Making It Home: Mrs. Manson Mingott's Decadent Flat

Coordinate adjacent rooms.

When two rooms connect (usually via pocket doors or an opening with portieres), the Victorian convention was to color coordinate them. Usually, the floor and wall colors in the first room would be reversed in the second room. Sometimes you'll see, instead, that the accent color in the first room becomes the dominant color in the second room, which picks up a new accent color. If you look at Mrs. Mingott's suite in the movie version of The Age of Innocence, you'll see that the parlor is deep pink with cream, and the bedroom is deep cream with rosy accent colors. Color coordination makes it possible to keep the rooms open to each other most of the time, giving a sense of spaciousness.

If, instead of the usual collection of rooms, you have a flat with one huge public room that must serve as parlor, dining room, and home office, you can use a variation of this technique to divide the space into manageable chunks. Choose one color for each function that you want to pack into the room. For example, let's say that the formal sitting space will be green, the dining space will be red, and the office will be blue. Start with neutral walls that work with all three colors. Upholster your parlor furniture in green, arrange it on a red rug with a largely green pattern, and accessorize with red and blue. Do the dining furniture and the most important accessories in red, arrange it on a blue and green rug with red accents, and add some blue and green touches. Do the office furniture in blue, arrange it on a red rug with a largely blue pattern, and accessorize in red and green. The result: everything "goes" but the three spaces are distinct!

Match the style to the space.

Spaces designed to be public (usually at the front of the house) are usually larger in scale than spaces intended to be private or for servants (usually at the back of the house). The old public rooms lend themselves best to large-scale furniture and sumptuous, dramatic effects. (But do measure the doorways and halls before you commit to a giant sofa or sideboard. Furniture proportions have changed over the last 150 years, and a modern chair that might be the right size for the space may be the wrong size for the doorway.) If you have a yen for

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