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The Principles Of Interior Decoration | by Bernard C. Jakway



The nature and the purpose of this study are, I believe, accurately indicated by its title. It is an attempt to analyze, correlate and set forth as clearly as possible the artistic principles that underlie sound work in the decoration of houses. This attempt is based upon the conviction that in a knowledge of these principles, their scientific basis, and the methods of their application, the beginner in this art will find the surest and easiest path to reasonably successful results in practice. The book is designed primarily to be of interest to the housewife, concerned with the attractiveness of her home; to the worker in housefurnishing shops, concerned with increasing the value of his services; to the teacher, concerned with imparting compact and workable knowledge, and to the reader who desires a general understanding of the subject. In other words, it is designed to be of interest primarily to the beginner and the reader whose knowledge of interior decoration is limited, rather than to the artist and the expert.

TitleThe Principles Of Interior Decoration
AuthorBernard C. Jakway
PublisherThe Macmillan Company
Year1925
Copyright1922, The Macmillan Company
AmazonThe Principles of Interior Decoration

By Bernard C. Jakway, University Extension Lecturer In Interior Decoration, University Of California.

-Author's Preface
The nature and the purpose of this study are, I believe, accurately indicated by its title. It is an attempt to analyze, correlate and set forth as clearly as possible the artistic principles that und...
-Chapter I. The Nature And Method Of The Art
WE all live in houses of one sort or another. Before these houses can be lived in they must be furnished. When furnished, whether well or ill, they constitute the environment in which we spend the gre...
-The Nature And Method Of The Art. Continued
Interior decoration is a part of the whole body of architecture, an art which differs from painting, sculpture, music and poetry in that it has a practical aim. While the other arts have always served...
-Chapter II. Fitness To Purpose
ONE who sets out to furnish a given house for the occupancy of a given family faces a threefold problem. He must select and arrange in the house such things as suit the age, sex and temperament of the...
-Fitness To Purpose. Part 2
The decorator must, however, never forget that he who chooses to disregard the personal factor, or even to make it of subordinate importance, must pay in loss of comfort and of beauty. One whose chief...
-Fitness To Purpose. Part 3
Like considerations of fitness to situation and use apply of course to the decoration of every other room. The things which enter into the treatment of a dining room should concur in making it a comfo...
-Chapter III. The Grammar Of Decoration
WE have seen that interior decoration is an art of selection and arrangement, working under the guidance of the faculty of taste. In practice this faculty is first employed in a comprehensive process ...
-The Grammar Of Decoration. Continued
In literature ideas are expressed by words; in interior decoration by form and color. Form itself, as a mode of expression, possesses an emotional significance, and so does color merely as color. Each...
-Chapter IV. Line And Form
IF the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, observed Pascal, the whole face of the world would have been changed. The power of line is indisputable. Yet it is clear that in itself line is a mere mat...
-Line And Form. Part 2
Curved lines express the ideas of flexibility, softness, grace, and joyousness, and tend to impart these qualities to any composition in which they appear. When over-emphasized by too exclusive employ...
-Line And Form. Part 3
Broken lines, by reason of their sudden changes, suggest the ideas of life and animation. While such lines may appear as dentil moldings in cornice, mantel or reading table, or in the bottom lines of ...
-Line And Form. Part 4
In practice the decorator must also be on guard against inartistic diagonals in choosing upholstery fabrics. It is a common practice to use a boldly designed printed linen at the windows of a room and...
-Chapter V. Color
COLOR covers everything, outlining and emphasizing shapes and making them easy to see. Its wide distribution, instant appeal, and powerful emotional effect made it a dominant element in the language o...
-Color. Part 2
Instead of uniting any two of the primaries to form binaries, or colors partaking equally of the qualities of their components, we can of course unite them in different proportions to form other hues ...
-Color. Part 3
The purity or intensity of a color depends upon its relative freedom from white light. Purity therefore expresses the amount or degree of the hue present, as distinguished from the total amount of lig...
-Color. Part 4
The colors are first of all divisible into two groups, the warm and the cold Warm colors are those in which red or yellow predominate; cold colors those in which blue predominates. The warm colors ten...
-Color. Part 5
The use of color in decorative composition will be discussed in several of the later chapters. The student of interior decoration must, however, be alert to gather ideas helpful in color practice from...
-Chapter VI. The Significance Of Texture
THE statement that form and color are the two media of decorative expression requires qualification; for texture, although in an accurate sense simply form and color interwoven, is in effect a distinc...
-The Significance Of Texture. Continued
The choice of textures and their harmonious grouping is an important and difficult part of the decorator's work, and one for which no guides other than a few vague suggestions can be established. It i...
-Chapter VII. The Elements Of Beauty
WHEN the decorator, having mastered the grammar of his art and studied the architectural requirements of the room to be furnished and the needs and tastes of its occupants, sets out to make the room b...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 2
A furnished room necessarily presents to the mind of one who enters it a wide variety in form, texture, hue, tone and significance. When, surveying the varying lines and shapes in such a room, the min...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 3
In a hall, or in any room where it can be kept fairly free from furniture and from competition with pictures and other counter-attractions, a rug can be made the dominant element of a decorative treat...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 4
In the effort to acquire a sure taste for effects of unity, principality in form must be studied carefully and should be studied progressively, beginning with the simplest leaf and flower forms, where...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 5
The repetition of color is absolutely essential. Each important hue must be recalled, once at least and often many times, in small masses and in more or less widely varying tones throughout the room. ...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 6
It must be remembered that in the perception of beauty the mind is at play. It cannot be forced, and is in fact curiously childlike. If a child is given a picture puzzle and finds the solution too eas...
-The Elements Of Beauty. Part 7
In periods of bad decorative art diversity is emphasized to the total neglect of the requirements of unity, and in periods of reaction from bad art unity is likely to be emphasized to the total neglec...
-Chapter VIII. The Law Of Contrast
WE have seen that beauty springs from unity in diversity, and that unity results from processes of comparison wherein like is placed with like - like lines, or shapes, or colors, or significances - un...
-The Law Of Contrast. Part 2
The changes effected by contrast in altering the height of tone of juxtaposed colors is illustrated by Figure 20. Here the small inner squares are all of exactly the same tone of gray, but they appear...
-The Law Of Contrast. Part 3
Monotone is tiresome, and to normal persons unendurable. The eye is never satisfied unless the visual field presents a diversity of tones. However, it must first of all be an orderly diversity, as oth...
-The Law Of Contrast. Part 4
While it is clearly impossible to formulate rules for the employment of contrast in decorative practice, because its use, like everything else in the art, must be governed by the requirements of fitne...
-Chapter IX. Proportion
A FURNISHED room does not grow as do the lilies of the field. It must be fashioned by studied creative processes. Yet it is the distinguishing characteristic and highest excellence of a perfectly furn...
-Proportion. Part 2
The Corinthian column is still more slender in proportion, having a height of ten diameters or more. Its flutings are separated by fillets terminating in curved forms, its capitals richly embellished ...
-Proportion. Part 3
When on the other hand the ceiling is too low to accord well with the other dimensions of the room, or when the ceiling of a room of normal proportions is to be raised in appearance in order to decrea...
-Proportion. Part 4
To diminish the apparent size of a room which seems too large these processes will be reversed. Darker and less neutral tones of the warm colors can be used on the floors and walls; larger and more pr...
-Proportion. Part 5
It is to be remembered also that actual size and apparent bulkiness are by no means the same thing. Slender structural parts and graceful lines reduce astonishingly the apparent size of a piece of fur...
-Proportion. Part 6
Thus if the bracket is too narrow (a) the figure appears uncomfortable and constrained in its attitude; while if it is too wide the figure appears (b) to have too much room and thus to lose its fixed ...
-Proportion. Part 7
Our instinctive insistence upon the presence of a dominant element in every composition conditions the proportions of all horizontal divisions of the wall spaces. When a wall is divided into two parts...
-Proportion. Part 8
The ceiling must seem to the mind to have some body and weight, since in the modern house it is to be regarded not as the sky above the room but rather as its roof. The very common practice of making ...
-Chapter X. Balance
WHEN a man stands still, his body erect, his mind tranquil and at ease, he is in balance. The two sides of his body, similarly grouped on either side of an ideal perpendicular center, are similarly af...
-Balance. Part 2
The decorative weight of the various objects in a room will vary, other things being equal, directly with their mass; or, rather, with their mass as affected by the laws of linear perspective. Thus tw...
-Balance. Part 3
It is clear that the general problem of the decorator is to invest his room, as a unit, with the degree of repose and steadiness essential to comfortable living, while he at the same time invests it w...
-Balance. Part 4
While it is the primary function of small decorative objects and of decoration volante generally to individualize the room and to give it animation, snap and decorative charm, it is clear that the dec...
-Balance. Part 5
While the balance between opposite ends and opposite sides of a room must be clearly felt, it will be the more pleasing in the degree that it is occult rather than formal. No one wants to see the two ...
-Chapter XI. Light And Shade
