How Can You Have a Beautiful Home?

Your home is the outward expression of your personality. Just as, to a certain extent, we judge a lady we meet for the first time by her outward appearance, so we glance with interest about the house we enter for the first time, to see how its aspect tells of its owners. The home is the natural mirror of what stirs within us of knowledge and experience, of taste and moral courage.

If you feel one day that your home is not as you would wish it, remember that the remedy lies in your own hands. For beautifying the home there are a few requirements or conditions that must be known to every one of us, for they are the very same conditions required in appraising all works of art — and Persian carpets.

First, and before all else, your home must be comfortable. To secure this atmosphere, consider the kind of furniture, its size and its measurements, so that they suit the purpose for which they were made. An incident of this sort happened to me which might well happen every day to other ladies. It chanced that one of the guests in my house, a man of large build, sat down upon a chair of delicate make and fragile appearance. He was not comfortable, and neither was I. I felt no ease of mind until I saw him move to another chair better suited to his frame and his appearance.

Among the other conditions or laws of beautifying the home is this: horizontal lines suggest strength and balance. The Arab divan, or its Western counterpart known as the 'sofa,' is an example. If your reception room is spacious, furnished with chairs of delicate make and small size, and you do not place among them low oblong pieces such as the divan, which give a feeling of balance and rest the eye — if you do not do this, your room cannot be called well-proportioned or comfortable.

As for carpets, it is the basic color in the carpet that composes its unity of view and its strength of balance. Its shape, its size, and the manner of its placement on the floor are also important considerations. Most well-made carpets are of proportionate size in themselves, but a small carpet, if laid slantwise on the floor, loses the balance required in the floor of a room for comfort in walking. The slanting line, moreover, carries a strong suggestion of movement. Imagine a man leaning against a wall. If you removed the image of the wall, what would happen? A violent movement, no doubt! This is what takes place with a carpet flung slantwise upon the floor: if it is not in keeping with the other artistic considerations, it makes the beholder wish he could stop the slanting movement it expresses.

The law of the slanting line can here be used at times for beautification — as when the curtain fabric is striped: the wall behind the curtain, in that case, is what stops the movement given by the slanting line, and thus the required proportion is achieved. Where slanting lines are used, it is advisable that the colors contrast, to give the eye relief.

Another of the laws of beautification is the use of fabrics contrasting and opposed in color, form, and weave. If every piece in your salon is upholstered in smooth, elegant satin, and the walls are polished and smooth, and the curtains likewise of smooth satin, the eye soon wearies and seeks to look upon some rough body opposed to the smooth satin. You see that the furnishing of the salon in itself demands much taste in the use of the many lines and forms which, if you observe in them the conditions of art, guarantee the room's beauty and attractiveness. But in the use of colors there is a wider field still for changing the look of the salon.

I have a Lebanese friend in whose house is a beautiful salon, over whose arrangement its owner wrestled with several problems. The room is spacious and well-proportioned in shape, but the furniture is all upholstered in elegant gold brocade. For all the beauty of brocade, it can grow tiresome in certain circumstances. My friend went back to her carpet, of wonderful beauty, and found running through its threads a golden color, patched with rose and with a green inclining toward blue. And there was in it brown enough to make the carpet a set of colors that hold together. The brown was present in the wooden pieces — the furniture — and in the copper tones. Had this lady painted her walls the familiar beige, the salon's gold furnishings would have been lost in the kindred color of the wall, and the splendor of their color would have gone. So she put into the mixture of the cream wall paint a touch of red, until it took on the color of a faded rose; thereby she created a link between the wall and the carpet and brought out the beauty of the color in the furnishings. This rosy color, moreover, cast a lovely glow upon the face of the lady and her guests. The brocade of the room bore a pattern of fine, small flowers; she therefore chose for her curtains a large pattern in that green inclining toward blue, and this green was repeated in the colors of the carpet and in the leaves of the flowers that adorned the corners of the room. The copper trays and vases were the middle color joining the gold of the brocade with the rose of the walls, and then the brown of the carpet and the wood. In this elegant and sumptuous room, which expresses its owner's personality most truly, the lady adorned the walls with beautiful paintings of scenes of her beloved Lebanon, choosing the colors of the paintings to suit the other colors of the room.

