William Morris once wrote: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” 

As homemakers, we should strive not only to create a home that is clean, orderly, and safe, but one that is beautiful.  It is this which makes it a true home, a place where the parents and children all delight to linger; it is the little feminine attentions to the play of color and light, to the tastes of the family’s various personalities and interests, to the requirements of noble ambition.  In other words, as architect Alexander Jackson Davis wrote, homes should be cozy, with porches and trellises and vines, and should reflect a man’s desire both for domestic things and higher aspirations.

As keepers of the home, we should strive to make home a place where our family will want to stay; we will want to create a haven of beauty and peace that will shield our own loved ones from the rude blast of the outside world.  (It is understood, of course, that beauty does not ever come from objects alone, and anyone who thinks so will be sorely disappointed.  It is the care and warmth that rests behind a mother’s care in these things, and in the love and peace that exists between a family that loves the Lord together.  You can’t set up a little artificial stage and hope to find it a home.)

The beauty of the home is so important!  I shall leave it to those more fluent than I to elaborate.  Here are (scattered and) inspiring passages from Julia McNair Wright’s book The Complete Home, in which she addresses “The Beauty of the Home.”  Her fictitious character Aunt Sophronia narrates.

I remember telling my niece Miriam before her marriage, that good housekeeping builds up the walls of Home.....In my opinion the beauty of the home is a very important matter. There are a few people who pass it by as "nonsense," say they "have no time for it," and that they must "spend their efforts on what has cash value;" being narrow-minded, or near-sighted, they do not perceive that beauty in a home has a very decided cash value. I say this, first, because if we cultivate beauty in the home, we produce there greater care and better and more cheerful spirits , and consequently better health, and therefore less outlay for sickness, besides having more effective working-force.

A growing family will be much more likely to remain cheerfully in a beautiful home, even if that beauty is simple and inexpensive. A family who are home-keepers are an inexpensive family.

I hear so much complaint that farmer's sons and daughters do not want to stay at home--they "hate the farm"--want other business; the girls had rather be mantura-makers or store-clerks, than be at home helping their mothers, making butter, and raising fruits and vegetables; the sons want to try their fortunes in the city; the parents find themselves, when their children are old enough to be efficient help, left to hired servants, who have little are to aid them in making and saving money, who are no company indoors, and meanwhile, the parental heart is burdened with fears and anxieties for the absent children, and possibly for the parental purse is burdened with their business failures.

"Instead of that rush to the country", said I, "the rush is away from it; the young folks think that they must go to town as soon as they are grown. Everyone wonders why and how Cousin Ann's three boys have stayed on farms."

"I think," said Mrs. Burr, "that one reason of that restless haste to leave the farm is owing to a neglect of making the farm and the farmhouse attractive. So many of these homesteads have a lonely, desolate look. No trees, no flowers, a neglect of a little ingenuity in making a pretty porch and fence for the house front, and an over-carefulness which refuses to open the front rooms for the use of the family, a neglect of making the bedrooms neat and pretty--things get a sameness and shabbiness, and young eyes pine for something more attractive.

There is that same error, as far as I can see, in villages and towns and cities, " said Mrs. Winton. " A great many people pile all the agreeable things they have into one or two rooms which they keep shut up for apocryphal visitors. The family sitting room and the bedrooms are bare and forbidding."

"And, that," replied Mrs. Burr, "the young folks go to visit their neighbors or out into the streets and look at the store windows, and so try to compensate themselves; whether they know what they want or not, all youth craves beauty: it is a natural desire."

"But what a pity," I said, "that young folks should not find what they crave in the safety of their own homes! What an anchorage for good faith and virtue is the love of an honest, pure, home. What a stay to a child in all his life, the memory of a home beautiful, upright and loving.

“And by beautiful I do not mean the beauty which is created by money, in velvet carpets, rosewood furniture, fine ornaments and pictures. Those are all very well when they fall to our lot, but the beauty which I mean can be created anywhere, and out of almost anything, by simple good taste. I think that care to make the home attractive is the secret of the farming tastes of Cousin Ann's boys. And what a comfort those tastes have been to their parents. Reed and Fred are on farms beside their father's, Dick is with his father, and little Jack is not likely to wish to go away. What an anxieties have they all been spared, what temptations, what losses, by these home tastes."

"I was a little boy," said Mr. Burr, "when Reuben and cousin Ann, as young married people, moved to that farm. I use to think it was the barest looking place on earth. An old broken down fence, no paths, no porch, no shade, no garden; there was the land, the barns and sheds, a straight wooden house, and some field fences. They moved there in the fall. Cousin Reuben, as we all call him now, spent a good deal of time that winter in his woodlot, cutting and hauling wood, for himself and for sale, and on top of his loads we school boys saw him bringing home all manner of queer looking and shaped sticks. The old yard fence was turned into kindling wood. I remember how that place changed, not by money outlay, for they had a mortgage to pay off, but by constant industry and good sense. Cousin Reuben and Ann worked away at that front yard and around the house, every summer evening for years. Those queer sticks grew in two years into a handsome rustic fence. Reuben built with his own hands a porch, an arbor, and a summer house; in the winter evenings he made bird houses and poles for creepers; Cousin Ann got slips, cuttings, and seeds; to give her a bit of good shrubbery was to give her a treasure, and Reuben carried from the field and wood promising young shade and ornamental trees. Look what a place they have now."

"Yes, I remember. Cousin Ann told me she meant her children should not grow up in such a desolate place as that was when she found it; and she thought they would love and value it more, if they helped to create beauty there. She had them from their earliest childhood learn to help keep the place neat, and make improvements in it. They helped her in the vegetable garden; they planted and weeded flower borders; no old barrel hoops rotted on the ground there: they were used for fences to the garden bed, and for frames for vines. The boys made rustic seats, they learned to turn common things to use, they made brackets and picture frames. Everyone helped to make everyone's room pretty, and no part of the house was too good for the family. The parents took a pride in making the house nice, and the children learned an equal pride in keeping it nice....

"Well," said Mr. Winton, "the whole county knows that they are a wonderful set of boys."

"They had a wonderful mother, to begin with," said Mrs. Burr. "And every mother may be just as wonderful, who sets her common sense and energy to work for her family--who trains her children's activity to constructiveness and usefulness, instead of to riot and mischief. What boy will not prize the home which he helped make, which was free to him and all it's best things, which gave him his interests and occupied his thoughts?"....

How do you homemakers (wives and daughters) ensure that your home is a beautiful retreat where the entire family loves to be?

Text: Quote by John Ruskin from “The Stones of Venice,” 1880.

Photograph: Cottage.  Copyright information.

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