2 Working-class interior, c. 1900. Even in the least luxurious interior, decoration was important; witness the draped mantelshelf.
The most important design reform movement to affect the interior in the nineteenth century was that of the arts and crafts. Starting in Britain, the movement had a far-reaching influence on twentieth-century design.
The Industrial Revolution of the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain generated a totally new economic and social structure. The twin forces of industrialization and urbanization dictated a new way of life for the population as a whole. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain led the world in terms of trade and enjoyed great prosperity. The foundation of a capitalist economy spawned a thriving middle class. Whereas previously decisions about the style of interiors had concerned chiefly the upper classes, who were advised by the architect, plasterer or upholsterer, this changed with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of a new bourgeoisie, anxious to communicate its newfound prosperity in terms of visual culture but insecure in its own taste.
The Victorian middle class generally settled on the edge of the city in new suburban estates. The appearance of the interiors of these modest three-storey homes and the way in which the inhabitants conducted themselves within were dictated by elaborate codes of behaviour. The numerous advice manuals dealing with social intercourse and interior decoration, starting with Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in England in 1861, and Mrs E.B. Duffey’s What Women Should Know, published in America in 1871, reveal how rigid and how crucial were the codes that governed the home. The precise etiquette for receiving guests, organizing dinner parties and managing the servants was all set down.
2 Working-class interior, c. 1900. Even in the least luxurious interior, decoration was important; witness the draped mantelshelf.
Items of household decoration such as wallpaper, textiles and carpets were now being mass produced and purchased for the first time by a bourgeoisie who emulated their social superiors with the furnishing of the formal drawing room. This was the room used to receive visitors, and usually had heavy curtains and thick lace at the windows, a patterned carpet, generously upholstered seating, ornate furniture and a huge range of ornaments, pictures and surface decoration. The overall impression needed to be one of comfort, richness and formality. Furniture could be bought from the new department stores, or in America by mail order. The seven-piece suite, manufactured and marketed in America during the 1870s by firms such as McDonough, Price and Co., used rich fabrics with added details like buttoning, tufting, pleating and fringing to create a sumptuous effect. The chairs used internal springing, popularized in France in the 1840s and common to most drawing-room seating by the 1850s, to provide a visual rather than merely physical effect of comfort. The springs had the advantage of returning the seat to the desired smooth shape after use. The ordering of the Victorian drawing room was governed by the need to impress, a need felt by even the working-class homemaker.[2]
3 New York drawing room, photographed in 1894. The dominance of surface decoration, ostentatious upholstery and mixture of period styles are typical of the late nineteenth-century interior, here with French influence.
However all-pervasive the Victorian middle-class desire to express comfort and wealth, the aesthetic standard of the interior disturbed contemporary critics, and a large body of writing appeared during the nineteenth century to give advice on taste and interior design.[3] Writers from A.W.N. Pugin (1812–1852) onwards equated what they regarded as ‘good’ design with high moral standards. Pugin led a campaign for the gothic style. His two books on the subject, Contrasts (1836) and the more detailed The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), make a connection between his own Catholicism and the architecture of the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. For Pugin, gothic was an expression of a just and Christian society in contrast to nineteenth-century industrial society with its social ills. The Victorian gothic revival was mainly inspired by Pugin and his interiors for the new Houses of Parliament building designed by Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860). The style continued in use into the twentieth century, feeding into the arts and crafts movement.
The gothic style was revived to create a brilliant effect in the work of William Burges (1827–1881) for his wealthy and eccentric client, the Marquis of Bute. Burges created two gothic fantasies, Cardiff Castle (1868–81) and Castell Coch (1875–81), near Cardiff. The lavish, boldly coloured decorations exemplify the Victorian tendency to romanticize the Middle Ages. The walls and ceilings were brightly painted, carved and gilded, and the rooms were embellished with carved and painted figures taken from ecclesiastical sources. The furniture designed by Burges is heavy, decorated with turrets and similar carving inspired by gothic architecture as well as furniture.
