One country house, used in winter, has been treated with reds and greens....All the floors are covered with a rich red velvet carpet, a sweep of splendid color, lying across the drawing-room floor, the much-divided hall, up the stairs to the bedrooms above, down the flight of a dozen steps or more to the library door, and on across that floor to the fireplace at its end, some forty feet away. The walls of the drawing-room are covered with a large red figure on a white ground. The hall is green, a better background for the pictures; the library, red. No sense of confusion is conveyed by the breaking up of the wall-colors. That splendid sweep of red in the carpet, when the doors are thrown open, brings everything together. An unbroken stretch of wall-space could never have done this.
Reds and greens
Another instance of a breathtaking lifestyle from the 1903 Homes and Their Decoration by Lillie Hamilton French:
