Excerpt from A Sleepy Hollow Restorations Portfolio<br><br>The painted bed, chairs, table, and bureau in the guest room are all part of a set of what Downing called cottage furniture. They are painted a darker hue of green than the walls, and decorated with copper-brown rococo cartouches and edgings which enclose floral motifs in vivid colors. In Downing's Country Houses (new York, 1851) a similar set is shown (fig. This furniture is remarkable for its combination of lightness and strength, and for its essentially cottage-like charac ter. It is very highly finished, and is usually painted drab, white, gray, a delicate lilac, or a fine blue - the surface polished and hard, like enamel. Some of the better sets have groups of flowers or other designs painted upon them with artistic skill. \vhen it is remem bered that the whole set for a cottage bed-room may be had for the price of a single wardrobe in mahogany, it will be seen how comparatively cheap it is. The set illustrated here cost $68 without marble tops, plus $18 for the wardrobe.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.