WE all recognize the importance of chiaroscuro in painting, of stage lighting in the drama, and even of lights and shadows in exterior architecture. Strangely enough, however, very few of us realize a...
-Light And Shade. Part 2
Light in a room may be either direct or indirect. That is, it may reach the eye directly from its source, or it may be reflected and diffused by the walls, ceiling, or other surfaces of the room, the ...
-Light And Shade. Part 3
If we conceive of the entire range of values from carbon black to the dazzling white of the diamond or of sunlit snow as forming a scale of one hundred and fifty degrees, with black at O and dazzling ...
-Light And Shade. Part 4
In the secondary contrasts between backgrounds and ornamental objects the two tones ought not in general to be more than fifty degrees apart. White, for example, emphasizes the effectiveness of gray. ...
-Chapter XII. The Dominant Hue
IN a study of this character, necessarily brief and necessarily didactic in method, it is difficult to say anything at all without saying too much. This difficulty is especially perplexing in the matt...
-The Dominant Hue. Part 2
Present-day practice has worked out a method through which one can both eat his cake and keep it. The character of a red dining room or library may be changed in half an hour by covering the hangings ...
-The Dominant Hue. Part 3
Warm-colored walls are more agreeable to many people than cool, more becoming to many complexions, and more sympathetic backgrounds for other furnishings. For these reasons it is often wise to use cre...
-The Dominant Hue. Part 4
The painter produces his color effects with paints, of which one hue costs little more than another. The decorator, on the other hand, produces his color effects with textiles and other materials, of ...
-Chapter XIII. Color Harmony
WE become aware of beauty in a color composition through the easy perception of likenesses among its diverse elements. In this process the mind, following its normal method of thinking from the partic...
-Color Harmony. Part 2
The next step in increasing the diversity and interest of the color treatment is to add the extreme red and yellow hues of orange, and to bring in sharper accents of color, as in the substitution of o...
-Color Harmony. Part 3
The real difficulty in the creation of these harmonies is to fix upon the complementary of the dominant hue. In the chapter on color it was pointed out that there is a difference between the scientifi...
-Color Harmony. Part 4
Red, blue and yellow do not present the same difficulties, because of the great range of rugs and drapery stuffs containing those hues in the lower values, as well as the range of fabrics containing r...
-Color Harmony. Part 5
When the purity of the dominant hue is constant, the number and purity of the subordinate hues will be increased directly with the area of the dominant hue. A room done in blue and tan, with tan walls...
-Color Harmony. Part 6
Connecting rooms must always be united by harmonious coloring, and by definite bonds of common color. The degree of likeness in color will depend in part upon personal taste, in part upon the similari...
-Chapter XIV. Ornament
ORNAMENT is that which adorns and embellishes. It gives variety and richness to the ornamented surfaces, and is, no less than plainness, essential to beauty in the decoration of houses. Without orname...
-Ornament. Continued
Present-day secular ornament is purely esthetic. It employs symbolic forms without reference to their meaning, and only in so far as they are intrinsically pleasing. Yet the pleasure of the decorator ...
-Chapter XV. Excellence In Design
WE have seen that in the perfectly furnished room the parts are so congruous in proportion and so harmonious in line and coloring that the room appears to be not a creation but a growth. Nevertheless ...
-Excellence In Design. Part 2
The fourth test of excellence in a design is the test of beauty. Beauty in a rug, a table or a textile is like beauty in the room as a unit in that it is beyond definition and beyond convincing analys...
-Excellence In Design. Part 3
Concerning excellence in the design of wall papers and cloth fabrics, we have noted in earlier chapters that, in general, size of pattern, or effect of texture, or both, will increase directly with th...
-Excellence In Design. Part 4
In the past fifteen years American manufacturers of floor coverings have made notable progress, both technically and in the character of their designs. They have not merely kept up with improving gene...
-Chapter XVI. Period Decoration
IT will be apparent from the preceding chapters that the study of period decoration does not lie within the scope of this essay, which is concerned neither with individual nor epochal expression in in...
-Period Decoration. Part 2
The French styles developed smoothly and logically, that of Francois I being followed by those of Henri II, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI. After the revolution the Directoire and the E...
-Period Decoration. Part 3
It is easy to gain from the popular literature of period decoration an impression that the period styles reveal a peculiar fitness and beauty, and that each possesses an esoteric significance, innate ...
-Chapter XVII. Conclusion
THE field mapped out for exploration in this volume has been covered, and the work is at an end. It is a work confessedly imperfect, and - though it aims at a certain completeness in scope and method ...







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previous page: The Decoration Of Houses | by Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman Jr.
  
page up: Decoration Making Books
  
next page: The Practical Book Of Interior Decoration | by Harold Donaldson Eberlein, Abbot Mcclure, Edward Stratton Holloway