The Decoration of Houses

Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr. Scribner's, New York, 1897. Wharton was thirty-five. The book established her as a serious architectural critic before she was known as a novelist, and on the wiki's estimate it is more useful than anything she wrote after — still the most useful single book on the subject.

The principles of good architecture govern interiors no less than façades. A room is a problem in proportion before it is a problem in decoration. The decorative scheme that violates the room's underlying line cannot be rescued by ornament — however fine the ornament. The question of how to decorate a room cannot be answered until the architectural question (what is the room?) has been settled.

The wiki's working translation: a room earns its furnishings, not the reverse. To buy furniture before one has resolved the room's proportion is to dress a sentence before one has written it.

Wharton and Codman's book is, in part, a sustained critique of the Victorian interior — its accumulation of objects, its competition of surfaces, its refusal to let the room speak before filling it. Their argument is that ornament is the reward for getting the proportion right, not a solution to getting it wrong.

This connects directly to the wiki's cross-domain concept of Restraint. The disciplined interior withholds. It allows the room's underlying structure to assert itself. Furniture and objects are chosen for their relationship to the room's proportion, not for their independent decorative interest.

Proportion first. The room's proportions — ceiling height, window placement, the ratio of wall to opening — determine what the room can hold. Work out from these; do not work inward from the decoration.

Decoration must be in scale. A large room can carry large ornament; a small room cannot. Scale is not a preference. It is a discipline.

Each room has a use, and a character suited to that use. The library is not the drawing room; the drawing room is not the bedroom. Wharton insists that each room's decoration should express its function, not override it with general prettiness.

Simplicity is not poverty. The plainest room, proportioned correctly, will outrank the elaborate room whose proportions are wrong.

The Decoration of Houses is the primary source for Domain II — Interiors. The wiki's argument in that domain will draw on Wharton's text and, where appropriate, on Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), which makes a parallel philosophical case.