CONVERTING A HOUSE.—V.
ON the third floor is the best bedroom with its dressing- room. The front room is a funny little L-ahaped room with two windows. It is smaller than the day nursery because the stairs to the top floor and a bit of passage are taken out of it. It had, at some time or other, been divided into two rooms, the tail of the L and one window being cut off, but this made two extraordinarily small, rather inconvenient rooms. Here, therefore, was the chance for an alcove, always so agreeable in a bedroom, but -generally involving stuffiness. In this alcove there is a window, and so it is neither stuffy nor dark. Along the line where the partition had been we put up two Ionic pilasters, and on the back walls of the alcove two mere ; these we had painted grey with black flutings. But the principal feature of the room is the alcove's Paul Poiret paper in an immense conventional design of interlacing flower-like circles, each circle half as large as a bicycle wheel. These circles are carried out in a very soft, harmonious red-purple and deep blue against a dappled black back- ground. " Oh, you have got a pretty night nursery ; I haven't never seen one so pretty,' was the remark of 21 on being introduced to these " flowers." The rest of the room is executed in a very cool silver grey with a painted frieze, recalling the colours of the Poiret paper in cooler, almost faded colours and on a smaller scale. A mahogany dress- ing-table, the top of which some one had thriftily covered with brown American cloth, was also painted grey, and the design of flower circles was repeated on:this. This is a great success, especially the brown American cloth, which has taken the paint beautifully, is highly varnished, and therefore does not require that extremely tiresome adjunct, a " toilet cover." In this room there is another "Magi- coal " fire, but in this case we have utilized a rather nice little early Victorian round hooded grate. The mantel- piece has been painted to look 'like some grey-green marble; the floor is black with an Eastern rug on it. There are two very large cupboards, one hanging and one fitted with shelves, on either side of the fireplace as in the nursery. In the alcove, in reach of the bed, is the house telephone again, its extremely ugly box " camouflaged " with the pattern of the paper. Between the bedroom and dressing- room comes up the lift into a little lobby. The back room has been made into a dressing-room and bath-room, and a new, very narrow door has been cut connecting it with the bedroom in front. We have fitted it with a deep clothes cupboard in which coats hang up, their corre- sponding trousers being hung below across two bars.
This is a very practical device, as if trousers are laid their whole length along a shelf and the owner wants the bottom pair, he is bound to disturb all those on the top. With us each pair is hung separately. Here, by the way, I should like to add one piece of advice. We should have done well to have fitted most of the cupboards I have mentioned with their own electric lights. This is an improvement we hope to make. If a cupboard is deep it is correspond- ingly difficult to see into it. Under the window in the dressing-room is a large fitted wash-hand basin, with a boot cupboard underneath it and a shelf all round painted to look like blue marble and covered with a sheet of glass.
The basin is oval in shape and has a wide margin to it ; the splashes consequently do not reach as far as the glass sheet, and there is ample room on the sides for cakes of soap, nail brushes, and sponges. On the wall above the bath is a hot towel-rail so placed to save floor space. The walls and the ceiling are pale primrose colour, but the bath surround is painted blue and represents a conventional wavy sea. A folding bed which stands on its head, as it were, and can remain "made " in this position ; a small chest of drawers which acts as a dressing-table ; .a swinging and tilting shaving-mirror, and a small wardrobebeemplete the furniture and fittings of this room.
The stairs which lead to the top floor are japanned black and have the usual bright gilt corner pieces. The rooms on this floor were, when we came to the house, the most shocking attics imaginable ; and here again was a defect which nearly made us give up the idea of taking the house. There were only two rooms ; one, as I said before, was entered through the other ; neither was adequately lighted nor ventilated, and it was impossible to look out of the windows. We have now divided this space into three rooms—a tiny bath-room, which also contains a wash-hand basin, and two bedrooms, each of which has a proper separate approach. We have doubled the size of the wmdows, and the partition has been fitted with a small hanging cupboard for each roam. There are now hanging electric lights over the bed in each room as well as over the dressing table. The rooms are warmed by ingenious-gas-radiators. Luggage apace has been contrived to each room under the roof. Each room has dappled-grey paint and flowered wallpaper, bright chintz bed-covers and curtains and furniture painted to match the pinery of the rooms. In one zoom the dappling is predominantly blue, in the other a warm buff ; the two papers are different though similar. As in the little bath-room, there is a fitted wash-hand basin ; the rooms themselves do not have to be lumbered up with washstands. There are shelves in the bath-room where the personal belongings of the two users can be kept. The bath-room itself is entirely painted with aluminium paint. This is, we find, a great thinness ; it is very light and clean-looking, it is cheap to put on—only requiring one coat instead of three—and marks and splashes wash off it easily. Here we have also a small emergency gas geyser so that hot water may be obtained even when the house is partly shut up and the central boiler is not working. And now having " made over " our house from basement to attics, having planned our house to our wants, it remained to be seen whether we could not do something more towards a yet nicer adjustment in an alteration of our habits to fit our opportunities. A. W.-E.
(To be concluded.)
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