Pugin’s work was an inspiration to the leading writer on art and design in nineteenth-century Britain, John Ruskin (1819–1900), who influenced taste in interior design through his writings on art in The Times newspaper and his books, such as The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3). He warned against the common practice of making one material look like another, and the effort to create a new style when gothic could not be surpassed. Like Pugin, he saw the ugliness that surrounded him as the unavoidable result of the miserable conditions for the majority brought by the Industrial Revolution. He took issue with the Victorian fashion for cramming as much as possible into a room to symbolize the owners’ wealth and status, writing in The Seven Lamps of Architecture: ‘… but I would not have that useless expense on unnoticed fineries or formalities; cornicing of ceilings and graining of doors, and fringing of curtains, and thousands such; things which have become falsely and pathetically habitual – things on whose common appliance hang whole trades, to which there never yet belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real pleasure, or becoming of the remotest or most contemptible use – things which cause half the expense of life, and destroy more than half its comfort, manliness, respectability, freshness, and facility.’
‘I know what it is’, he continued, ‘to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate; and I know it to be in many respects healthier and happier than living between a Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender.’
Ruskin’s critique of new, mass-produced furniture and furnishings was expressed again in a letter he wrote to The Times of 25 May 1854, in which he discusses William Holman Hunt’s painting on the theme of adultery, The Awakening Conscience (1853), with reference to the ‘fatal newness’ of the interior.[4] For Ruskin, moral virtue and such new furniture were incompatible.
Ruskin’s rejection of mass-produced furniture and his advocacy of design from the past influenced a whole generation of writers and designers, most notably the socialist, designer and founder of the arts and crafts movement, William Morris (1834–1896). Morris established interior design and the production of furniture and furnishings as a valid enterprise for the architect and fine artist, firing the arts and crafts movement of the 1880s to ‘Turn our artists into craftsmen and our craftsmen into artists!’ After studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford, Morris decided against a life as a clergyman, became interested in architecture, and worked in the offices of the gothic revival architect G.E. Street (1824–1881) before abandoning the profession to become an artist. This career too proved abortive, and after his marriage to Jane Burden in 1859 he concentrated on design.
4 William Holman Hunt: The Awakening Conscience, 1853. For Ruskin, the painting’s theme of the ‘love nest’ was expressed largely in terms of the garish and shiny furnishings, for instance the ill-matched ‘painted’ veneer on the piano-end.
5 Hallway of the Red House, Bexleyheath, built by Philip Webb for William Morris and his bride in 1859–60. Webb’s simple staircase and hall cupboard are gothic in inspiration. The cupboard doors are painted with scenes of Arthurian romance by the artist Burne-Jones.
Morris commissioned his new home, the Red House at Bexleyheath, Kent (1859–60), from a former colleague in Street’s practice, Philip Webb (1831–1915).[5] When the house was complete, Morris and his circle of friends, which included Webb, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the young artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), decorated the interior in a style that harmonized with Webb’s vernacular building, a modest English country house of red brick which incorporated medieval and seventeenth-century features at a time when late Georgian and Italianate forms were the norm. Morris was unique in consciously matching interior to exterior so completely in an unpretentious house. The architectural fitments were sturdy and simple compared with mainstream Victorian design. Oak rather than rich mahogany was used throughout the house, for the staircase, beams and furniture. The red-tiled hall reflected the red-brick exterior and brick chimneypieces. All the textiles were designed and hand-crafted by Morris and his circle, and the furniture such as the chest in the entrance hall was hand-painted by Burne-Jones.
Like Ruskin, Morris detested the mass-produced household goods of the age and equated them with the atrocious living and factory conditions endured by the working classes.[6] He believed strongly that good design could only be produced by men and women working creatively with their hands.
Although a convinced Marxist, Morris was also a successful entrepreneur. He founded the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861 to design and produce well-made textiles, furniture and carpets, building on the success of the Red House interior. In 1875 the firm became Morris & Co. with Morris as sole proprietor, and went on to produce the hand block-printed wallpapers and textiles whose designs are still popular today. One of Morris & Co.’s most important design commissions was for the Green Dining Room (1865–7) at the South Kensington Museum, London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). The overall scheme for the refreshment room was by Webb, who was responsible for the Japanese-inspired embossed plaster sections on the upper part of the walls. Renaissance-inspired stained glass and dado panels were by Burne-Jones. Later domestic interior design commissions include ‘Clouds’ at East Knoyle in Wiltshire (1879–91) for the Hon. Percy Wyndham and Wightwick Manor in Staffordshire, one of the finest of the surviving interiors. But what was Morris’s influence on subsequent interior design?
