This is a guest blog post by Trinity Kendrick, MSc in Preservation Practices, Roger Williams University. Trinity is a 2024 Buchanan Burnham Fellow.
When writer Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman Jr. first submitted their manuscript of The Decoration of Houses to the publisher MacMillan’s in 1897, it was swiftly rejected. The unknown architect who consulted on the decision declared that “nobody was likely to buy an amateur work on house decoration by two totally unknown writers.”1 At this time in America, architecture was coming into its own as a respectable taste-making profession. Wharton herself noted the unusualness of Codman – trained at MIT in the Beaux-Arts style – collaborating not only on The Decoration of Houses, but the decoration of her own “incurably ugly” Newport home Land’s End.2 Interior decoration, after all, was looked down upon in the same vein as dressmaking; it was women’s work, separate from the overwhelmingly male dominated field of architecture. Both Wharton and Ogden had similar opinions on the fussy Victorian approach popular among the upper-class of the generation preceding them, and agreed that interior design should be “simple and architectural.”3 The book, aside from its more straightforward advice on curtains and bric-à-brac, advocated for the idea that a house’s interior is as much a part of the structure as the exterior and should follow the same rules of proportion, rhythm and logic. The public must have found merit in this idea, because when The Decoration of Houses was published in Scribner’s Magazine (who the year before had accepted three of Wharton’s earliest poems), it sold out immediately. The Decoration of Houses has become a, if not the, foundational text for interior decoration, but its contribution to architectural theory and its attempt to re-establish “house-decoration as a branch of architecture”4 is often undervalued.
(Left) A black and white photograph of Edith Wharton reading, c. 1900. P28, collection of the Newport Historical Society. (Right) Photograph of Ogden Codman, Jr. in Dinard, France. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Known for her novels of social criticism about the lives of early 20th century elites, Wharton’s own background of privilege and status was the direct inspiration for her stories. Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862, was the daughter of George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, a descendant of one of New York’s oldest families.5 While they were not wealthy in comparison to the other “new money” Gilded Age families, they were established and respected. Wharton was raised in New York high society, although she spent much of her early childhood in Europe where she was influenced at a young age by classical architecture, “Ruskin in hand.”6 Her family often summered in Newport at Pen Craig, which she recalled fondly for the childish freedom it provided.7
The street facade of Pen Craig, the Wharton’s summer home in Newport, c. 1925. P8518, collection of the Newport Historical Society.
She married the wealthy Edward Robbins Wharton at age 23, and they split their time between their homes in New York, Newport (Land’s End) and later settling in Massachusetts (The Mount).8 However, the marriage was an unhappy one, and after she divorced Edward in 19139 Edith moved to France and would remain there for the rest of her life. Besides her fiction novels – including The Age of Innocence (for which she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize), Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth – Wharton also visited the front lines in Europe during WWI and her war journalism earned her the Legion of Honor in 1916.10
While The Decoration of Houses and her other architecture book Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) may seem out of place with her later work, there is a strong connection between them. Wharton’s novels often addressed the division of spaces, the interplay of the interior and exterior, the public versus private, and how architecture can be a powerful social symbol. Descriptions of her character’s physical contexts were integral, leading literary critic Edmund Wilson to describe her as not only “the pioneer, but the poet, of interior decoration.”11 Many of her novels were set either in New York or Newport, and Wharton increasingly felt that Newport during the Gilded Age was becoming a “Thermopylae of bad taste,”12 (a barb directed at the Vanderbilts) and that “we have passed from the golden age of architecture to the gilded age of decoration.”13 The Decoration of Houses, in the context of Gilded Age Newport, is partially a response to many of those garish “white elephants” built by the nouveau-riche around the turn of the century as much as it is a rejection of the outdated Victorian style.
(Left) Edith Wharton’s childhood home at West 25th Street, New York, N.Y. (Right) Drawing room in Land’s End. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A photograph depicting Land’s End, the summer home of Edith Wharton and her husband Teddy. Architectural features include a porch with hanging plants, detailed clapboard woodwork, and two gambrel rooflines. Circa 1880. P3055, collection of the Newport Historical Society.
