Victorians didn’t watch a lot of TV
Designing a modern living room in an old house can be difficult
Q: We are moving to a Victorian (Queen Anne style) house that we have been using as an office for the past nine years.
Our plans are to convert what has been the conference room into our living room.
The room is ornately designed with beautiful Victorian elements and has high ceilings and hardwood floors.
The problem is none of our existing furniture, including a 213-centimetre-long sofa, will fit.
We would like to have at least one sofa facing the fireplace, but we would also like a television in this room.
A: The Queen Anne style dominated Victorian residential architecture from about 1880 to 1910 and is today virtually synonymous with the phrase “Victorian house.”
The Victorian era was a time when people took the design of their homes far more seriously than we do today.
The Victorians were highly status-conscious, and nothing displayed status more than an elaborately decorated home.
At its most extreme, a Queen Anne exterior is characterized by astonishing excess, featuring large projecting bay windows, towers, turrets, porches, balconies, stained glass, roof finials, decorative trim, patterned shingles, and elaborate brackets, banisters and spindles.
Even the chimneys on Queen Anne houses are spectacularly crafted.
In addition to all the other decorative elements, the Victorians also painted their Queen Anne homes in a rainbow of colours, most of which were fairly dark tones of sienna red, hunter green, burnt yellow or muddy brown.
The interiors of Victorian-era homes exhibited much of the same excesses. But like most period homes, the beauty of their character and charm is often at odds with the way we live today.
A typical Victorian parlour was a sitting room, often a place where a family would simply greet its guests or visitors before moving on to another room.
It was meant to be a room that showed off the owner’s taste and wealth and was rarely intended as a space where any great deal of time was spent.
Of course, today, we spend a great deal more time in our living rooms.
The Victorians could never imagine these spaces as a place to watch television, to spend entire evenings in, or as a place to curl up on a Sunday morning.
Although we can admire the Victorian philosophy of “too much is not enough,” today we prefer to downplay our environments, choosing simpler lines and decorative styles that enhance — but don’t intensify — the styles.
In this living room, there is only one corner that can logically accommodate a television because every other wall space is taken up with one decorative element or another.
I have tried to keep furniture clear of the most elaborate decorative elements, allowing them to stand on their own.
My plan tries to take advantage of the floor space in the large bay window (or turret) and recesses your existing sofa within it.
On one side of the sofa the majestic fireplace; on the other, a beautiful cabinet that houses the television and other electronic paraphernalia.
Directly opposite the sofa (sitting virtually in the centre of the room), a couple of occasional chairs can complete a seating arrangement for five in a formal, somewhat symmetrical arrangement.