On The Decoration of Houses

Interior design books come and go; it is a rare tome that makes a permanent home on my shelf. But Edith Wharton’s 1890 The Decoration of Houses is one such tome. Written thirty-one years before her luscious and searing Age of Innocence would make her the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, the piece is unusual in the context of her oeuvre. The prose is, of course, as rich and colorful as one might hope—but what can we make of Wharton’s design sense?

It’s worth considering how her literary aesthetic might inform her stance towards such matters. Literature and architecture make easy bedfellows; the aptitude for metaphor between them has been written about at length. Someone so perceptive to the tragicomedies of social theater surely knew a thing or two about scene-setting. Environment is of intense importance to Wharton. Rather than something inherent, the behavior of her characters is shown in response to their surroundings—recall the shabby but enchanting pied-à-terre of Countess Ellen Olenska, compared with the open, dignified bachelor pad of Lawrence Selden. For Wharton, conditions largely determine fate, so it makes sense that she would be particular about the impression of her own habitation.

The library at The Mount—a writer’s Arcadia.

The text’s blend of canny architectural criticism with abject opinion is intoxicating, though there is little in the way of photographic illustration. To see her design principles, we turn to images of Wharton’s own schemes. Born to an old aristocratic New York family, the Joneses (“keeping up with the Joneses”), her access to architecture’s finest was limitless. Her Massachusetts estate, The Mount, was beautifully outfitted with Ogden Codman Jr.; her Newport estate and later Pavilion Colombe in France reveal a similar sensibility, though images are scarce. The few glimpses of her Park Avenue apartment echo a decorative program still seen along the upper avenue today.

Wharton with her beloved dogs and bent-willow chairs at Pavilion Colombe, her Riviera retreat.

Perhaps it is better to consider her broader advice on style rather than the particulars of material manifestation. Styles come and go, but The Decoration of Houses is packed with bon-mots that feel as fresh as her fiction. Direct and exacting, Wharton was a circumspect analyst of interiors. Here are some favorites:

“There is no necessity for having bad bric-à-brac. Trashy ‘ornaments’ do not make a room more comfortable; as a general rule, they distinctly diminish its comfort.”

“Plain shelves filled with good editions in good bindings are more truly decorative than ornate bookcases lined with tawdry books.”

“If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.”

“The supreme excellence is simplicity.”

“...all good architecture and good decoration (which, it must never be forgotten, is only interior architecture) must be based on rhythm and logic. A house, or room, must be planned as it is because it could not, in reason, be otherwise; must be decorated as it is because no other decoration would harmonize as well with the plan.”

“I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”