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SOME CRAFTSMAN CHIMNEYPIECES, ANY
ONE OF WHICH MIGHT FURNISH THE KEY-
NOTE FOR AN ENTIRE SCHEME OF
DECORATION
N MOST well planned rooms, the main feature of
structural interest is the fireplace, which, by reason of
being the natural center of comfort and good cheer,
not only dominates the construction of the room, but
gives the keynote for the entire scheme of decoration
and furnishing. Everything should lead up to the
fireplace as the principal attraction in the room, and, naturally, the
fireplace should be worthy of its pre-eminence. Yet in many houses
which have been planned without thought and built in a common-
place way, the chimneypiece, with its showy, flimsy mantel and miserly
little fireplace opening, is anything but a feature of structural inter-
est, and fails to an equal degree to convey any suggestion of welcome
and home comfort. Rooms may easily be redecorated, but in many
cases the hopelessly commonplace chimneypiece seems to stand as a
permanent obstacle in the path of any effective effort at sufficient re-
modeling to change the character of the room.
   It is because so many rooms fail of interest and any permanently
satisfying quality,-for the reason that they lack a sufficiently strong
starting point from which to carry out a well balanced scheme of
decoration,-and also because so many plans for remodeling common-
place rooms fail for lack of suggestion as to practicable ways of
bringing them into more satisfying shape, that the designs here given
for eight CRAFTSMAN fireplaces are so carefully illustrated and de-
scribed. Each chimneypiece as shown has a distinctive character of
its own. Some are meant for large rooms, some for small, some for
the big geniality and homeliness of the living-room, and others for the
dainty finish of a woman's bedroom or small sitting-room. Some are
of tiles in the soft dull reds and milky greens and biscuit color that
form such charming notes in the decorative scheme of a room, and
others are of the dark red hard burned brick that seems, after all, more
structural than any other material that can be used for a chimneypiece.
Not only are the fireplaces carefully shown in detail, but with each one
is given enough of the woodwork, wall spaces and structural features
surrounding it, to convey a tolerably clear idea of the scheme of deco-
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