The ethical approach of Morris and his circle inspired a network of craft guilds, small groups of artist-designers such as that of C.R. Ashbee (1863–1942), whose Guild of Handicraft was founded in the East End of London in 1888 and moved to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 in a utopian attempt to live out the Morris ideal of crafts production in a rural community. The Art-Workers’ Guild was another such group, founded in 1884 as an alternative to the architecturally based Royal Institute of British Architects and the fine art Royal Academy. Its architects and craftspeople, who admired Ruskin and Morris, included the designers Walter Crane (1845–1915) and Lewis F. Day (1845–1910) and the architect W.R. Lethaby (1857–1931). The Guild provided an important platform for the public discussion of craft techniques and style but was not concerned with actual production. Some of the members of the Guild went on to found the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which organized shows of arts and crafts work from 1888 onwards.
Morris inspired not only design reform but also new methods of training designers by hand-making objects, where previously design and manufacture had been two separate processes. The greatest achievement of W.R. Lethaby was the founding of the London Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1894, the first art school to have teaching workshops for crafts.
It was through the influence of Ruskin and Morris that furnishing an interior with newly acquired antiques became fashionable for the first time. The Sussex Chair attributed to Rossetti and produced by Morris & Co. was a recreation of an earlier vernacular model. When Rossetti moved to a new house in Chelsea, London, in 1862, however, he chose to furnish it largely with old furniture of different periods and in different styles. The key point for the arts and crafts movement of the 1880s was that a chair, whether from the seventeenth or nineteenth century, should be manifestly handmade, with the joints visible. The more clearly expressed the construction the more honest the piece, and the greater the contrast with the machine-carved, highly polished veneers of mainstream taste. This led to an ‘antiques movement’ that gained momentum in the late nineteenth century and was supported by specialist dealers and published furniture histories.
6 Morris advocated the use of wall-hangings and of simple furniture based on country models. The walls of his own drawing room at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, c. 1880, were hung with his ‘Bird’ tapestry; the adjustable Morris & Co. chair on the left was developed c. 1866 from a Sussex type, while the settle from the Red House by Philip Webb is both rural and medieval in style.
However, Morris’s and the arts and crafts’ main influence on subsequent interior design was largely formal, as opposed to ethical. The ‘honest’ furniture of Morris & Co. was expensive and had a limited circulation. Morris was a highly talented designer of flat patterns, and the interweaving lines and forms drawn from nature of the Tulip chintz of 1875 and the Cray chintz of 1884, for example, would inspire designers in Britain and America and on the Continent.
C.F.A. Voysey (1857–1941) was an architect of the next generation who designed houses and their interiors with the arts and crafts regard for the vernacular and honest workmanship, and extended his interest to designing wallpapers, textiles, carpets and furniture for his schemes.[7] His own house, The Orchard, Chorleywood, Hertfordshire (1899), has plain interiors with inglenooks (large fireplace recesses) and unpretentious furniture based on English vernacular models. His daring use of scale, however, influenced the architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Chapter 2). Voysey’s door in the hall of The Orchard reaches above the low picture rail, and the effect of breadth is exaggerated by heart-tipped metal hinges that almost span the door. A second feature is that the woodwork and ceiling of The Orchard were painted white, and this, combined with the expanses of window glass, particularly in the dining room, made the interiors appear bright and even glaring by the standards of earlier Victorian taste. Voysey’s evident belief in the benefits of stark, honest interiors and furniture is overriding. Voysey’s contemporary, the architect Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945), employs more colour and decorative detail in his domestic interiors, for example stained glass in the windows and stencilling on the walls.
7 C.F.A. Voysey: entrance hall of The Orchard, Chorleywood, 1899. Voysey’s self-consciously simple, sparse interiors reflected arts and crafts ideals, and were widely influential on the Continent.
8 M.H. Baillie Scott’s colourful design for a Music Room, part of the winning competition entry for ‘The House of an Art Lover’, 1901.
