The House in Good Taste Paperback – September 1, 2015 by Elsie De Wolfe

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.