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The true office of the house is not only to be useful, but to be
aesthetically a background for the dwellers therein, subordinate to them,
not obtrusive. In most of our modern building and furnishing the people
are relegated to the background as insignificant figures. This is largely
why the home feeling is absent, why children do not form an affection for
the rooms they live in.
Let there be nothing in the room because some other person has it; this
shows poverty of ideas. Let there be nothing in the room which does not
satisfy some need, spiritual or physical, of some member of the family.
How bare our rooms would become! Let the skeptical reader try an
experiment. Take everything out of a given room, then bring back one by
one the things one feels essential not merely because it fills space but
for the presence of which some one can give a good and sufficient reason.
It will mean a trial of a few days, because it is not easy to separate
habit from need. A table _has stood_ in a certain spot: that is no reason
in itself why it should continue to stand there unless it supplies a need.
If a fetish stands in the way of social progress, do away with it.
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