EXHIBITION
The "Daily Mail" Ideal Home Exhibition. (Olympia.) THE Grand Hall of the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia has this year been designed by Mr. James Gardner, one of the architects responsible for the Festival Gardens, and to this stately Kensington pleasure-dome he has brought his particular flair for the lighthearted and fantastic. Half-Emmett, half-Brighton-Pavilion, wholly gay, his decor frisks through the vacuum-cleaners and olde Englishe lanthornes like a spring lamb. A central sun, fashioned of coloured umbrellas and flanked by star-capped turrets, hangs above a rich lime-green carpet, which leads to a bandstand whimsically poised in mid-air on a flag-pole. From this precarious eyrie regimental bands blow forth the strains of The Gondoliers to stir the acres of lime muslin suspended from the roof. It is all wonderfully fey, and it takes a little time to wipe the stardust from one's eyes and get down to the business at hand.
The piece de resistance is the Village ; hoxses, shops, pubs and Banks complete. In house-decoration the accent this year is, of course, on economy, but, whereas the wall-papers exhibited are cheap and pretty, the materials are as ugly as only maroon damask can be. One house, decorated for some unimaginable reason by the W.V.S., is in impeccable taste, with simple colour-schemes and elegant chintzes ; but the others, though also sensible, labour-saving and carefully planned for the frail pocket, lack artistic direction to a marked degree. But then most English people like to combine Knole settees with folk-weave curtains.
The gardens are, as usual, superbly laid out. Tinkling streams run hither and yon ; fields of carnations, azaleas and flowering shrubs sprout from moist lawns ; and in arbours pricked with urns gipsies make music from dawn to dusk. It is cool here and shaded, so that it is to be regretted that bodies worn by walking from Gas to Caravans, from Fashion and Beauty to Crisis in the Kitchen, from cigarette- cards to sewing-machines—that bodies hot and so frequently lost cannot lie down awhile in the daffodils.
Planned in a merry mood and displaying in every corner a charm- ing and frivolous approach to salesmanship—there is a lot of Festival wirework about and even a Festival dove—this exhibition is one of the best the Daily Mail has ever mounted. Every housewife will be inspired to do just what the Chancellor dislikes most—buy. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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