International studio (57.1915/1916)

Good Taste and the Mansion


GENERAL VIEW OF HOUSE AND GROUNDS

OOD TASTE AND THE MANSION
BY HENRY BLACKMAN SELL
While there is an undeniable ele-
ment of truth in the worn adage, “ Orthodoxy is my
doxy; heterodoxy is my opponents’,” it must be
admitted that good taste—that is, the fitness
of things in their places—is not always to be
found in the mansion, for the mansion presupposes
money, much money as a rule, and the combina-
tion of appreciative eyes and a thick pocket-book
more often than not makes for a sumptuousness
which far surpasses the bounds of fitness, and
hence bad taste has come to be associated in the
minds of many artists with the mansion.
Now this is changing with the value and im-
portance of the increasing examples of environ-
mental architecture, trim, fit and in their places,

and making themselves felt, and of decorations
and furnishings which truly decorate and which
truly furnish in the best sense of both of those
much misused words.
Much is being said and written these days
about the modern movement in all the depart-
ments of the so-called “fine arts,” but to none
do we owe so great a debt of gratitude as to those
exponents of environmental architecture, and
their brothers in the art of the home, the modern
decorators. Time-worn music, past-period paint-
ing, archaic sculpture and Victorian drama we
can avoid if we wish, but architecture and in-
terior decoration we have on every hand and the
avoidance of contact is next to impossible.
As C. Matlack Price so truly suggested in the
October International Studio, good taste in
architecture—and in interior decoration—is a



THE LONG, GENTLE LINES OF THE PRAIRIE ARE
REPEATED IN THE SWEEP OF THE ARCHITECTURE

price & McLanahan
ARCHITECTS

XI