Baillie Scott’s influential article for The Studio of January 1895 entitled ‘An Ideal Suburban House’ included plans for an adventurous layout. A large, high, medieval-style hall has a music gallery on the first floor and an inglenook on the wall opposite, formed by an overhanging passage. Unusually, folding screens divide the rooms. Baillie Scott realized much of the plan in ‘An Ideal Suburban House’ at the White House, Helensburgh (1899–1900), and went on to further commissions in Europe and America after publication of his work in The Studio. In 1901 he won a competition organized by Alexander Koch, the German publisher of Innen Dekoration magazine, to design ‘The House of an Art Lover’. The painted woodwork and emphasis on the vertical, particularly in the Music Room, link the design with art nouveau.[8]
Baillie Scott was also successful in the less prestigious Letchworth Cheap Cottages competition in 1905. Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was one of several housing developments built to provide functional and healthy homes for the working classes in economical arts and crafts style. Other Garden City schemes include Hampstead Garden Suburb, begun in 1907 to the north of London and overseen by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944). Lutyens established his career at the turn of the century as a designer of medium-sized country houses in the arts and crafts style. Deanery Gardens, Sonning, Berkshire (1899–1901), is half-timbered outside, while inside there are exposed beams, white plaster walls and bare floorboards.[9] At this date such a design could no longer be considered revolutionary. The radical overtones of vernacular architecture and simple hand-crafted furniture were slowly yielding to the complex and enduring ideology of Britain as a nation with a remote and romanticized rural past.
9 Edwin Lutyens: sitting room, Deanery Gardens, Sonning, 1901. Jacobean-style furniture, bare oak floorboards, oak panelling and exposed beams evoke an ‘Old English’ rural atmosphere, redolent of solidity and craftsmanship.
10 Plain oak furniture made by Gordon Russell at Broadway, Worcestershire, 1925. Simple country styles remained current throughout most of the twentieth century.
The arts and crafts movement had little effect on design on the Continent until the 1890s, when it contributed to the creation of art nouveau and the beginnings of the modern movement. American interior design, however, was profoundly influenced by the reforming ethics and naturalistic style of Morris and his followers, which chimed with the frontier spirit and sense of individualism that were growing stronger as America began to establish a national identity in design. Organizations were founded on English models, including the American Art Workers’ Guild in 1885, the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society in 1897 and the Minneapolis Arts and Crafts Society in 1899. Americans learned of British trends through lecture tours by leading theorists, particularly the designer Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) in 1876 and C.R. Ashbee in 1896 and 1900. The magazine The Studio was published in America as the International Studio, and news of British design dominated American periodicals such as House Beautiful, started in 1896, and The Craftsman, which had been founded by the American arts and crafts designer Gustav Stickley (1858–1942) in 1901 following an extensive visit to Europe.[11-12] Morris & Co. goods were exported to America and stocked by the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago.
Charles Sumner Greene (1868–1957), of the American architectural partnership Greene and Greene, had travelled to Britain to learn more of the arts and crafts movement at first hand, as well as gleaning information from International Studio. With his brother Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954) he designed four important arts and crafts houses in California for the Blackers, Gambles, Pratts and Maybecks between 1907 and 1909.[14] The inner wooden frame of David B. Gamble House, Pasadena (1908), is clearly articulated, with beautifully finished pegged joints providing a visual feature and evidence of the work of a team of highly skilled craftsmen supervised on site by the architects. Extensive use was made of leaded coloured glass for windows, doors and light fittings, all of which were designed by the architects, as was the hand-crafted furniture. Greene and Greene made an important departure from British arts and crafts house-plans by including terraces, verandahs and courtyards that integrated the interior and garden. However, the debt to William Morris and the British domestic revival, which began with Webb’s Red House and continued in the work of Voysey and Baillie Scott, remains predominant.
11–12 Gustav Stickley: reclining chair of c. 1902 and settee of 1905–7. Stickley’s furniture in the so-called ‘Craftsman style’ enthusiastically followed the teaching of Morris and other English arts and crafts designers, in that the wood is left plain and the joints are visible. At the same time, Stickley believed his designs were particularly suited to what he described as ‘the fundamental sturdiness and directness of the American point of view’.
13 Léon Jallot: dining room, Brittany, 1926. Arts and crafts influence awakened designers to the value of the rural heritage.
