Decoration

While moving books around, as we so often do, this lovely Rex Whistler cover popped out at us. A comfy chair, a window open to the courtyard, some books and a banjo for our knee.

I believe the best thing about this book might just be Rex Whistler's cover art, buy Mrs. Lockwood offers us a brief and concise history of house types from ancient Egypt to those available to the future homeowner of the early 1930's. She seems most at home with the Colonial period. The book is a fine little primer on style through the ages. Her introduction to Decoration and beauty are as modern as anything one might fine in any coffee table book of in this century.

Mrs. Lockwood tells us, "Details are the stuff that dreams are made of."


There is not a decorator out there who could have said it better, and she seems downright modern and quite to the point in her introduction to why we decorate. Why do we decorate?

"We are born that way. fundamentally, it is the universal impulse to express the things of the spirit in visible form, the divine urge( or its devilish perversion) that sets mankind apart from his fellow creatures on this earth and denies him their peaceful existence."

Here's to opposable thumbs.