Rugs and furniture

If you can look at those three chairs and say to yourself, "The first two "go together" because they have a kinship of form, scale and texture which the third definitely has not," you need no advice from anybody.

If you can turn away from a luscious rosy floral carpet because you know you already have enough warm color in your room, the form of the pattern is too full of intricate curves to suit your early American furniture, the scale is too nearly the same as your wallpaper, and the texture is too "dressy," you can throw this book and all the other books away.

Skillful and imaginative decorators, and women with a flair for the original, often design rooms with unusual combinations of color, furniture and accessories.

If these rooms are truly livable, they can always be analyzed to find a harmony of the four basic qualities, even though their contents hail from a dozen different lands and times.

If the rooms are merely startling and "different," they belong in a show window, not in your home.