design by Edith
Before she was a famous novelist, Edith Wharton had an eye for home décor — and wrote about it
edith Wharton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author famous for novels set in the late 19th century, also wrote an influential book on interior design, long considered a sort of bible of American decorating.
The Decoration of Houses, written before any of her novels, was radical when published in 1897. Co-authored with Wharton’s distant cousin, Ogden Codman, it advocated classical simplicity and balance in contrast to the excesses of the Gilded Age.
The book was “the level-headed, indispensable book on the subject,” says interior decorator Thomas Jayne of Jayne Design Studio in New York City. He calls it “the most important decorating book ever written.”
Jayne has written a new book, Classical Principles for Modern Design: Lessons from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses (The Monacelli Press), that revisits the classic. He argues that Wharton’s fundamental ideas about proportion and the planning of space still create the most harmonious and livable interiors, whether traditional or contemporary.
His book traces contemporary ideas about design and décor back to Wharton and Codman, showing where the old and new approaches coincide and diverge.
Organized as The Decoration of Houses was, with distinct chapters on walls, doors, windows, ceilings and floors, Jayne’s book adds kitchens and the use of color — two major aspects of home design today that Wharton and Codman did not address.
Accompanying the text and selected quotes from Wharton and Codman’s original are lush photos of interiors from Jayne Design Studio that demonstrate Wharton and Codman’s design principles. Projects include the restoration of 18th-century public rooms in Crichel House in Dorset, England; a Montana mountain retreat; and an array of New York apartments and country houses.
Just as Wharton’s novels turned a probing and often critical eye on the excesses of upper-crust society, so her book on design was a reaction to Gilded Age and Victorian excesses in interiors, which were becoming crowded and fussy, Jayne said.
“This was Wharton’s first book. She had money and means, and had spent her teens and 20s looking at great rooms and homes. No one had ever written a book devoted entirely to decoration, as opposed to architectural treatises and what they then called ‘domestic economy books,’ ” Jayne said in an interview.