Rococo, less commonly Roccoco, also known as Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and dramatic style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, and trompe-l'œil frescoes to create surprise and the illusion of motion and drama. It is often described as the final expression of the Baroque movement.
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
The Eastlake movement was a nineteenth-century architectural and household design reform movement started by British architect and writer Charles Eastlake (1836–1906). The movement is generally considered part of the late Victorian period in terms of broad antique furniture designations. In architecture the Eastlake style or Eastlake architecture is part of the Queen Anne style of Victorian architecture.
Alfred Waterhouse was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his designs for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II—and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London. He was particularly active in designing buildings for universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge but also what became Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds universities. He designed many country houses, the most important being Eaton Hall in Cheshire, largely demolished in 1961-63. He designed several bank buildings and offices for insurance companies, most notably the Prudential Assurance Company. Although not a major church designer he produced several notable churches and chapels. He was both a member of The Royal Institute of British Architects, of which he served a term as President, and a Royal Academician, acting as Treasurer for the Royal Academy.
The Gamble House, also known as the David B. Gamble House, is an iconic American Craftsman home in Pasadena, California, designed by the architectural firm Greene and Greene. Constructed in 1908–1909 as a home for David B. Gamble, son of the Procter & Gamble founder James Gamble, it is today a National Historic Landmark, a California Historical Landmark, and open to the public for tours and events.
The Breakers is a Gilded Age mansion located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, US. It was built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family.
Interior design is the art and science of enhancing the interior of a building to achieve a healthier and more aesthetically pleasing environment for the people using the space. An interior designer is someone who plans, researches, coordinates, and manages such enhancement projects. Interior design is a multifaceted profession that includes conceptual development, space planning, site inspections, programming, research, communicating with the stakeholders of a project, construction management, and execution of the design.
In Western architecture, a living room, also called a lounge room, lounge, sitting room, or drawing room, is a room for relaxing and socializing in a residential house or apartment. Such a room is sometimes called a front room when it is near the main entrance at the front of the house. In large, formal homes, a sitting room is often a small private living area adjacent to a bedroom, such as the Queens' Sitting Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House.
Interior architecture is the design of a building or shelter from inside out, or the design of a new interior for a type of home that can be fixed. It can refer to the initial design and plan used for a building's interior, to that interior's later redesign made to accommodate a changed purpose, or to the significant revision of an original design for the adaptive reuse of the shell of the building concerned. The latter is often part of sustainable architecture practices, whereby resources are conserved by "recycling" a structure through adaptive redesign.
The Adam style is an 18th-century neoclassical style of interior design and architecture, as practised by Scottish architect William Adam and his sons, of whom Robert (1728–1792) and James (1732–1794) were the most widely known.
Ogden Codman Jr. was an American architect and interior decorator in the Beaux-Arts styles, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design.
Mario Praz was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony (1933), was a comprehensive survey of the decadent, erotic and morbid themes that characterised European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The book was written and published first in Italian as La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica in 1930; and the most recent edition was published in Florence by Sansoni in 1996.
Bric-à-brac or bric-a-brac, first used in the Victorian era, around 1840, refers to lesser objets d'art forming collections of curios. The French phrase dates from the 16th century meaning "at random, any old way".
The Mount (1902) is a country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, the home of noted American author Edith Wharton, who designed the house and its grounds and considered it her "first real home." The estate, located in The Berkshires, is open to the public. The property was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
John Hubbard Sturgis was an American architect and builder who was active in the New England area during the late 19th century. His most prominent works included Codman House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the personal residence of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Later in his architectural career he founded, along with Charles Brigham, Sturgis and Brigham. The firm lasted nearly two decades in New England and received many notable commissions such as the first Boston Museum of Fine Arts building, located in Copley Square.
Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl was an American actress who became a very prominent interior designer and author. Born in New York City, de Wolfe was acutely sensitive to her surroundings from her earliest years and became one of the first female interior decorators, replacing dark and ornate Victorian decor with lighter, simpler styles and uncluttered room layouts.
Victorian decorative arts refers to the style of decorative arts during the Victorian era. Victorian design is widely viewed as having indulged in a grand excess of ornament. The Victorian era is known for its interpretation and eclectic revival of historic styles mixed with the introduction of Asian and Middle Eastern influences in furniture, fittings, and interior decoration. The Arts and Crafts movement, the aesthetic movement, Anglo-Japanese style, and Art Nouveau style have their beginnings in the late Victorian era and gothic period.
Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 19-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1793), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of Ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow.
An interior design magazine is a publication that focuses primarily on interior design in a hard copy periodical format or on the Internet.
The Codman Carriage House and Stable is a historic building located at 1415 22nd Street NW in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The industrial building was constructed in 1907 as a carriage house and stable for socialite and art collector Martha Catherine Codman, who lived a few blocks north in her home, later known as the Codman–Davis House. She commissioned her cousin, Ogden Codman Jr., an architect and prominent interior decorator who also designed her home. He designed it in a Second Empire style.
