Indians Viewing Landscape by Thomas Cole, 1827One of the tenacious beliefs in America is that we need space. We don't have enough. We can’t get enough.
Consider our history. We first landed on the Atlantic shore, and from there moved inland to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. From there we came out onto the rolling prairies of the Midwest, which soon flattened out into the Great Plains, which were then brought up short by the massive phalanx of the Rocky Mountains. We wanted all kinds of space, we demanded it, and then we quickly filled it up with our presence.
Americans don’t like to be fenced in. With a population of over 300 million people, the unthinkable is happening. We still covet big homes on large lots, located on wide, smoothly paved streets dotted with small newly planted trees. Big houses on big lots cost money. More money than most people have to spend.
From The Economic Cottage Builder, 1856
Early in the history of our country, the size of a house wasn’t important. Owning it, making it over into something inimitably our own, was. Back then, a home was both a refuge and a place of work. It was cozy and comfortable, without any frills or unnecessary accessories. It was where the family came together. Where they established their identity.
A small house was not a liability; it was efficient and affordable. Smallness was a virtue. The decoration was restrained. The woman of the house was to keep the premises tidy and functional. That was her job.
All this changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. With the acquisition of wealth, houses got bigger. Within the span of a few decades, the new middle class changed the concept of domesticity.
The Breaker House, designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1895 for
Cornelius Vanderbilt II
Designed by McKim, Mead and White for Henry Villard and his family in 1882; completed in 1884. Villard went bankrupt three months after moving into his mansion.
Bigger houses meant more wall and floor space. And they needed to be decorated. Bare walls in a really big house were a sign of weak imagination. All that money and no decorations? The self-made moguls who were transforming the American economy needed to build houses that matched the grandiosity of their tax-free business enterprises. “So and so lives there,” people would whisper out in the streets. “The marble columns come all the way from Italy.”
Great Hall in the Villard House
It was important for these robber barons to strut and display their new-found wealth. Why accumulate money without flashing it around? So they built gigantic domiciles. They coffered the high ceilings, carved fireplaces into elaborate caverns, paneled the walls, installed stained glass windows and posted iron gates around their property to separate themselves from everyone else.
J Pierpont Morgan’s Drawing Room in New York, 1883
Decorated by the Herter Bros. in a style of “Pompeian inspiration … a mild gaiety of expression amid the aroma of perfect taste.”
The ivory white woodwork was sprinkled with gold.
They decorated the inside with artifacts that had virtually no meaning to them personally: suits of armor, oil paintings, statuary, tapestries, and oriental rugs. Some went as far as to have their furniture gilded to give it a smooth satiny finish – reminiscent of what the Sun King had. Above all, they needed to distinguish themselves from the other moguls, and also from the paltry efforts of the middle class.
George W. Child’s Drawing Room, 1870s
Paneled in aramanth wood, large mirrors,
Aubusson carpets and a “Byzantine” clock.
America was founded on principles of equality. The newly rich didn’t want equality. They didn’t want to have anything to do with earlier domestic designs. They thought that was homey and lame. They sent their decorators to Europe to strip complete rooms out of an old chateau in France, old-world palazzos in Italy, musty old castle in Britain paying their impoverished owners the lowest prices. They wanted anything they could find that was European that would cover up the tinselly newness of their new-found wealth.
Ames-Webster House, Boston, 1890s
Interior by Herter Brothers
Ironically, as they looted Europe of its architectural treasures they felt a need to recapture the past. Designed by a new generation of Paris Ècole trained architects, they developed a visual language based on classicism, in which architecture, painting and sculpture combined to express a new sense of national purpose. While a few American voices such as Louis Sullivan were calling for an expression to build with the latest technologies, materials and in a new progressive American style, the American millionaires didn’t want that. They looked to the past. They mimicked the past and added at will. Popular magazines published pictures of their grand houses, which alerted the middle class to the fact they had a long way to go to try and match the excesses of the really big robber barons.