THE DECORATION OF HOUSES Edith Wharton (61 plates) 1897
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Description
Item: THE DECORATION OF HOUSES by Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman. 204 gilt-topped uncut page large (23.5cm x 17.5cm) hardback book first published 1897, this edition 1911. Content: This is a 1911 edition of The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses, is a book of interior design written by Edith Wharton with architect Ogden Codman in 1898 recognised as one of the original standard works in this field. Wharton & Ogden denounced Victorian interior decoration and interior design for having rooms heavily curtained with Victorian bric-a-brac and filled with overstuffed furniture. This resulted in poorly planned and arranged rooms that were uncomfortable and that people did not enjoy and therefore rarely used. Codman and Wharton advocated the creation of houses based on the noble European tradition of strong architecture accentuated by furniture that suits the room. Wharton said rooms should be based on simple, classical design principles, such as symmetry, and proportion; and that a sense of balance in architecture is needed. The book was a great success, and led emergence of professional decorators working in such a manner, such as Elsie de Wolfe. The Decoration of Houses is a seminal work on the construction and decoration of sensible, comfortable, attractive rooms within a home. Some would consider it the first modern American manual of interior design. It was reprinted by The Mount and Rizzoli and in a hardcover facsimile in 2007. Wharton and Ogden wrote 198 pages (plus index pages) divided into sixteen chapters. The first few chapters focus on the importance of balance, symmetry and good use of space, while later chapters have to do with the specific use of rooms and how rooms ought to be arranged in order to ensure optimal comfort and usefulness. Wharton and Ogden were very fond of past styles of furniture in comparison with the upstart Victorian furnishings surrounding them. Much preferring simplicity and order in decoration, they warned readers not to mix and match styles of furniture eclectically. They also preferred the use of less detail, looking down on the Victorian love for clutter and busy wallpapers and fabrics. Illustrated with 56 plates (photos/illustrations). Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to the wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses". She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous and incisive novels and short stories. As such, she was well-acquainted with many of her era's literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1885, at twenty-three years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of Ms. Wharton's social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually. He began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They (hi)divorced in 1913, after he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. Edith and Edward were married for twenty-eight years. Besides her writing, Wharton was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including her first published work,The Decoration of Houses and Italian Villas and Their Gardens. In 1901 she built The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as the supreme example of her design principles. The house and its gardens have been extensively restored and are open to the public from May through October although, as of the end of February, 2008, the house museum is threatened with foreclosure. There, Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of the true nature of old New York, and entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, the novelist Henry James. Although she spent many months travelling in Europe nearly every year, The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When her marriage deteriorated, however, she decided to move permanently to France, living initially at 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II. When World War I subsided in 1918 she abandoned the fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt. She also purchased Sainte-Claire le Château, a former convent, in the southern village of Hyères, where she lived during the winters and springs. Helped by her influential connections in the French government, primarily Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), she was of the few foreigners in France who was allowed travel to the front lines. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up work rooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organising concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals, and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, comprised of writings, art, and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923. The Age of Innocence (1920), perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. She spoke flawless French and many of her books were published in both French and English. Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well, and she was the godmother of Clark's second son, Colin (1932–2002), who wrote the book The Prince, the Showgirl and Me about his work as third assistant director of the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better-known failed encounters in the American literary annals". She was also good friends with Theodore Roosevelt. In 1934 Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, in the entry she wrote for American National Biography about Wharton, "What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968." Wharton continued writing until her death on August 11, 1937, aged 75, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France. She is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, France. Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers, was unfinished at the time of her death. Marion Mainwaring finished the story after carefully studying the notes and synopsis Wharton had previously written. The novel was published in 1938 (unfinished version) and 1993 (Mainwaring's completion). She died in 1937 at her villa, Pavilion Colombes, near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise. Ogden Codman, Jr. (January 19, 1863 - January 8, 1951) was a noted American architect and interior decorator, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design. Codman was born to Ogden Codman, Sr. (of Boston and the Codman House) and the former Sarah Bradlee in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He spent his youth from 1875 to 1884 at Dinard, an American resort colony in France, and on returning to America in 1884, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was influenced in his career by two uncles, John Hubbard Sturgis (architect) and Richard Ogden (a decorator), and admired Italian architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, French architecture, and the colonial architecture of Boston. After brief apprenticeships with Boston architectural firms, Codman started his own practice in Boston, where he kept offices from 1891-1893, after which time he relocated his main practice from Boston to New York City. Codman also opened offices in Newport, Rhode Island as early as 1891, and it was in Newport that he first met novelist Edith Wharton. She became one of his first Newport clients for her home there, Land's End. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote: "We asked him to alter and decorate the house—a somewhat new departure, since the architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field up to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables." Wharton subsequently introduced Codman to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who hired Codman in 1894 to design the second and third floor rooms of his Newport summer home, The Breakers, which he did in a clean eighteenth century French and Italian classical style. Codman was not a draftsman, and it is said that in Paris he hired a talented group of students from the École des Beaux-Arts to draw up the sketches for Vanderbilt. On October 8, 1904, Codman married Leila Griswold Webb, widow of railroad magnate H. Walter Webb. She died in 1910. In 1907, Codman built what was later to be known at the Codman-Davis House in Washington, D.C. for his cousin Martha Codman. It is currently the official residence of the Ambassador of Thailand, and one of the few intact homes that he designed. Codman's New York clients included John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for whom he designed the famous Rockefeller family mansion of (Kykuit, at the family estate in Westchester County, in 1913; and Frederick William Vanderbilt's (Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York and 459 Fifth Avenue in New York City), as well as another collaboration with Wharton on her townhouse at 882-884 Park Avenue. All told, Codman designed 22 houses to completion, as well as the East Wing of the Metropolitan Club at 1 East 60th Street. He also began the trend of lowering the townhouse entrance door from elevated stairways to the basement level. He designed a series of three houses in Louis XIV style at 7 (his own residence), 12, and 15 East 96th Street from 1912-1916. The Landmarks Preservation Commission later described the facade of number 7 as being "full of gaiety and frivolous vitality" and further, "on approaching the house, Paris and the Champs-Élysées immediately come to mind." In 1920 Codman left New York to return to France, where he spent the last thirty-one years of his life at the Château de Grégy. Codman died at age 87 in 1951. His architectural drawings and papers are collected at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; the Codman Family papers are also held by Historic New England and the Boston Athenaeum. Condition: Hardback good + condition; bumps/wear to top/bottom of spine & corners/edges, bump/split rear bottom edge, minor fading to spine (titles unaffected), marks. Pages excellent + condition; age browning to first/last blank pages, page faces very clean & bright. Additional photographs available upon request. Collectable!!! SHIPPING INSURANCE All books are insured during shipping for their purchase value up to a maximum of UK £34.00 This insurance excludes postage & packaging costs. Additional cover available upon request. Add me to your favourites list! Check out my other items! & My eBay Shop Powered by eBay Turbo Lister
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