Adding Modern to the Mix in 1959

Tired of scrolling through the latest blogs about decorating your modern home? Then consider this classic book from the Ladies Home Journal.

Elizabeth T. Halsley’s ‘Ladies’ Home Journal Book of Interior Decoration,’ from 1959, is readily obtainable online and in bookshops for about what you’d pay for a similar, modern day tome. The book makes clear, as no modern book can, how modern design was seeping almost seamlessly into the hearts and minds of mid-century ladies – and into the interiors of their homes.

It counters the idea, to a degree, that modern was in opposition to traditional styles, and makes it easier for observers today to spot the many 1950s and 1960s homes that dot our landscapes with a mixture of modern and traditional elements in their facades and their interiors.

Halsey, a decorator who with her husband installed the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, worked in several historical house museums, and helped restore Williamsburg, Virginia, accepts modern as just another style. The book goes through them all, from Colonial on up, in detail and with true appreciation.

“We call the new style modern for want of a better name,” she writes. “There was a time when Georgian was called modern.”

“Instead of building a traditional house and dividing and arranging it to suit the family’s needs as far as possible,” she writes, “the new idea was to consider the needs first and build a house around them. Many of the first houses constructed with this idea were grotesque almost to the point of being ridiculous, but gradually architects developed houses in the new style which were both functional and beautiful.”

It would be nice to know which houses Halsey had in mind as being ridiculous.

As for interiors, she’s all for blending modern into the stylistic mix. After learning about styles, she writes, “you will know just what you are doing if you decide to a put a Modern sofa in a Colonial room.”

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