The Affinity of the “Young Marrieds” for MODERN

House Beautiful, October 1, 1943.

Watch the tastes of today's young people. Just as they are determining the strategy of global war and holding the battle lines, they are asserting a mature and vigorous philosophy in their preference for contemporary design in the furnishings of their homes

By Marion Cough

The young have suddenly grown up, almost overnight, to assume burdens of responsibility such as no other generation has ever known. It's a young people's war. The boys fly the bombers that the girls have built. And it's a young people's world, where twenty-year-olds are keeping homes going, raising families, facing the problems of adulthood with courageous competence. What these young people do, what they think, what they say, is of the utmost importance, because they have proved themselves to be mature in judgment if not in years, and they know where they're going.

We have been aware for some time that the young are wielding a forceful influence on the kind of homes future Americans will live in. We have watched newlyweds, fresh out of high school and college, plan their one and two-room apartments and buy their furniture. They turn, unerringly, to modern shapes and fabrics, to light woods, to the kind of decoration that plays down elegance, but that is rich in the subtlety of textures and the beauty of wood graining and luminous glass They have a sound appreciation of the economy of Modern how tables can serve more purposes than one, how flexible units can use up every inch of wall space and increase storage facilities, the ease with which smooth surfaces can be cleaned, cotton fabrics washed. They are excellent judges of these things because, leading busy lives, they know the necessity of having furnishings that are up to their tempo. For them Modern holds no terror or strangeness, because they and Modern are all products of the same era. It represents to them the direct and uncomplicated way they like to do things, And, you may depend upon it, their way is setting the pace.

Look at the Chicago apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Burris Laxman and you'll see the youthful way with Modern. Mrs. Laxman is Bettina Metealf, top-fight fashion model of New York and Chicago. Before she planned her smart balcony-apartment she made a study of all the furniture periods just to be sure she knew what each had to offer her. As she studied the traditional forms in the light of her natural color and design preferences, as she tried to fit each kind into the picture of her living habits, she gravitated right back to Modern, which had been her first inclination, anyway. She applied logic to her selection, although actually her choice was almost automatic.

Here are some of her reasons.  She, like so many brides, has a profession which keeps her busy from nine to six daily, from Monday through Friday. There’s no time for fussing with unessential housework, so she had to have the kind of furnishings that are easily kept up. Her straight-cut lacquered cabinets and dressers, her glossy surfaced light wood tables, practically keep themselves looking beautiful because they require so little dusting and polishing. And her washable cotton upholstery fabrics and curtaining, the fringe string rug, are washable, which means that spots and stains are not a source of worry. She liked the purposefulness of Modern furniture, too, because it provides the place for everything which is half the battle in keeping a home neat.

Bettina gave thought to the furniture, too. Unlike older generations, many of whom started out by furnishing a ten-room house once and for all with the reasonable certainty that they would always live in it, young people must plan for their first furnishings to be adaptable to all the moves they are bound to make before they finally settle down in a home of their own. Bettina’s present living room is dining room, too, but its Chinese-flavored white lacquered credenza was bought with a future dining room in mind. Now it holds music and a radio, as well as a silver and linen. The zebra-striped chairs - that’s a printed linen fabric - would do ver handsomely, one at each end of a future dining table. For the moment meals are served on a collapsible white leather-top table that can be stored in a closet.

Bettina’s choice of color was, of course, a personal one, yet there is a philosophy behind it which is quite generally contemporary. She worked our her decorating scheme with decorator Everette Brown of Marshall Field & Co., specifying that pallid colors were to be crossed off the list at the start. They bore her because they lack vitality. She’s discovered that she relates best in rooms where the color is strong and vibrant. They’re as good a pick-up, she says, as a four o’clock coke after a day under the photographer’s lights. With this theory, and her own innate fashion sense which, incidentally, is something young people seem to possess universally, she evolved a black and white and chocolate brown living room, accented with the most brilliant, positive green she could find. The sofa’s covering is pepper-and-salt cotton tweed. Side chairs are a combination zebra stripe and wood the color of wheat. Draperies are a white crash-like fabric trimmed with green fringe, and a great, oversized lunge chair has a felt cover in the same ecstatic green. All this against brown walls. As Bettina points out, she has a neutral room - and it is definitely not beige. She can change the entire room just by changing the accent color on the lounge chair and draperies.

the bedroom, which is the balcony of the apartment, follows the same theory. Its walls, most of the furniture, the bedspreads, and curtains are all white, as white as white as the could get. Against all this snowiness, the bedskirts are flaming Christmas red organdy, and curtains are tied back with the same color. A bedside table and dressing table in black lacquer underline the sophisticated feeling of the room.

The way Bettina has used color is characteristically modern. In itself it takes the place of accessories, which you will notice are few and far between. Where you see them, they are bold, important to the design of the rooms, and useful. In the living room, one lamp base repeats the stripe of the zebra chairs, another the graceful curve of the plumes that ornament the stair well. And since there’s a Chinese feeling in the cabinetry, the fireplace mantel holds figures of the eighties men of China - and nothing more. It’s a sort of symbol of the whole young attitude toward decoration, the philosophy that reduces the mechanics of living to the simples terms.