Wharton’s own Newport home, Land’s End, was originally designed by John Hubbard Sturgis in 1864, and was home to banker and Transcendentalist Samuel G. Ward before the Wharton’s purchased it in 1893.14 It is a loose variation on a Stick Style, its key features a massive cross-gabled roof and unsymmetrical layout. While Wharton described the society of Gilded Age Newport as vapid, the weather depressing, and the house itself ugly, she had a fondness for the views and atmosphere it provided.15 She asked Boston architect Ogden Codman Jr. to help her rectify this architectural folly, which would lead to The Decoration of Houses. At the time of writing Codman was at the beginning of his career, but would later go on to design high profile exteriors and interiors, including the second and third floor rooms of The Breakers.16 Wharton was constrained by the existing structure at Land’s End, and the changes were limited: removing some exterior extraneous ornament, conducting substantial interior alterations and adding a circular forecourt and hedge to the grounds.17 It was not until the construction of the Mount in 1902 that she could truly execute her architectural vision with the help of Codman. While Houses was technically Wharton’s first full length book, she did not consider it a part of her literary career and called it an “odd and unexpected beginning.”18
A first edition copy of The Decoration of Houses, owned by Ogden Codman Jr. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Decoration of Houses is one of many contributions to the American Renaissance architectural movement, which embraced classical ideals of order and proportion. Post-Civil War America was a nation attempting to define its identity and architecture – as showcased in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition – was a powerful symbol of its status as an emerging world power. There were many historical revival styles vying for prominence, leading to an eclecticism that many architects felt lacked meaning and was not a true representation of America and its principles. Advocates of the American Renaissance urged for classicism – an approach rooted in Greek and Roman principles – because its tradition was associated with democracy, and the Renaissance with a flourishing of culture. Architect Charles F. McKim, a proponent of the American Renaissance, was a supporter of Houses and responsible for some of its revisions.19 In the introduction to the book, Wharton and Ogden cite post-sixteenth century Italian domestic architecture as the best model for modern life, and specifically its French and English derivatives as being the most appropriate for the North American climate.20 They build on architectural theorists and early preservationists, especially Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin. Wharton respected Ruskin for his architectural philosophy and early influence on her budding interest in architecture, but ultimately critiqued him for his principles of aesthetics. Much like Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin, Wharton and Ogden point to an understanding of historic tradition (but not a direct imitation of it) as necessary for creating good modern architecture. However, while the former preferred the asymmetry of the Gothic and rejected the classical tradition espoused by the École de Beaux-Arts, the latter embraced classical symmetry and proportion (especially its French derivatives). Wharton and Ogden imply that architecture in the current age is a lost art, and that “no lost art can be re-acquired without at least for a time going back to the methods and manner of those who formerly practiced it.”21 Aside from a commitment to historical tradition, Wharton also subscribed to the Ruskinian view that architecture reflected societal or individual morals, a philosophy also purported by other theorists like Andrew Jackson Downing. While Wharton was known for eschewing many of the expectations placed on her as a member of high society, she was still a product of her environment, referring to the social activities in Newport as “watering-place amusements,”22 and stating, “vulgarity is always noisier than good breeding.”23
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s country home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Decoration of Houses also touches upon ornamentation, how much of it is acceptable and when it becomes too much. The debate on superfluous ornamentation and functionality was nothing new in the architecture world. The ideas presented in Decoration echo earlier ones of theorists like Viollet-le-Duc, who stated, “every absolutely beautiful work must be the development of a rigorously logical principle,”24 and the ever-quoted “form ever follows function”25 from Louis Sullivan’s The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, which preceded the publication of Decoration only by a year. Neither Viollet-le-Duc nor Sullivan opposed the idea of ornament, quite the opposite, but rather saw it as something that should emerge organically from the building and be useful in its own right rather than being arbitrarily placed to distract from architectural defects. A more vehement rejection of ornament would come in the 20th century, represented notably by Adolf Loos’ 1913 essay Ornament and Crime, but at this point the tendency towards simplification still allowed for well-crafted flourishes, often inspired by natural or historic precedents.
While The Decoration of Houses was not the first of its kind, Wharton and Ogden made an important contribution to the design field by taking emerging architectural theory and applying it to the inside of the home, not just the outside. In their view, it is most important that interiors be harmoniously designed in the first place, but they acknowledge that people may be unable to significantly alter their inherently flawed existing rooms. Rather, the point of the book is to provide guidance on maximizing a space by emphasizing proportion, symmetry and simplicity. For all the relevancy of The Decoration of Houses provides to modern readers – the importance of understanding the classical tradition, the power of simplicity, the preference for well-made basics over cheap copies, and the importance of doing nothing halfway – perhaps its most important quality is that it acknowledges its own obsolescence: “But it must never be forgotten that everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others,—the wants of dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences. The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms are often to be explained in this way.”26
[1] Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), 108.
[2] Ibid, 106.
[3] Ibid, 107.
[4] Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses: By Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman (Charles
Scribner, B.J. Batsford), 20.
[5] Hermoine Lee, Edith Wharton: A Biography (Knopf, 2007), 52.
[6] Ibid, 34.
[7] Ibid, 40.
[8] Ibid, 178.
[9] Ibid, 136.
[10] Ibid, 32.
[11] Edmund Wilson, “Justice to Edith Wharton,” reprinted in Irving Howe Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), 23.
[12] Richard Guy Wilson et al, The American Renaissance 1876-1917 (Pantheon Books, 1979), 149.
[13] Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, 196.
[14] Richard Guy Wilson, “Edith and Ogden: Writing, Decoration, and Architecture,” in Pauline Metcalf, Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses (The Boston Athenaeum, 1988), 138.
[15] Wharton, A Backward Glance, 106.
[16] Pauline C. Metcalf, Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses (The Boston Athenaeum, 1988), 12.
[17] Wilson, “Edith and Ogden,” 138.
[18] Wharton, A Backward Glance, 108.
[19] Wilson, “Edith and Ogden,” 150.
[20] Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, 2.
[21] Ibid, 9.
[22] Wharton, A Backward Glance, 106.
[23] Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, 190.
[24] Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture, (J.R. Osgood, 1875), 487.
[25] Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (Lippincott’s Magazine 57, 1896), 345.
[26] Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, 18.