Aesthetic Movement Architecture & Design

It’s Art for Art’s Sake at the Winchester Mystery House.

Most come of for the its tourists spooky who associations. visit the Winchester Architecture Mystery buffs, House on the in other San hand, Jose, California, are in for a jaw- dropping tour of Aesthetic Movement architecture and decoration. Built over and around a modest Victorian farmhouse, the mansion took 38 years to create ( 1884–1922) and was never really finished. The cost was $ 5 million, or $71 million in today’s currency. It is spectacular.

the museum house is privately owned and heavily visited. The story told is that Sarah Winchester, widow of rifle heir William Wirt Winchester, was encouraged, during a sŽance, to leave Connecticut and head to California, to build an eccentric home for the spirits of all those killed by Winchester firearms. Money was no object: Sarah had inherited $20 million ($520 million today) and also had an income from her shares in the company—the equivalent of $26,000 a day in today’s currency.

Whether Sarah believed in ghosts, or was a mathematics prodigy dabbling in labyrinths and encryption, the house she built is a puzzle. It’s true that staircases spiral—or dead end; that doors open to nowhere; that the prime number 13 and spider webs are favorite motifs.

Beginning her project in 1884, Sarah Winchester (working without an architect or any blueprints) embraced the era’s popular Aesthetic Movement design. A challenge to the rigidity of classical art, the movement that started in England a decade earlier stood for “art for art’s sake,” welcoming beauty and the contemplation of beauty. It is the opposite of utilitarian design. Its architectural equivalent became known as the Queen Anne Revival, which morphed into the even more ornamental American Queen Anne style. Houses are picturesque, asymmetrical, heavily textural, and embellished.

Inside the house, gold and silver chandeliers hang from coffered and decorated ceilings over parquet flooring. Artful windows by Tiffany & Co. illuminate rooms filled with Anglo– Japanese pattern, lustrous Victorian tile, embossed Lincrusta wallcoverings, and carved wood.

RIGHT Turrets and bays, balconies with fancy railings, irregularly shaped windows, and a “door to nowhere” together create a rich Queen Anne fantasy. From the roof on down, every surface is exuberantly ornamented with fish-scale shingles, ball-and-spindle decorations, turnings, carvings, and board siding at the base.

ABOVE A row of turned columns and rails with ball-and-spindle fill follow the length of the wraparound porch.

BELOW Panels feature Eastlake-inspired ball-and-stick and diamond patterns.

ABOVE Now four storeys, the house had a seven-storey tower before the 1906 earthquake, evident in this archival photo. Today Winchester Mystery House comprises 24,000 square feet in 160 rooms. LEFT The complex, wood-shingled roof, always stained red, is embellished by multiple carved finials.

RIGHT Bradbury’s ‘Herter Ceiling’ is used on the wall fill above the Lincrusta dado. ABOVE With ornate beveled glass, the front door is a tour de force set within a carved redwood archway.