HOME FURNISHINGS : Footstools Can Elevate Style of Room’s Decor

Once upon a time, Cinderella put her tiny foot upon a stool, slid it into a glass slipper and won Prince Charming and half of his kingdom.

Footstools aren’t just the stuff of fairy tales. Smaller and lower than ottomans and hassocks, they once were highly functional. In drafty homes, they kept feet off cold floors. With doctor’s orders to keep the foot elevated, they offered relief from the gout.

Central heating and prescription drugs rendered them obsolete as necessities, but not as curiosities.

“Using them is what separates the men from the boys in decorating,” says Robert Metzger, a New York decorator and antiques dealer. “They aren’t run of the mill.” Metzger finds a place for a footstool in the living room next to a sofa or easy chair and tucked under or next to a coffee table. Since they are really too small to sit on, he regards them as purely decorative.

In the bedroom, however, they can be functional.

“They’re just the right height for a bedside telephone, both to reach for a ringing phone and for dialing,” he says. “A phone on a bedside table is really too high to reach comfortably.”

Needlepoint is the cover of choice--your own handiwork or an antique piece. If it’s not needlepoint, Metzger suggests antique textiles, real or fake animal skin, or remnants of old rugs.

Old footstools can be round, square or rectangular, and are fairly easy to find and not terribly expensive, says Trudi Roth, an antique textiles dealer in New York. Styles range from the rustic three-legged wood milking stool to highly polished hardwoods. She says Regency, Empire and Victorian styles are easy to find.

Footstools with floral carpeting or needlepoint were a feature of Victorian parlors, and many survive. Typically, they have a curved frame of rosewood, mahogany or walnut, often to match the parlor chairs.

Roth collected footstools until she had so many she started selling them at antiques shows in the Northeast. She also repairs, restores and replaces textile tops.

“A footstool suffers a lot of wear and tear and often has already been repaired even before I get to it,” she says. “The fabric ones need new needlepoint designs, and the wood and metal frames usually need cleaning and polishing.”

Replacing a top can be time-consuming, especially if there are several layers--and hundreds of upholstery tacks--to remove. A top, however, can be replaced far more easily than repairing a frame in bad condition.

There is hardly a furniture period that didn’t include a footstool. Among the more unusual turn-of-the-century and 20th-Century types are the Adirondack, made of tree branches, and footstools with beaded tops. Roth found some from the 1920s with hidden compartments--used to stow bootleg liquor, she speculates.

Their heyday, however, was the 19th Century, when footstools provided a showcase for fancy needlepoint, tapestry and beading that women of leisure made in their idle hours.