Pictures

In using pictures to give your home meaning and charm, it is well to remember that a large space calls either for large paintings or for a group of small pictures. In choosing paintings you will find that if you fall back upon your own taste, they will generally prove suited to your home and your personality. It is sometimes possible to substitute fine carpets for pictures in adorning the walls, and they are often much like precious paintings.

Among the secondary conditions in beautifying the home is that you place every piece in a position suited to the balance and rest of the eye. I stand astonished when I enter certain houses and see the pictures of the family and their loved ones hung above their heads, nearer to the ceiling than to those who would look at them. I believe this habit arises from the nature of this country: the necessity of high ceilings created the custom of hanging pictures high, to fill the emptiness of the tall wall. But there are other ways of filling this emptiness, which I personally prefer to hanging pictures as though they were flying in space. In the Arab countries we find that the architecture generally runs to high ceilings, and so the eye demands that this excess emptiness be filled. If you are prepared to depart from the customary, and to face the opposition of family and friends, you can try a method I used in my own country.

My salon is smaller than the usual Arab salon, but the ceiling of the room was high; so I painted it a clear green, and at once it appeared lower than it was. Yes, the painter criticized me, and so did my friends when I put the idea to them; but after they saw the result, the painter himself took to recommending this method in many houses. The easiest way of treating a high ceiling is to give full attention to the colors and patterns of the salon's fabrics, and the high emptiness naturally disappears.

As for family photographs, I prefer to keep them in my private room, where I can enjoy them without making of them the ornament of my walls. The Japanese, who are known as a people of taste and art, have a theory about the hanging of pictures and about the means of adornment with objets d'art of every kind. They say the eye tires, and refuses to look upon the most beautiful of objects, if they remain set in the same place and in the same fashion day after day after day.

To avoid this state they display only a few pictures, and enjoy them, until the day comes when the eye passes through the room and no longer sees the pictures; then they replace them with others.

Most women need to alter their homes and change them from time to time, so as not to weary of seeing the same things. This changing often vexes the men of the household. Among the artistic devices for changing the look of the salon is the use of flowers of every kind, and of objets d'art, on condition that color, form, and kind be considered, so that they may be beautiful as a whole and in harmony with the rest of the room. The bouquet that draws your eye and pleases you is usually one that fulfills the conditions of beauty and harmony. So when a bouquet of flowers pleases you, try to discover why it pleased you. You will generally find that what pleased you is the contrast of colors and of kinds — that airy green against those smooth, soft leaves. For the beauty of the bouquet, the vase itself must be steady in color and proportionate in size, just as you consider these matters in choosing carpet and furniture.

And there is no harm in exercising your skill in the arranging of flowers, aided by what you know of the conditions of balance in form and color, repeating the operation again and again until experience gives you boldness in arrangement, and a knowledge that will soon bring you the approval of your friends.

In closing, let me repeat the fundamental conditions for beautifying the home: horizontal lines suggest balance. Straight lines, like walls and windows, stop movement. Slanting lines suggest a strong movement which must be stopped by straight lines. Roundness, as in furnishings, pictures, trays, vases, and cushions, suggests calm and rest. These are familiar fundamental conditions to which we all return in beautifying our homes. Add to them your own experience in the use of contrast — in color, form, size, and the weave of fabrics — within the bounds of harmony; that is, do not place massive furniture beside other pieces of delicate size, nor much lilac with much red. If you follow these simple conditions, your salon will be the best of places for you — a beautiful one in which to receive your friends.

Rendered into Arabic by Mrs. Serene Husseini Shahid