International studio (36.1908/1909(1909))

ROOM FURNISHED IN COLONIAL STYLE HEPPELWHITE TENT BED (1780)

^ OLONIALROOMSFORCOUNTRY
/ HOUSES—A SUGGESTION IN
H FURNISHING
\_^ BY MINNA C. SMITH
THE tent-room is a. quaint name to be given a
guest-room, suggestive of a brief visit of the modern
kind to a visitor whose tent is pitched in a country
house in a tent-bed of the olden day. A model of such
a room, seen at the new Tiffany Studios in Madison
Avenue, has aii the charm of an original coionia!
room, as they are stiii to be found here and there
in New England where certain ancestrai homes
retain the furniture much as it was in the period
of Heppeiwhite. In this modei room the tent-bed is
of mahogany, a 1780 Heppelwhite. It is as wide
and long as the latter-day double bed, but it is
lower than the four-posters usually seen, and has the
effect of being a little bed. The original glazed
chintz, in a forgotten blue and a perennial tan, tents
it gracefully, and its rope and canvas, that held the
multiple mattresses of the past, are strong in their

place, an evidence of originality in an old bedstead
which only an athlete in training would nowadays
care to retain in use. The foot-posts halt the
student of colonial furniture with pleasure in
their delicate carving and slender, tapering, square
legs. The acanthus leaves on the capitals are
worked out with peculiar charmthe same motif
is repeated on the caps at the tops of the posts.
The old cast brasses that cover the screws are well
wrought, their design an urn. The head-posts are
plain, characteristically, and at the headboard the
chintz is short to come inside the headboard in the
true old housekeeping way. This is a pattern and
example to any one following in country house
furnishing the rules of old that made beauty and
utility lie down together.
Near the foot of the tent-bed is a Pembroke
table with two drop leaves, which, opened, make
an enticing oval. It has square, tapering legs, and
a decoration of a strip of satinwood, relieved with
ebony as an edging to the tops of the legs and to
the apron. Beside this table is an early Heppel-

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