House Decorator

Definition

House decorator is the Garretts' professional self-designation (1876) — and the wiki's name for the professional identity claimed between the upholsterer's trade and the interior decorator's profession. Rhoda and Agnes Garrett's Suggestions for House Decoration uses the handbook "to demonstrate their professional status as trained 'house decorators' rather than domestic 'home-makers'" (Ferry, p. 110) — the hyphenated pair marking the line the claim crosses: not the woman who makes a home (domestic ideology's assignment) but the trained professional who designs interiors for clients. The profession's self-definition, quoted in Ferry's excerpt, is comprehensive and architectural in scope: the consummate house decorator "should be able to design and arrange all the internal fittings of a house, the chimney-pieces, grates, and door-heads, as well as the wall-hangings, curtains, carpets, and furniture" — a professional "able to judge both the total effect and the minute details of the decorative scheme, and who aims to create a 'harmonious whole'" (Garretts, quoted pp. 114–115). The claim's professional warrant is styled in the essay's title: "Decorators May be Compared to Doctors" — decorators as members of a trained profession, comparable to medicine. The identity is claimed from inside the new 'Queen Anne' style debate (the Introduction opens with Stevenson's 1874 paper and "place[s] [the authors] immediately in the context of their professional life," p. 114) and from experience of the client relation ("A great [deal] of trouble and vexation would often be saved if people would make up their minds beforehand how much they wish to spend," p. 115).

Key Thinkers

• Rhoda and Agnes Garrett — the identity's claimants: England's first female interior decorators, cousins, sisters of Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson; trained professionals working "in a male-dominated world," financially independent and unmarried; their Suggestions (1876, in the 'Art at Home' series) is the handbook that performs the professional claim (PAGE NEEDED — see log).
• Emma Ferry — the identity's historian: the feminist recovery that reads the professional claim out of the advice book, and the title's medical-comparison thesis as the profession's self-estimation (2003/2006).
• Charles L. Eastlake — the authority the claim is built from and against: the Garretts appropriate his dominant discourse and "relegate it to the past, while promoting the 'Queen Anne' style as the way forward" (editors, p. 110); his polemic "paves the way for the professional decorator as the arbiter of taste" (Intimus headnote) — the professional space the Garretts are the first women to occupy.
• Elsie de Wolfe — the identity's later professionalization: "America's first female professional interior decorator" (editors, 2006) — the American claim that postdates the English one by thirty-seven years.
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the genealogists: interior design's "own history as a practice stemming from the upholsterer's trade" (p. 10) — the trade-to-profession story into which the house decorator is the first professional link.
• Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr — the identity's architectural claim (1898/2006): the Intimus headnote credits their book with equating "architecture and decoration as professional activities" (p. 387) — the professional claim made not from the decorating side (the Garretts' 'house decorators') but from architecture's: decoration, having passed the double test, "is only interior architecture" (p. 387); Codman himself, per the verified record, "viewed interior design as 'a branch of architecture'" (Lange, The New Yorker, via Wikipedia) — the architect claiming the decorator's ground as his discipline's own branch, the era's mirror-image of the Garretts' claim.

