Chapter XII: Sitting-Room and Boudoir

In some strange way the word _boudoir_ has lost its proper significance. People generally think of it as a highfalutin' name for the bedroom, or for a dressing-room, whereas really a proper _boudoir_ is the small personal sitting-room of a woman of many interests. It began in old France as the private sitting-room of the mistress of the house, a part of the bedroom suite, and it has evolved into a sort of office _de luxe_ where the house mistress spends her precious mornings, plans the routine of her household for the day, writes her letters, interviews her servants, and so forth. The boudoir has a certain suggestion of intimacy because it is a personal and not a general room, but while it may be used as a lounging-place occasionally, it is also a thoroughly dignified room where a woman may receive her chosen friends when she pleases. Nothing more ridiculous has ever happened than the vogue of the so-called "boudoir cap," which is really suited only to one's bedroom or dressing-room. Such misnomers lead to a mistaken idea of the real meaning of the word.

Some of the Eighteenth Century boudoirs were extremely small. I recall one charming little room in an old French house that was barely eight feet by eleven, but it contained a fireplace, two windows, a day bed, one of those graceful desks known as a _bonheur du jour_, and two arm-chairs. An extremely symmetrical arrangement of the room gave a sense of order, and order always suggests space. One wall was broken by the fireplace, the wall spaces on each side of it being paneled with narrow moldings. The space above the mantel was filled with a mirror. On the wall opposite the fireplace there was a broad paneling of the same width filled with a mirror from baseboard to ceiling. In front of this mirror was placed the charming desk. On each side of the long mirror were two windows exactly opposite the two long panels of the mantel wall. The two narrow end walls were treated as single panels, the day bed being placed flat against one of them, while the other was broken by a door which led to a little ante-chamber. Old gilt appliques holding candles flanked both mantel mirror and desk mirror. Two of those graceful chairs of the Louis Seize period and a small footstool completed the furnishing of this room.

The boudoir should always be a small room, because in no other way can you gain a sense of intimacy. Here you may have all the luxury and elegance you like, you may stick to white paint and simple chintzes, or you may indulge your passion for pale-colored silks and lace frills. Here, of all places, you have a right to express your sense of luxury and comfort. The boudoir furnishings are borrowed from both bedroom and drawing-room traditions. There are certain things that are used in the bedroom that would be ridiculous in the drawing-room, and yet are quite at home in the boudoir. For instance, the _chaise-longue_ is part of the bedroom furnishing in most modern houses, and it may also be used in the boudoir, but in the drawing-room it would be a violation of good taste, because the suggestion of intimacy is too evident.

Nothing is more comfortable in a boudoir than a day bed. It serves so many purposes. In my own house my boudoir is also my sitting-room, and I have a large Louis XV day bed there which may be used by an overnight guest if necessary. In a small house the boudoir fitted with a day bed becomes a guest-room on occasion. I always put two or three of these day beds in any country house I am doing, because I have found them so admirable and useful in my own house.

As you will see by the photographs, this bed in no way resembles an ordinary bed in the daytime, and it seems to me to be a much better solution of the extra-bed problem than the mechanical folding-bed, which is always hideous and usually dangerous. A good day bed may be designed to fit into any room. This one of mine is of carved walnut, a very graceful one that I found in France.

In a small sitting-room in an uptown house, an illustration of which is shown, I had a day bed made of white wood that was painted to match the chintzes of the room. The mattress and springs were covered with a bird chintz on a mauve ground, and the pillows were all covered with the same stuff. The frame of the bed was painted cream and decorated with a dull green line and small garlands of flowers extracted from the design of the chintz. When the mattress and springs have been properly covered with damask, or chintz, or whatever you choose to use, there is no suggestion of the ordinary bed.

