When wood mosaic or parquet-work is used, owing to the necessary
simplicity of the forms, I think it best not to vary the colour of
the wood. The variation caused by the diverse lie of the grain and
so forth, is enough. Most decorators will be willing, I believe, to
accept it as an axiom, that when a pattern is made of very simple
geometrical forms, strong contrast of colour is to be avoided.

So much for the floor. As for its fellow, the ceiling, that is, I
must confess, a sore point with me in my attempts at making the best
of it. The simplest and most natural way of decorating a ceiling is
to show the underside of the joists and beams duly moulded, and if
you will, painted in patterns. How far this is from being possible
in our modern makeshift houses, I suppose I need not say. Then
there is a natural and beautiful way of ornamenting a ceiling by
working the plaster into delicate patterns, such as you see in our
Elizabethan and Jacobean houses; which often enough, richly designed
and skilfully wrought as they are, are by no means pedantically
smooth in finish--nay, may sometimes be called rough as to
workmanship. But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that
have fallen so low as the plasterer's. The cast work one sees
perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of
ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it. It
is simply meant to say, 'This house is built for a rich man.' The
very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed, mostly happens with an
art that has fallen sick. That richly designed, freely wrought
plastering of our old houses was done with a slowly drying tough
plaster, that encouraged the hand like modeller's clay, and could
not have been done at all with the brittle plaster used in ceilings
nowadays, whose excellence is supposed to consist in its smoothness
only. To be good, according to our present false standard, it must