YEAR after year has witnessed an ever-increasing exodus from individual to communal roofs and the apartment house has gradually developed more and more colossal proportions, greater and greater facilities for comfort and convenience, and has come to usurp the best residential portions of certain American cities.

The motive which impels the workingman to abandon the five- or six-room house on the outskirts of the city for the three- or four-room flat is the same as that which actuates the millionaire in moving from his palatial six-story dwelling to the fabulous priced simplex or duplex apartment - a desire for a simplification of the mechanism of living, for a higher efficiency and a greater economy of human time and energy.

But, strangely enough, an appreciation of the essential difference of intent in the apartment, and the resulting peculiarities of construction seem to enter very slightly into its decoration and furnishing! People set about furnishing apartments on exactly the same scale as they would houses covering two or three times the area, and then they complain they are cramped for space, that nothing looks well in an apartment, and that they are, at best, poor substitutes for a home. They do not seem to realize that, even if the size of the room in an apartment is the same as that in a house -which the average are certainly not - the very fact of their compactness, the absence of wide intervening halls and passage-ways and spare nooks and corners makes the furniture much more obtrusive and the decorations much more likely to conflict.

In the smaller apartments so great do the obstacles to conventional furnishing often appear at the outset that people with the taste and means to establish charming and individual homes, put up with makeshift furnishings and deaden their sensibilities to abuses of good taste and consistency year in and year out.

The old excuse that the apartment offers a mere temporary abode is no longer tenable. The apartment has come to stay, and it is high time that the characteristic problems that it gives rise to, should be given special attention by both decorators and apartment dwellers.

With a little planning, a willingness to depart from stereotyped paths, and a reasonable landlord, even the least prepossessing apartment can usually be made to include many of the fundamentals of a pleasant and tasteful home.

And now let us consider the question of landlords. With the ever-multiplying number of apartments being erected in the larger cities which anticipate, in their construction, ever new needs and desires of their prospective occupants, and which exert every effort to please and to provide the best possible foundation for decoration, one needs no longer, even in moderate-priced apartments, be a slave to the landlord. Of course, many of the older apartments present advantages in price, size of rooms, and location over the newer structures, but unless one can have a free hand in decoration their other advantages go for little. One can, indeed, do little to counteract the lugubrious effect of near-oak and near-mahogany and hideously ornate grill-work and mantels in the narrow confines of an apartment living-room or parlor. Unreasonable landlords who zealously guard their woodwork against paint and refuse to allow the removal of uncouth architectural adornments, or the mediation of objectionable architectural features should be discriminated against, and they will soon be routed out of their short-sighted and obstinate policy. There are many landlords of the older apartment houses who not only permit the tenant an unqualified use of paint and saw, but who voluntarily offer to undertake the changes at their own expense.

A young couple with little experience in domestic affairs desired to begin housekeeping on a miniature scale and rented, without much reflection, a five-room apartment consisting of a dining-room, living-room, two bedrooms and kitchen of diminutive proportions. Both the husband and wife had a vague idea of the kind of furniture they wanted, but when they began to look at living-room, dining-room, and bedroom "suites," they realized that it would be a physical impossibility to crowd them into the tiny rooms. They were on the point of abandoning their lease in despair when the sudden opportunity for a flying trip abroad presented itself, and with great relief they turned over their problem to a city decorator, commissioning him to furnish the little home in their absence. Fortunately the decorat6r was one of the few who did not disdain a small commission and who had made an individual study of small and moderate-sized apartments.

The apartment was, indeed, not in the least prepossessing and none but inexperienced folk would have rented it. The woodwork was old-fashioned imitation mahogany, the fixtures were of the early scroll-work variety, the radiators were bulky and much in evidence, there was practically no closet space, and the rooms were mere cubby holes.

Among the advantages of the apartment was a fair amount of light, a dining-room and living-room which opened into one another, and a relatively broad and pleasant living-room window.

These advantages would not seem particularly weighty to the ordinary person, but the decorator pivoted the entire scheme upon them. Obviously it was better to create a single room of fair size by treating the dining-room and living-room as one than to attempt to make two separate rooms of cramped dimensions. He determined, therefore, to use a silver-gray grass-cloth paper in both rooms, and white woodwork with mahogany trimming.

For hangings he chose a printed linen with bright hued flowers on a striped black and intense yellow background. This made a striking frame, arranged in a severely plain valence and side curtains, for the important living-room window and also gave character to the gray walls. To further relate the two rooms he ran a narrow frieze of this fabric around the ceiling line of both and introduced a narrow mahogany strip into the white baseboard. He also added a note of interest to the plain white doors by inserting panels of linen framed with narrow strips of mahogany.