October 1937

ACROSS THE Editor's DESK

The Picture on the Cover: Again furniture in blonde wood gives us that homelike atmosphere that's so delightful in informal rooms, particularly in winter sunrooms. And here, too, we've proof that the little personal touches-- the bouquet so simply arranged, the books so handy, the everready card table, and the dish of fruit-- are incidents that make any room invitingly livable. We like the lamps, each placed to light a furniture grouping correctly. But most of all we're intrigued with the walls-- yellow for the window side, green for the other three.

It's News to me!

AT THE FLICK OF A SWITCH

IF ALL the useless bits of statistical information in the world were laid end to end, the result would be one more useless bit of statistics. But here's one that has a direct bearing on your home: during the past twenty-five years the use of electricity in the homes of America has increased tenfold.

YOUR ROOM'S YOUR CASTLE

WE'RE always reading about what to do with the guest room to make it the quintessence of comfort for visiting firemen, mothers-in-law, and ex-college chums.

FROM Couch TO Bed AND Back again

FAITHFUL REPRODUCTIONS OF Heirlooms

Colorful, Livable Rooms

Set Your Table

THE good things in life don't change so much. Hospitality still means just about what it did when the weary wanderer was welcomed with the comforts of the medieval hospice-- refreshment, entertainment. Today's charming hostess welcomes the unexpected guest, or the crowd, in a home where the comforts and refinements are designed to be shared.

Under-Water Bouquets

IF YOU like flower arrangements that are unusual you will enjoy making under-water bouquets. These novel bouquets are simply cut flowers arranged under water in a deep glass bowl or container so that one views them thru the water. The effect is most charming, especially if there is some magnification thru the glass.

HOW TO Landscape THE ENGLISH HOME

GARDENS of England undoubtedly have been more inspiring and served more to influence garden taste in America than those of any other country. We are grateful for this because, by observing English garden tradition, many home landscapes here have acquired a mellowness and antiquity which we admire with envy.

YOU CAN PAINT Spring Pictures WITH TULIPS

IF YOU'VE always wanted to experiment with an odd shade of red for portières or to plan a unique patch-work quilt, or paint a picture with remarkable colors-- and yet haven't ever done any of these things at all-- well, here's a garden substitute. Buy tulips, instead, and plant them for a fling of reckless but harmonious color.

KEEP WARM--AND Healthy

WE'VE done a lot of talking, these last few years, about air-conditioning. Summer air-conditioning, we know, is a splendid thing. We know because it brings us cool comfort that we feel.

A New England Home FOR ANYWHERE

THIS dignified New England Colonial Bild- cost Gardened Home is a straight-forward design and is carried out with authentic and charming detail. The exterior is of a character that will lend itself to several different material treatments, such as, all shingle, clapboard, or brick veneer on the first floor, with either clapboard or shingles above. Then again, if you desire, the first floor can be laid up in rubble stone of local origin.

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENING TO Sinks

NOBODY would have dreamed, fifty years ago, that the creaking pump and battered dishpans-- those sore thumbs of the kitchen-- could ever grow up into the gleaming beauty and magical efficiency of the sink of today. Yet they have, and so swiftly in the last few years that even sinks born but a few years ago are embarrassingly outdated today.

NOW YOU CAN HAVE GALLONS OF SOFT WATER

"MY IDEA of heaven," said a friend of mine who had just moved into the soft-water region of the east, "has always been a place where soft water flowed right out of my water taps. And now I have it-- gallons of it, unlimited quantities of it."

PUTTING VITAMIN ABC's INTO MEALS

WHAT is it that you can't see, or touch, or feel, or taste, or smell, but that you must eat lots of to be healthy?

Kitchen Stars

FOR dexterous meal-making, it's mighty important to have the right cooking utensil at hand for each task. Aggravating, isn't it, to seek the right pan in a clutter of too many pieces? And what a blow to cooking ambitions if there's a scarcity of adequate utensils for getting a good meal. Misdirected economy sometimes makes us keep on hand utensils that were never stars.

YOURS FOR A Jolly Kitchen

VERY quaint, but modern and right at home in a streamlined kitchen are "Country Fair" motifs for color accents. Prize stock, a Percheron pony with heart-shape dots and a cow with trefoils, are irresistibly conventionalized as cut-outs for curtain borders. If your kitchen is done in shades of yellow, orange, buff, or blue, you'll like lemon-yellow figures against leather-brownside curtains.

WE BUY A Puppy

HALF the battle was over. At last we'd decided on the breed of our future puppy! It's not important which kind it was: enough that it most nearly suited all our requirements.

French Provincial AND HOW TO KNOW IT

FRENCH Provincial furniture, of which we'll see a great deal this coming year, is the furniture of rural France of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Made for and by the people of these country towns and farms, it reflects the simple living of the provinces.

Exit HORSE-AND-BUGGY BATHROOMS

THE Question BEFORE THE HOUSE

The change can be made, but it isn't easy. The foundation must be enlarged to carry the extra weight. The throat of the wider fireplace must be in proper ratio. The flue must be enlarged so that additional smoke will be carried away, and there is a ratio between area of flue and area of front opening of fireplacewhich must be maintained.

WHEN YOU Talk BUILDING

EVERY buyer of a new house should be acquainted with the more common building terms to permit a better understanding of the various construction details as they are discussed by the architect or the builder.

Lighten YOUR LIVING-ROOM

IF YOU'VE one of these distressingly dark living-rooms that's blessed with sunshine only in the morning, why not paint the whole thing white? You may think this a slightly crazy idea at first --but so did my family until I doggedly went ahead and proved to them what a perfectly delightful place a white living-room can be.

