International studio (58.1916)

Interior Decoration and Personality

A MANTEL DECORATION BY R. K. RYLAND


INTERIOR DECORATION AND PER-
SONALITY
BY SUMNER ROBINSON
Two rooms may both fulfill their more
obvious offices of comfort, purpose, fitness,
yet one be entirely impersonal, while the other
will at once show that personal, perhaps tem-
peramental, motives and factors have entered
into its make-up. The one does not interpret,
the other does. And when we wish to appreciate
the finer values and nicer shades of distinction
that give to interior decoration its deepest and
richest appeal, we must understand that there is
just the difference between the room that does
not interpret and the one that does that there is
between the passing of a breeze over a stretch
of water and of an expression over a human coun-
tenance. The one is of the surface of things; the
other, of the invisible forces beneath the surface.
The one is of the body of the room; the other, of
its soul.
Yet even when rooms do interpret—when they
undoubtedly possess the quality we might call
soul, this soul, this sense of personality, may not
be that of an individual. In decorative treatment
are two distinct types of personality.
A room may possess a lineal or traditionary
personality. That is, it may be decorated and
furnished in such a way that the treatment and
objects appear to have an entity of their own
apart from its occupancy. Chairs or cabinets
may have been “handed down” with all their
associative accretions of years. The position of

windows, the proportions of walls, the size or
fashion of chimneypiece, all may display a very
human and storied response to past conditions.
Again—and this is the subject I wish to treat—
a room may possess an individual or tempera-
mental personality. That is, in all that it is and
contains, in its entire aesthetic content, it ex-
presses but one feeling of personal occupancy,
selection, vitalization. Even though its furni-
ture may contain antique pieces or reproductions
of antiques, their separate entities are now plainly
or subtly, as the case may be, merged into one
component entity. The room conveys not so
much the idea that it came into its rich and
various being by a gradual collective process as
it does that it is the result of a unity of concep-
tion—one person’s conception.
As an illustration, there has just been completed
the designing and furnishing of a city interior for
a client who recently inherited a goodly number
of fine mahogany pieces of furniture, of Co-
lonial, Late Colonial, Georgian, and heavy Post
Colonial styles and origins. Each piece has the
air of quality about it with which generations of
genteel association appear to endue furniture.
But the lady, in inheriting the furniture of her
forbears, has inherited none of the New England
characteristics with which each stately piece
seems informed. If compelled to live with these
venerably associative encumbrances, her own
singularly blithe individuality would somehow
just have to wither up and blow away, or else
completely neutralize all the suggestive value of
its mahoganized background.

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