I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women
throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it
what you will--awakening, development, American Renaissance--it is a
most startling and promising condition of affairs.

It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly æsthetic
tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it
should tell the time. Home-makers are determined to have their houses,
outside and in, correct according to the best standards. What do we mean
by the best standards? Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged
house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes his
home with a hopeless disregard of tradition. We must accept the
standards that the artists and the architects accept, the standards that
have come to us from those exceedingly rational people, our ancestors.

Our ancestors built for stability and use, and so their simple houses
were excellent examples of architecture. Their spacious, uncrowded
interiors were usually beautiful. Houses and furniture fulfilled their
uses, and if an object fulfils its mission the chances are that it is
beautiful.

It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual
castle in Spain, but it isn't necessary to live among intolerable
furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle. There never was a
house so bad that it couldn't be made over into something worth while.
We shall all be very much happier when we learn to transform the things
we have into a semblance of our ideal.

How, then, may we go about accomplishing our ideal?