standing of your nation and increasing others' respect for it, and to creating a happy, wholesome family — one of the cells of which society is composed — if you devote your attention and consecrate the greater part of your efforts to designing your home anew upon the principles of elegance and sound taste.

In the coming issues, God willing, I shall speak to you of the technical side of arranging the house, of the modern fashions followed in this matter, and of everything connected with the house from the artistic side — among other things, the choice of flowers and their arrangement, the selection of pictures and their hanging upon the walls, and the combining of the different colors of furnishings and determining what suits each room of them.

And may all this arouse your interest, so that you will address to me, through "The Woman's Voice," whatever problems present themselves to you, and whatever explanations you desire.