14 Living room, David B. Gamble House, Pasadena, 1908, by Greene and Greene. Beautifully finished woodwork and stained glass represent the Californian version of arts and crafts. Japanese influence appears in the chair-backs and jointed timbers of the inglenook.
15 Omega Workshops: decoration of Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex, 1920s. Walls, screens, cupboards and even the log-box were painted by the artists.
William Morris’s ideal that there should be an obvious artistic presence in the interior continued to influence interior decorators throughout the twentieth century. In Britain, the Omega Workshops founded by the art critic Roger Fry in 1913 set out to bring the talents of the painter to the domestic interior. Artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell joined Fry in painting decorations onto mundane and often badly made pieces of furniture, and printing fabrics with bold designs based on the work of Henri Matisse. Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, which the Bloomsbury Group bohemians used as a country retreat, had every flat surface painted by one of the group with strong colour combinations and bold post-impressionist forms.[15] During the 1980s the fashion and furnishing-fabric retailer Laura Ashley launched a range of wallpapers and fabrics based on Bell’s and Grant’s designs.
Middle European arts and crafts movements gathered momentum during the 1890s, and were still in evidence at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. The Polish Pavilion by Joseph Czajkowski was decorated with brightly coloured paintings inspired by folk art, and the Greeks displayed a ‘Greek Peasant Dwelling’.
William Morris’s designs also inspired the aesthetic movement of the late 1860s and 1870s, an alternative style of reformist design in Britain that was to have a great influence in America. The other principal inspiration for the aesthetic movement was Japanese design. This had first been seen by the British public at the 1862 International Exhibition in London when the British Consul in Tokyo, Rutherford Alcock, exhibited a collection of Japanese artefacts. The simplicity and exoticism of blue and white porcelain, silks and lacquerwork appealed to British designers craving an alternative to mass-produced revivalism and opulence. Much of the Japanese display was bought by the firm of Farmer and Rogers, who used it to stock their ‘Oriental Warehouse’ selling Japanese silks, prints and lacquer. Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843–1917) was employed by the firm in 1862, and in 1875 he bought its entire Japanese stock of goods and opened his own ‘Oriental Bazaar’ to sell the popular japonisme. Soon afterwards he opened Liberty, the shop that went on to establish the exclusive ‘Liberty & Co.’ look, supplying oriental ceramics and textiles with British-designed metalwork and furniture for the creation of fashionable interiors.[16]
16 Fashionable bedroom by Liberty, 1897. Light, elegantly patterned fabrics and wallpapers, a delicate Queen Anne Revival table, a metal (rather than a wooden) bedstead for health and ease of cleaning, all express the reforming aims of the arts and crafts and aesthetic movements.
The aesthetic movement lacked the moral concerns of the arts and crafts movement. Its object was to create less ponderous and healthier ‘artistic’ interiors for the Victorian middle classes, whose tastes had now matured. One of the architect-designers of the movement, R.W. Edis (1839–1927), advised in his book Healthy Furniture and Decoration (1884) against the use of ‘jarring colours and patterns’ in the bedroom, as these would tend to cause ‘nervous irritability’.[17] Despite the concern for health, the slogan ‘Art for Art’s sake’ sums up the movement’s preoccupations, in contrast with the political aspirations of William Morris. The short-lived Century Guild, founded by A.H. Mackmurdo (1851–1942) in 1882, shared Morris’s convictions in attempting to bring fine art into the sphere of everyday life.[18] The Guild designed and exhibited furniture, textiles and wallpapers that mingled naturalistic ornament such as Morris had used with the slender forms and bold colours of Japan.
17 ‘Art Furniture’ in its setting. R.W. Edis’s illustration of his own drawing room with painted frieze, Morris & Co. wallpaper, chair (on the left) designed by William Godwin, and cupboard for china, painted with four heads representing the Seasons.
18 Century Guild stand at the Liverpool International Exhibition in 1886, with furniture by Mackmurdo of slender forms and Japanese inspiration.
The early houses of architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) had much in common with the arts and crafts movement, often providing warm panelled interiors with inglenooks and heavy oak furniture, for example at Cragside, Northumberland (1870–85), the first house, incidentally, to be lit by hydro-electricity.[19] At the same time Shaw was pioneering a very different style of architecture, known as Queen Anne, to provide a light, comfortable and elegant type of home. Old Swan House, Chelsea, London (1875–77), was furnished with reproduction Queen Anne tables, chairs and cupboards and Japanese blue-and-white ware. The key room was the living room on the first floor that ran the width of the street facade, thus incorporating three Queen Anne-style windows in one room.
