Interiors
After Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr.
From The Decoration of Houses(Scribner’s, 1897). On proportion, decoration, and the room as an expression of character — written before Wharton was known as a novelist, and more important than anything she wrote after.
The Argument
Wharton’s argument is architectural before it is decorative: the principles of good architecture govern interiors no less than façades. To fill a room before one has resolved its proportion is to dress a sentence before one has written it.
The continuity with dress is not accidental. The discipline is the same: understand the structure before attending to the decoration. Know what the thing is before deciding what to put on it or in it. Selection applies to rooms as readily as to wardrobes. Restraint governs the well-set room as it governs the well-dressed woman.
“A room earns its furnishings, not the reverse.”
Four Principles
- I
Proportion first
The room's proportions — ceiling height, window placement, the ratio of wall to opening — determine what the room can hold. Work outward from these; do not work inward from the decoration. A room is a problem in proportion before it is a problem in furniture.
- II
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. The error of the unconsidered interior is not excess but disproportion: the wrong thing in the wrong room.
- III
Each room has a use
The library is not the drawing room; the drawing room is not the bedroom. Each room's decoration should express its function, not override it with general prettiness. The room that tries to be everything declares itself nothing.
- IV
Simplicity is not poverty
The plainest room, proportioned correctly, will outrank the elaborate room whose proportions are wrong. Ornament is the reward for getting the proportion right — not a solution to getting it wrong.
The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr. — Scribner’s, New York, 1897
Wharton was thirty-five. The book is 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. It remains the most useful single book on the subject.
A philosophical parallel is available in Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), which makes the same case from first principles.