American Interior

It’s 2012. I’m in the trash strewn parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts off the Mass Pike leaning against my dented minivan. The back seats where my three kids usually sit are folded, hidden inside the chassis. I’m waiting for the hand-off of two huge bolts of French fabric to sew drapery for a dead woman. 

Edith Wharton designed and lived in The Mount—now a museum and cultural center—from 1902 to 1911. Born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 to a wealthy New York family, the expression keeping up with the Joneses is said to originate with them. Wharton bucked the family business of leisure. She wrote forty novels in less than forty years. The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer. But the first book she wrote was not a novel. 

The Decoration of Houses was Wharton’s 1897 treatise on interior design. Co-authored with Ogden Codman, Jr.—an architect who thought Beaux-Arts was too modern—the book insists on the removal of “useless trifles” of bric-à-brac and the “confusion” of excess upholstery. Their absence would allow for the simplified harmony of architectural proportion in the treatment of walls, doors, windows, fireplaces, ceilings, and floors. The first half of the book is what would be described as interior architecture today. Firm advice on decorating every room in the home of a wealthy family in the late Gilded Age, ballroom to smoking room to nursery, comprises the second half. There is no chapter on kitchens.