19 Dining room inglenook in Richard Norman Shaw’s Cragside, Northumberland, 1870–85. The carved inscription reads: ‘East or West, Hame’s Best’, emphasizing a preoccupation with the domestic interior that would continue into the twentieth century. Art enters the home with Morris & Co. stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones. The gothic revival arch shelters a powerful industrialist, Sir William Armstrong, depicted at his ease in the guise of an enlightened country gentleman.
The epitome of aesthetic movement taste is the Peacock Room, created for the Liverpool shipping magnate and collector of Japanese ceramics Frederick Leyland. The artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) painted the leather walls a startling turquoise with gold peacocks, the quintessential symbol of the movement.[20] The large and exotic house in Kensington, London, designed for the fashionable artist Lord Leighton by George Aitchison (1825–1910), was unusual in having an Arab Court complete with fountain, lattice-work and Islamic tiles. The more modest town-house of graphic artist Linley Sambourne in Stafford Terrace, Kensington, London, was furnished by the occupant in the aesthetic style from 1874 onwards, and is now preserved by the Victorian Society. For the middle classes, the London suburb of Bedford Park was designed in 1870 by Norman Shaw and others as an estate for like-minded aesthetes.
20 The epitome of aesthetic movement taste: the Peacock Room, a dining room with built-in shelving for the display of oriental porcelain, and panels in oriental style, painted a vivid blue by the artist James McNeill Whistler and decorated with golden peacocks and chrysanthemums.
A lecture tour by Oscar Wilde in 1882–3 acquainted the American public with fashionable English taste. Wilde’s house in Tite Street, Chelsea, had recently been refurbished by the aesthetic movement architect E.W. Godwin (1833–1886), and he had learned of aesthetic movement principles from this source. Books also played a role in bringing British design to America. Charles Locke Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, published in London in 1868, ran to seven editions in America from 1872 to 1890. Eastlake criticized the work of professional decorating firms, and castigated their encouragement of ephemeral trends: ‘In the eyes of Materfamilias there was no upholstery which could possibly surpass that which the most fashionable upholsterer supplied… When did people first adopt the monstrous notion that the “Last pattern out” must be the best? Is good taste so rapidly progressive that every mug which leaves the potter’s hands surpasses in shape the last which is moulded?’
Influenced by William Morris, Eastlake recommended antique furniture combined with his own gothic revival designs.[21] These included sturdy chests, benches and bookcases decorated with pointed arches and carved gothic ornament. However, it was more the reforming spirit of his writing than the gothic style that caught the American imagination. His book made such an impact that ‘Eastlake Furniture’ or ‘Art Furniture’, based on his tenets of simple, good construction, was manufactured in America. Charles Tisch and the Herter Brothers produced such furniture in New York during the 1870s and 1880s.
21 Charles L. Eastlake’s sideboard, unvarnished and functional, ‘at first glance, proclaiming its real purpose’, as illustrated in his best-selling Hints on Household Taste (1878 edn).
22 Louis Comfort Tiffany: library of the designer’s own apartment, East 26th Street, New York, as illustrated in Artistic Houses, 1883.
The ‘Artistic’ interior became a mark of wealth, status and good taste in the 1880s. Artistic Houses: Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States with a Description of the Art Treasures Contained Therein, published in New York in 1883, featured key New York interiors in the aesthetic style. The designer Louis Comfort Tiffany’s flat on East 26th Street, New York, combined all the hallmarks of the aesthetic interior: Moorish motifs over the doors; Japanese wallpaper; Eastlake-inspired furniture; peacock feathers; and walls divided into four horizontal bands – the skirting board, dado, papered infill and frieze.[22] Short-lived as the aesthetic movement was (and by the turn of the century it had died out both in the United States and Britain), the attitudes it inherited from William Morris – that art should play a role in the interior and that machine-production was undesirable – had an enduring effect on twentieth-century interior design and architecture. The naturalistic forms of Morris’s surface patterns and japonisme were among the inspirations of the first great design style of the twentieth century, art nouveau.