I suppose there isn't a more charming room in New York than Miss Anne Morgan's Louis XVI boudoir. The everyday sitting-room of a woman of many interests, it is radiant with color and individuality, as rare rugs are radiant, as jewels are radiant. The cream walls, with their carved moldings and graceful panelings, are a pleasant background for all this shimmering color. The carvings and moldings are pointed in blue. The floor is covered with a Persian rug which glows with all the soft tones of the old Persian dye-pots. The day bed, a few of the chairs, and the chest of drawers, are of a soft brown walnut. There are other chairs covered with Louis XVI tapestries, brocade and needlework, quite in harmony with the modern chintz of the day bed and the hangings. Above the day bed there is a portrait of a lady, hung by wires covered with shirred blue ribbons, and this blue is again used in an old porcelain lamp jar on the bedside table. The whole room might have been inspired by the lady of the portrait, so essentially is it the room of a fastidious woman.

But to go back to my own boudoir: it is really sitting-room, library, and rest-room combined, a home room very much like my down-town office in the conveniences it offers. In the early morning it is my office, where I plan the day's routine and consult my servants. In the rare evenings when I may give myself up to solid comfort and a new book it becomes a haven of refuge after the business of the day. When I choose to work at home with my secretary, it is as business-like a place as my down-town office. It is a sort of room of all trades, and good for each of them.

The walls of the room are pretty well filled with built-in bookshelves, windows, chimney-piece, and doors, but there is one long wall space for the day bed and another for the old secretary that holds my porcelain figurines. The room is really quite small, but by making the furniture keep its place against the walls an effect of spaciousness has been obtained.

The walls of the room are painted the palest of egg-shell blue-green. The woodwork is ivory white, with applied decorations of sculptured white marble. The floor is entirely covered with a carpet rug of jade green velvet, and there is a smaller Persian rug of the soft, indescribable colors of the Orient. The day bed, of which I spoke in an earlier paragraph, is covered with an old brocade, gray-green figures on a black ground. A large armchair is also covered with the brocade, and the window curtains, which cannot be seen in the picture, are of black chintz, printed with birds of pale greens and blues and grays, with beaks of rose-red.

There is always a possibility for rose-red in my rooms, I love it so. I manage the other colors so that they will admit a chair or a stool or a bowl of rose color. In this room the two chairs beside the couch are covered with rose-colored damask, and this brings out the rose in the rug and in the chintz, and accents the deep red note of the leathern book-bindings. The rose red is subordinated to the importance of the book-bindings in this room, but there is still opportunity for its use in so many small things.

In this room, you will notice, I have used open shelves for my books, and the old secretary which was once a combination desk and bookcase, is used for the display of my little treasures of porcelain and china, and its drawers are used for papers and prints. The built in shelves have cupboards beneath them for the flimsy papers and pamphlets that do not belong on open shelves. If the same room were pressed into service as a guest room I should use the drawers in the secretary instead of the usual chest of drawers, and the day bed for sleeping.

The writing-table is placed at right angles to one of the book-filled panels between the front windows. I have used a writing-table in this room because I like tables better than heavy desks, and because in this small apartment a desk would seem heavy and ponderous. The fittings of the desk are of dark red leather, like that of many of the book-bindings, and the personal touch that makes the desk _mine_ is a bowl of roses. Between the two windows in the shallow recess, I have placed an aquarium, a recent acquisition that delights my soul. The aquarium is simply an oblong glass box mounted on a teak stand, with a tracery of teak carving outlining the box, which is the home of the most gorgeous fan-tailed goldfish. There are water plants in the box, too, and funny little Chinese temples and dwarf trees. I love to house my little people happily--my dogs and my birds and my fish. Wee Toi, my little Chinese dog, has a little house all his own, an old Chinese lacquer box with a canopy top and little gold bells. It was once the shrine of some little Chinese god, I suppose, but Wee Toi is very happy in it, and you can see that it was meant for him in the beginning. It sits by the fireplace and gives the room an air of real hominess. I was so pleased with the aquarium and the Chinese lacquer bed for Wee Toi that I devised a birdcage to go with them, a square cage of gilt wires, with a black lacquer pointed canopy top, with little gilt bells at the pointed eaves. The cage is fixed to a shallow lacquer tray, and is the nicest place you can imagine for a whistling bullfinch to live in. I suppose I could have a Persian cat on a gorgeous cushion to complete the place, but I can't admit cats into the room. I plan gorgeous cushions for _other_ people's "little people," when they happen to be cats.

