The Drawing Room

Definition

The drawing room is the Victorian house's formal reception room — upstairs, and in the period's furnishing code feminine-coded: light-styled, ornamental, the room to which "the ladies ascend" after dinner. It enters this wiki as the foil of Eastlake's dining-room polemic (1868), where it appears as the upholsterer's code in its most arbitrary form: "After dinner the ladies ascend into a green and gold-papered drawing-room, to perform on a walnut-wood piano, having first seated themselves on walnut-wood music-stools, while their friends are reclining on a walnut-wood sofa, protected from the heat of the fire by a walnut-wood screen" (p. 101). Its furniture suite is fashion's hostage — "A few years ago, all these last-mentioned articles of household furniture were made of rosewood. In the early part of this century it was de rigueur that they should be mahogany; so the fashion of taste goes on changing from age to age" (p. 101) — and its decoration is convention's vulgarity: "If the chaste and deftly associated colours which characterize the Oriental loom are right, and content us downstairs, why should we lapse into the vulgarity of garlands and bouquets for the design of our drawing-room carpet?" (p. 102). In the house's two-extremes diagnosis it is the flimsy pole: "We leave a solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome class of furniture below, to find a flimsy and extravagant one above" (p. 102).

Key Thinkers

Charles L. Eastlake — the room's anatomist (1868): the drawing room as the upstairs pole of the furnishing code — the walnut suite, the green-and-gold paper, the garlands-and-bouquets carpet — and the exhibit in his case against room-bound decorative art.
John C Turpin — the room's social historian (2003/2006): the drawing room as the salon's cheaper English successor ("The salon itself was not as popular as a room type. The drawing room was a more affordable choice"), its anomalous and staccato conversation, its stage-choreography (Mentmore), and D'Orsay's rules mirrored in the roving eye.
Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors whose framing ("questioning conventional arrangements that seek room-to-room difference in both form and style") makes the drawing room the emblem of what the reform program would homogenize.
Elsie de Wolfe — the room's later professional manager (1913): the decorator whose advice literature takes over exactly the social scene the drawing room hosts — the visited interior judged by its surroundings ("We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture").
William W. Braham — the convention's gender analysis: the "feminine note of decoration" and the natural/applied polarization that codes ornament and applied colour as feminine (p. 59) — the palette-level mechanism behind the drawing room's ornamental assignment.

