Design by Edith
“She offered an unusual combination of philosophical and practical advice. Interior decoration has to function, but she argued for a higher plane of design, with an emphasis on well-proportioned rooms — with well-placed and sized windows, and good structural elements like moldings, cornices and welldesigned ceilings — as opposed to the distractions of too much furniture or unnecessarily fussy window dressings and flooring,” he said.
The book urged people to focus on well-proportioned rooms with “good bones,” Jayne said. “And that’s as true now as it was then.”
Wharton liked ceilings, he said, seeing them as neglected and perfect surfaces to influence the feel of the entire room. Jayne’s book shows several highly structured and painted ceilings to illustrate Wharton’s views.
Both the original book and Jayne’s work point out that beautiful rooms need not be costly.
“Baseboards and crown molding are sold by the yard at stores like Home Depot and are extremely affordable,” Jayne says, “and they do so much to provide structure to a room.” Furnishings, too, don’t need to be expensive — “they just need to be proportionate to the size and function of each room.”
If there is one main takeaway, Jayne says, it is that “tradition is not about the past or about elitism. Tradition is now. It’s active and important and democratic.”
His section on kitchens, which were ignored by Wharton because neither she nor many of her readers at the time prepared their own food, argues for eat-in kitchens, with a focus on kitchens as a gathering space.
And while Jayne ignores ballrooms, which were considered essential in Wharton and Codman’s day, he says the dining room remains important and should be included in any home large enough for one.
“It’s OK to have a room that is only used for parties or special occasions, assuming you can afford the space,” he said. “Dining rooms and ballrooms have the same kind of luxury. Wharton called these kinds of rooms ‘gala rooms.’ ”
“Living rooms should be living rooms and gala rooms should be gala rooms, but don’t make a hybrid. Each has its place,” Jayne said, echoing Wharton.
Jayne is also the author of The Finest Rooms in America: Fifty Influential Interiors from the Eighteenth Century to the Present and American Decoration: A Sense of Place, a monograph on the work of his studio (both published by The Monacelli Press).