EXHIBITION
The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. (Olympia.) FOR most people presumably the ideal home starts off with four ideal walls and an ideal roof ; the ideal garden, cooker, bath, tin- opener, potato-peeler and so on are only second and third thoughts: But the fact that the actual homes are still, to say the least, in short supply, means that a great deal of home-building has to start at the wrong end. It is easier nowadays to get a machine to wash crockery than decent crockery to wash, and much cheaper to get a good vacuum-cleaner than a good carpet.
At Olympia this year it is understandably the complete houses which attract the largest crowds, although nine-tenths of the people who queue to see inside them have as much hope of ever occupying one as they have of occupying 10 Downing Street. Unfortunately there seems to have been an architectural decline since the apogee of the prefab period, examples of which were to be seen at this exhibition two years ago. Wei are back again now at the doll's house and Tudor tea-shop nonsense, The exception is provided by a New Zealand house—a dignified little bungalow, which manages to combine lightness and brightness with an unusual degree of sturdiness.
For anyone who is not in the hardware or furnishing business it is difficult to assess what an exhibition such as this has to offer that is new and, therefore, worthy to have attention called to it. A great deal of the furnishings are indubitably old—not in the sense of being antique, but of being familiar to anyone who has walked down Tottenham Court Road in the last twenty years. It is, perhaps, not in the nature of this exhibition to be the nursery of experiment or the mould of taste, but surely it is time some of these bead lampshades and cockeyed (" modern ") dressing-tables were burned. For those visitors who must find something new if they are to count their day well spent, I would recommend prunus cerasus serrulata taihaku.
It is the habit of the exhibition to have a certain number of what, in a firework display, would be called "set pieces." This accounts for the appearance, in the luscious corner devoted to cosmetics and scents, of a "Gold Coast Village." When I came up one of the village's four inhabitants was explaining to an admiring crowd the purpose of two large "talking drums." "No chief will allow these drums to be beaten except on a state occasion," he said ; upon which, presumably in honour of the opening of Parliament, he produced a smart paradiddle with what looked like two riding crops.
I shall probably get punished for this when I get home," he added
with a grin that was anything but sheepish. E. C. H:
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