Miss Marbury's sitting-room is on the next floor, exactly like mine, architecturally, but we have worked them out differently. I think there is nothing more interesting than the study of the different developments of a series of similar rooms, for instance, a dozen drawing-rooms, twelve stories deep, in a modern apartment house! Each room is left by the builder with the same arrangement of doors and windows, the same wall spaces and moldings, the same opportunity for good or bad development. It isn't often our luck to see all twelve of the rooms, but sometimes we see three or four of them, and how amazingly different they are! How amusing is the suggestion of personality, or lack of it!

Now in these two sitting-rooms in our house the rooms are exactly the same in size, in exposure, in the placing of doors and windows and fireplaces, and we have further paralleled our arrangement by placing our day beds in the same wall space, but there the similarity ends. Miss Marbury's color plan is different: her walls are a soft gray, the floor is covered in a solid blue carpet rug, rather dark in tone, the chintz also has a black ground, but the pattern is entirely different in character from the room below. There is a day bed, similar to mine, but where my bed has been upholstered with brocade, Miss Marbury's has a loose slip cover of black chintz. The spaces between the windows in my room are filled with bookshelves, and in Miss Marbury's room the same spaces are filled with mirrors. The large wall-space that is background to my old secretary is in her room given up to long open bookshelves of mahogany. My over-mantel is mirrored, and hers is filled with an old painting. The recessed spaces on each side of the chimney breast hold small semi-circular tables of marquetry, with a pair of long Adam mirrors hanging above them. Another Adam mirror hangs above the bookshelves on the opposite wall. These mirrors are really the most important things in the room, because the moldings and lighting-fixtures and picture frames have been made to harmonize with them.

The lighting-fixtures are of wood carved in the Adam manner and painted dark blue and gold. The writing-table has been placed squarely in front of the center window, in which are hung Miss Marbury's bird cages. There are a number of old French prints on the wall. The whole room is quieter in tone than my room, which may be because her chosen color is old-blue, and mine rose-red.

In a small house where only one woman's tastes have to be considered, a small downstairs sitting-room may take the place of the more personal boudoir, but where there are a number of people in the household a room connecting with the bedroom of the house mistress is more fortunate. Here she can be as independent as she pleases of the family and the guests who come and go through the other living-rooms of the house. Here she can have her counsels with her children, or her tradespeople, or her employees, without the distractions of chance interruptions, for this one room should have doors that open _and_ close, doors that are not to be approached without invitation. The room may be as austere and business-like as a down-town office, or it may be a nest of comfort and luxury primarily planned for relaxation, but it must be so placed that it is a little apart from the noise and flurry of the rest of the house or it has no real reason-for-being.

Whenever it is possible, I believe the man of the house should also have a small sitting-room that corresponds to his wife's boudoir. We Americans have made a violent attempt to incorporate a room of this kind in our houses by introducing a "den" or a "study," but somehow the man of the house is never keen about such a room. A "den" to him means an airless cubby-hole of a room hung with pseudo-Turkish draperies and papier-mâché shields and weapons, and he has a mighty aversion to it. Who could blame him? And as for the study, the average man doesn't want a study when he wants to work; he prefers to work in his office, and he'd like a room of his own big enough to hold all his junk, and he'd like it to have doors and windows and a fireplace. The so-called study is usually a heavy, cheerless little room that isn't any good for anything else. The ideal arrangement would be a room of average size opening from his bedroom, a room that would have little suggestion of business and a great flavor of his hobbies. His wife's boudoir must be her office also, but he doesn't need a house office, unless he be a writer, or a teacher, or some man who works at home. After all, I think the painters and illustrators are the happiest of all men, because they _have_ to have studios, and their wives generally recognize the fact, and give them a free hand. The man who has a studio or a workshop all his own is always a popular man. He has a fascination for his less fortunate friends, who buzz around him in wistful admiration.