"THIS is the day of the small house," one astute critic has observed; "the residence planned for comfort and convenience, not for ostentation, and dependent on few servants. People are getting over the mania for owning things just for the sake of the things, and want only what they can actually use." We are beginning to enjoy the art of living, and gardens, greenhouses, and garages are taking the place of large formal rooms, leaving the little house simple and livable. The high cost of living, the increased facilities for enjoying the out-of-doors through automobiles and country clubs and, last but not least, the broadening scope of woman which makes her unwilling any longer to sacrifice the larger interests of life to household drudgery, all concur to place the star of the little house in the ascendency and to create for it an important and distinctive place in modern life.

Informality and pleasant hospitality should be the keynote of the small house. It should be fresh and smart. The hackneyed decorations of the past order are to be avoided, and imitation of the more pretentious schemes of to-day, as well. Charming and individual small stucco, frame, and half-timbered houses set amid trim lawns and beautiful shrubbery, are legion, but the interiors of few of them fulfil the promise which the exteriors hold forth.

The chief fault of the little house is its over anxiousness to ape the decorations of its big sister on the hill and its failure to appreciate the opportunities which its size and delightful informality of purpose offer for fresh and free decorative expression. It must be remembered that, both in architecture and furnishing, the little house has its own "raison d'etre," its own personality, and its own function to fulfil and is by no means a mere miniature copy or diminished edition of larger and more pretentious structures. Neither ornateness, lavishness, nor austerity have any place in the little house. Its aim should be toward a simplicity, a spontaneity and a hale and hearty hospitality in which the hackneyed decorations of a past order or the more pretentious schemes of great houses play very little part.

Furniture, fortunately, has ceased to be merely furniture suitable for all times and all places, and is beginning to take on an individuality which allows for its wider decorative use. No greater advance has been made in the creation of any type than that intended for the simple and informal uses of the cottage. There are many artists and designers to-day catering exclusively to the needs of the little house and catering to them with so much taste and intelligence that they bid fair to outstrip the larger ones and leave small excuse for drab and uninteresting interiors.

"We specialize in decorative things for the informal houst," reads the catalogue of one excellent modern furniture house. "There are many people specializing in the very expensive things for city homes and great estates, but we offer inexpensive furniture, decorative in character, with certain of the necessary furnishings to complete a charming interior."

It is the time now for the large house to covet the decorations of the small one - an idea which was borne out in the exclamations of the mistress of a large suburban home over some delightful pieces of modern cottage furniture. "Oh, if I only had the house to put them in!" she cried enthusiastically.

What a contradictory thing is human nature! The mistress of the large house would have welcomed the opportunity of buying furniture for the cottage, but the owners of small houses invariably are obsessed with the desire to furnish large houses, and purchase furniture with this in mind. It is, indeed, a delight and luxury to buy furnishings for a particular house and seldom have houses so furnished failed to reward the individual thought and pains bestowed upon them -but to purchase furnishings for the furnishing's sake and with some generalized conception of a house in mind becomes an onerous and fruitless duty.

Modern small-house furniture divides itself into three large classifications. These are by no means 142 advocated as the only kinds, but they are the ones which seem to hold in themselves the most inviting suggestions. There are the modern adaptations of old English and peasant cottage furniture which come principally in oak and walnut; there are the modern painted varieties founded on the old English and peasant models; and there are the delightful modern reed and wicker pieces. These styles may be judiciously mingled and even their progenitors urge against their purchase in "suites." "It is the decorative idea behind the furniture and not the monotonous repetition of lines and form which constitutes the unity of the set," reads the circular of one pioneering house.

One should enter at once into the spirit of the little house when one steps into the entrance-hall. While the entrance-hall of large and formal houses acts as an outer vestibule against the intrusion of strangers, the little house needs no such barrier. The entrance-hall need not receive the more personal and intimate touches of the family rooms, but it should hold out a characteristic welcome to the guest.

One individual entrance-hall had walls of delft blue-and-white paper in an invisible check divided into broad panels with white molding. A wainscoting stained dark blue reached five eighths of the way up the wall. On the floor was a blue-and-white invisible checked rug with a plain border. A settee and two chairs with white woodwork and upholstered in dark blue, stood against one wall; and opposite them was a white console table with a white framed mirror above. There was a deep window on one side of the entrance door and this was hung with plain blue silk and had a white window seat upholstered in blue. An iron plant-stand, painted white and always filled with greens or flowering plants, stood in the window and there was an umbrella stand to match it beside the door. There was a white staircase at one end of the hall with its first step guarded by two prim box trees in blue-and-white tubs.