The Dining Room — the downstairs counterpart and the two-extremes pair: solidity and gloom below, flimsiness and extravagance above; the rooms that the after-dinner ascent divides.
Separate Spheres — the drawing room as the feminine-coded pole of the house's spatial division: the room that stages the spheres' daily separation ("After dinner the ladies ascend").
Gender and the Interior — the room's gender coding as a decorative code: green-and-gold paper, garlands and bouquets, the performing piano — the feminine-coded decoration Eastlake codes "vulgar."
Fashion — the room's temporal condition: its furniture woods cycle with taste (rosewood → mahogany → walnut), making the drawing room the fashion-cycle's stage.
Conversation — the room's organizing practice, degraded: where the salon hosted ideal conversation on equal ground, the drawing room hosted "anomalous conversation with the sole intent of social and political advancement" — staccato talk creating "a false view of life."
Salon — the room's institutional ancestor: the salon "continued to slowly fuse itself with the culture of the English upper class, but without the emphasis on enlightened discussions occurring in France" — the drawing room as the salon's affordable, intellectually emptied substitute.
Scenography — the room's stage-form: "The aura of elitism found expression on elaborate stages where the significance of the actors' visual performance surpassed their verbal utterances" — the drawing room as "the grandest of stages" (Turpin), the Victorian prehistory of the performance model.
Domestic Interior — the room-type within the house-wide system; the room whose vulgarity-vocabulary ("garlands and bouquets") the stylistic-unity program would redeem.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the primary source: the green-and-gold drawing room and its walnut suite (p. 101); the wood-cycle of drawing-room furniture (rosewood/mahogany/walnut, p. 101); the garlands-and-bouquets carpet as vulgarity against the Oriental loom downstairs (p. 102); the "flimsy and extravagant" upstairs furniture (p. 102); the multi-style mansion's "Louis Quatorze drawing-rooms" as the disease's grand form (p. 102).
Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the same social room, professionally managed two generations later: the visited interior's judgment-scene and the elimination program that clears exactly the bric-a-brac Eastlake's caricature accumulates.
A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the palette-gender mechanism behind the room's decorative coding: applied colour and ornament aligned with "artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity" (p. 59).
'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the room censured, defended and rebuilt by professional women (1876): in 'Houses As They Are' the Garretts censure "the work of 'some fashionable decorator and upholsterer'" employed by "the anxious ladies of the house," the room a "lamentably commonplace apartment" (quoted p. 112) — and note the companion diagnosis: Mrs Orrinsmith's The Drawing-Room (1877) opens with the same "ordinary lower middle-class Drawing Room of the Victorian era" (Ferry note 10, p. 115). In 'Houses As They Might Be' the ladies' tastes are themselves satirized as derivative — Mrs A's "dado style" and Mrs B's flowers painted on door panels, "so beautifully done they were exactly like real flowers" (quoted p. 113) — and the Garretts transform the room "in accordance with a more cultivated view of the principles of decorative art" into "an affordably 'Queen Anne' style 'shrine'" (quoted p. 113). The chapter's rights-shift is the room's: the ladies move from being "told that it is now their turn to have their tastes consulted" to "demand[ing] the right of having their particular tastes consulted" (quoted p. 113) — the feminine room becoming the site of women's professional authority over taste, with the Garretts' cultivation mediating (and overruling) the ladies' own preferences. See queen-anne-style, house-decorator, taste, right-to-design.
Time travel (Massey 2018) — the drawing room converted into the century's avant-garde gallery: the ICA's Dover Street premises were "the first floor of a nineteenth-century townhouse," and "the upstairs former drawing room was used as an exhibition space and events venue throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s" — approximately 16 × 5.5 m, with the room-type's period apparatus intact ("wrought iron, Juliet balconies, and French windows," "early-nineteenth-century fittings"). The room's second life is literal in the chapter's formula: "The place of the exhibition was a sedate drawing room, remodeled using the Theory of Games and behaviorism to challenge the ICA gallery visitor" (for an Exhibit, 1957 — see populable-art-work). Where Eastlake's and the Garretts' drawing room is decorated, this one is re-apparatused: the feminine social room's transformation into the exhibition interior — the drawing room as the default large-room host of public culture (see event-space, ephemeral-interior).
From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the room-type's Viennese counterpart and its function as boundary: the salon, "a space in which women would socialize while dressed in more relaxed and intimate garments, hovering on the boundary between public and private" (p. 159). Where Eastlake's drawing room is the upstairs pole of a rigid code, Houze's salon is the code's hinge: the feminine room that hosts the household's public life, its relaxation licensed by dress — the women's "more relaxed and intimate garments" mirroring the room's semi-public status. The Viennese salon thus gives the room-type its theoretical definition: the drawing room as the separate spheres' airlock, where private and public are held in suspension (see separate-spheres, interior-as-garment).
Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the room's social-institutional register, the source that reconstructs what Eastlake's excerpt only presupposes (the gathering the furnished room hosts). The salon-substitution: "The salon continued to slowly fuse itself with the culture of the English upper class, but without the emphasis on enlightened discussions occurring in France… The salon itself was not as popular as a room type. The drawing room was a more affordable choice. Here, participants focused on anomalous conversation with the sole intent of social and political advancement" (p. 371; see conversation, salon). The talk's degradation: "Unlike the enriching discussions of the French salons, the English drawing rooms were filled with pretentiousness and vacuity. The goal was neither to offend nor inform… Staccato conversations permitted all present to participate in the creation of an atmosphere characterized by a 'false view of life'" (p. 372). The room as stage: "The aura of elitism found expression on elaborate stages where the significance of the actors' visual performance surpassed their verbal utterances" — Mentmore's Grand Hall choreography ("They were seen," p. 372), the Lady's witnessed descent from the staircase "axially aligned with the Grand Hall," and guests "continuing their performance on the grandest of stages" (p. 372; see scenography). The decor-as-talk rhyme: "Count D'Orsay's rules of conversation are supported by the stage set… the avoidance of long stories in polite conversation prevents any one individual from being a point of focus. Conversation is to move freely and rather rapidly from one to another. In similar style, the Victorian interior is riddled with objects, each so spectacular in form and ornamentation that the eye of the guest is never permitted to rest" (p. 372) — the room's anti-rest decor as the visual analogue of the conversation's anti-focus rule, with the unintended consequence ("the interior's demand for a roving eye may have lubricated the ritual of being seen as accidental glances imparted unintended meanings"). Where Eastlake anatomizes the room's furniture and de Wolfe manages its judgment, Turpin scripts its drama — the drawing room as conversation's venue, stage set, and degraded format at once.
source-notes/edelman-2006-mens-room

Open Questions

Eastlake's vulgarity-vocabulary targets precisely the feminine-coded room ("garlands and bouquets") — is his reform program's "homogenisation" of the interior an implicit discipline of the drawing room, and of the decorative practice assigned to women? (Connects to Taylor & Preston's suppression thesis, the-decorative, gender-and-the-interior.)
The drawing room is coded in the sources as both the sphere of women's authority (de Wolfe's "chatelaine" and her managing program) and the object of decorative denigration (Eastlake's vulgarity; Braham's feminine-coded ornament). Are these the same room seen from inside and outside the gender system — and which account should organize the wiki's treatment of feminine-coded interiors?
The wood-cycle (rosewood → mahogany → walnut) means the drawing room's identity was always temporary — a room whose furniture changed "from age to age." What does it mean for a room-type to be defined by furniture that is periodically replaced wholesale?
The Garretts' ladies "demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted" — but their tastes are derivative (the "dado style," flowers "exactly like real flowers") and the professionals overrule them "in accordance with a more cultivated view." Is the professional woman's authority in the feminine room won at the price of other women's taste — and does 'cultivated taste' function as the class instrument between the decorated and the decorating woman? See taste, house-decorator.

Notes

Second room-type page in the wiki (after dining-room), created from the same source; the pair documents the upstairs/downstairs code-system that Eastlake's stylistic-unity program attacks.