Five Ways to Decorate the Piano Top

Little Bulbs FROM THE WEST

GO WEST, good gardener, go Was-- when it's bulb planting time! Because from those hills and valleys come little native bulbs that have rare charm and beauty. There are tall border spires, tiny spring elves for edging or rock garden, woodland blooms for shrubberies and shady places, mostly strange unknown things of interest, but a few so long established in gardens that their Pacific heritage has been forgotten.

WE BUILD HIM A Clothes Portfolio

I HEARD muffled roars from my husband's clothes closet.

HOW TO WINTER THE Tender Bulbs

PEOPLE who grow gladiolus as a hobby look forward with enthusiasm to harvesting the corms, as soon as the tops have turned yellow, because they know that in proper winter storage is the foundation for better flowers next year. Then, too, you get an extra dividend in the bulblets which offer an easy means of increasing your stock.

Look Thru the Pitcherplant

THE pitcherplant eats insects for lunch. It's a gruesome thought, yet one that makes us marvel at the ways of Nature. Botanists have told, before, about the habits of this plant, but few people have ever seen convincing evidence. Now the X-ray reveals the pitcherplant's secret.

Making the Most of your Living Room Windows

HAVE you ever noticed how living-room windows form your first impressions of a home and the people in it? If there are no glass curtains, you are immediately conscious of their absence. The room assumes a glare and undesirable brilliance.

THE Diary OF A PLAIN DIRT GARDENER

Oct. 1 Last spring I made a small bed of nasturtiums, with each little row across it a different sort. First there was a row of the older dwarf singles in mixture. Next came Golden Gleam, double yellow, fragrant, long-stemmed, that burst on the world first about 1931. Then followed the children of Golden Gleam that have appeared since-- Scarlet Gleam, the Gleam Hybrids, Orange Gleam. Of all these, my choice is Orange Gleam.

PLANT NOW FOR Spring Beauty

"SPRING'S here!" A robin is singing from the elm tree. "Spring's here!" The March wind whistles as it sweeps up over the hills. "Spring's here!" pipe all the baby green leaves as an accompaniment to the grand march of spring.

THIS AFRICAN FLOWER WEARS STRIPES

A TOAD or a flower-- the two are not, as a rule, very closely associated, but Nature sometimes plays strange tricks. Especially is this true with plants of the desert and the tropics.

THIS KITCHEN LEADS A Double Life

FRINGED GENTIANS Grow FOR ME

WHAT is more interesting than to happen upon a spot where the bluest of blue flowers look up at you thru fringed lashes? Such an experience was mine one late October day in 1906 when, in a meadow north of Greenwich, Connecticut, I came upon a field of Fringed Gentian growing in such profusion that it brought to mind this thought of Bryant's:

Save, Canny Cook

YOU'VE put everything but the kitchen range into your budgeteering. But why not throw in the range? Unless you're extremely kitchen-wise, yearly you spend dollars to buy costly heat that doesn't cook.

Pioneer Ways FOR THE MODERN HOME

"MEAT and meal in the house, wood at the door: let'er blow!" ... a simple, homely proverb often spoken by a settler of the early days in Nebraska. Yet it conjures up in the mind an alluring vision of home, gracious and serene, a place of enduring contentment, a refuge where each is understood, and where each may do as he pleases.

White Clouds ON THE GROUND

WITH a minimum of toil, the indolent may enjoy glorious masses of pure white, feathery bloom well into October, when many treasured flowers have become unsightly remnants of summer beauty. For the person who dislikes garden work, but who appreciates the decorative effect of flower and foliage, Indian Sanicle has almost the force of an answer to prayer.

ACROSS FROM THE Golden Gate

DOWN-EAST Dormers GO WEST

A BLEND OF Brick AND Shingles

SHREDDED WHEAT

HERE'S AN Idea!

AROUND the used-furniture shops lately we've noticed a lot of women (and some decorators among them) ferreting out those long library or sofa tables (vintage 1918) and plotting to make perfectly grand Modern coffee tables of them!

Why Pay More Than Necessary?

TOM and Jerry B., twin brothers, recently took identical life-insurance policies for $20,000 in the same company. But while Tom pays $466.29 a year, Jerry is paying $480.00.-- $13.71 more. This difference is explained by the fact that Jerry pays quarterly premiums while Tom makes a single annual payment.

Tips for Tinkerers

SOME CARPENTERS bore a small hole in the end of their hammer handles and flow in melted beeswax or paraffin. By working the ends of nails in this, danger of splitting hard or thin wood is reduced. The hole will contain quite a supply of wax and doesn't, of course, interfere with the use of the hammer.

FALL FURNISHINGS IDEAS FROM THE 5-Star Homes

REMEMBER the story of the 5-Star Homes in Albany, Buffalo, and Syracuse, New York, that we published last April? And the materials with which Christine Holbrook, Better Homes & Gardens' home-furnishings editor, was working in selecting color schemes and planning furnishings for these homes, now open for inspection?

THE MAN NEXT DOOR

The next big boon for the American home-maker might be food in cans that can be put right on the dinner table, plugged in for warming, and opened up to become handsome dishes-- possibly with a chromium-plated, modernistic design.

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Two-Timer

UNLOOKED-FOR guests for dinner, no dessert ready-- and, to make it worse, no centerpiece for the table!

ALONG THE Garden Path WITH THE WEEK-END GARDENER

"IF WE had collected together all our grass cuttings thruout the growing season and dried them," wrote Dr. E. J. Salisbury in 'The Living Garden,' "we should probably find that the total weight of dried grass from an acre of lawn would be somewhereabout 5,000 pounds, or rather, more than a pound per square yard."