Related Concepts

• Interior Design — the descendant discipline: the genealogy runs upholsterer (trade, attacked 1868) → house decorator (Garretts, 1876) → interior decorator (de Wolfe, 1913) → interior design (theorized, 2000s); the Garretts are the profession's female founding claim.
• The Upholsterer — the ancestor-trade and the adversary: the Garretts censure "some fashionable decorator and upholsterer" (p. 112) while their advice arms readers "to speak with more authority to the upholsterer or the paper-hanger whom he employs" (p. 111) — the professional claiming ground the trade holds.
• Advice Literature — the genre that carries the claim: the handbook as professional demonstration, its Introduction placing the authors in the architectural style-debate of their day.
• Queen Anne Style — the professional banner: the style the house decorators "devoted their attention" to, defended against the Gothic Revival with a suitability argument.
• Gender and the Interior — the identity's gendered condition: trained women professionals in a trade coded feminine and a world coded male; "the exhausting fight against the stream of prejudice" (Smyth, quoted p. 114).
• Domestic Feminism — the adjacent strategy: where the Beechers claimed domestic expertise inside the home, the house decorators claimed professional identity outside it — 'house decorators' rather than 'home-makers'.
• Taste — the professional faculty: the cultivated discrimination the Garretts prescribe ("so far cultivated as to make it desirable to display them," quoted p. 113).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the primary source: the two-fold subversion thesis (professional status vs 'home-makers,' p. 110); the profession's definition (all internal fittings, chimney-pieces to furniture, pp. 114–115); the "harmonious whole" aim and the professional's double judgment (total effect and minute detail, pp. 114–115); the client-relations expertise (p. 115); the style-debate Introduction as professional self-placement (p. 114); the editors' recognition of the cousins as "England's first female interior decorators" with their suffrage link (p. 110).
• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the claim's precondition: the polemic that discredited the trade-arbiter and "paved the way for the professional decorator as the arbiter of taste" (editors' headnote) — the professional space the Garretts were the first women to enter, eight years after the polemic.
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the identity's American professionalization: the founding female professional of the decorator's trade, thirty-seven years after the Garretts' English claim.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the genealogy the concept completes: interior design's history "stemming from the upholsterer's trade" (p. 10) — with the house decorator as the first professional claim on that trade's ground.
• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the identity's gendered afterlife: interior design's feminization conditioned by "the removal of men and their work from the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (p. 57) — the professional field the Garretts entered from its excluded side.
• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the profession's social-origin story, told from etiquette rather than trade: "Prior to the appearance of the likes of Emily Post and Lillian Eichler, a new professional arose to fill the cultural void and embrace the need for etiquette. Enter the interior decorator" (p. 372) — the decorator entering history as the etiquette-vacuum's filler (no native aristocracy, the bustling city, the suburb "physically limit[ing] social interaction," note 20: the 1918–45 etiquette-book wave and etiquette's secularization "as a generalized pattern of behavior designed to lubricate social intercourse"). And the fusion-point: "In the true spirit of the French madams and the Victorian ladies, Elsie de Wolfe would combine the ritual of entertaining and etiquette and the practice of interior decoration into a cohesive whole" (p. 373). Where the wiki's other sources give the profession its trade genealogy (upholsterer → Garretts → de Wolfe → interior design, pp. 10, 110), Turpin gives its social genealogy — the decorator as a manager of gatherings and rituals, heir to the salonnière's and the hostess's office, whose rooms are instruments of manners. See etiquette, conversation, de-wolfe-elsie.
• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — the identity's architectural mirror-claim: where the Garretts claim professional standing from the decorating side ('house decorators' rather than 'home-makers'), Wharton and Codman claim the same territory from architecture's side — the book "equates architecture and decoration as professional activities" (headnote, p. 387), decoration passing the double test and answering to proportion thereby becoming interior architecture ("good decoration… is only interior architecture," p. 387). The excerpt's professional audit names the profession's competence problem: "After a period of eclecticism that has lasted long enough to make architects and decorators lose their traditional habits of design, there has arisen a sudden demand for 'style'" (p. 388) — architects and decorators alike named as having "lose[d] their traditional habits"; the cultivated layman "often a better judge than the half-educated architect" (p. 388); and the ornament-concession as the professional's capitulation to the client ("a concession to the client who… would not know he had got it were these details left out," p. 388). The profession's 1898 definition, like the Garretts' 1876 claim, spans fixed fittings and furniture alike — the two claims bracketing the decorator's professional space from opposite sides. See interior-architecture, upholsterer, advice-literature.

Open Questions

• The title's comparison — decorators to doctors — quotes the Garretts' claim, but the excerpt does not print the passage. What did the analogy argue (training? licensure? fee-professionalism? the healing of rooms?), and how much of the modern profession's standing depends on it?
• The Garretts define the house decorator's scope as "all the internal fittings" including chimney-pieces, grates and door-heads — fixed architectural elements. Does the 1876 claim already exceed the decorator's twentieth-century remit (furnishings, soft goods) and sketch the interior architect's territory? See interior-architecture.
• Ferry stresses the Garretts were "trained professionals working in a male-dominated world" — where did women train as 'house decorators' in 1876 (the Friends of The Wilson talk, per Ferry, records them as the first English women to train in an architect's office)? The wiki needs the training-and-practice story the excerpt omits.
• Is the 'house decorator' vs 'home-maker' distinction stable? The Garretts' draperies chapter returns women to "women's sphere" and the household-linen ideal — the professional claim and the domestic ideology coexist in one book. See separate-spheres, domestic-feminism.
• The profession's genealogy now has its first women (Garretts 1876) before its celebrated American founder (de Wolfe 1913). Why did the Anglo-American historiography forget the English claim — and what does the forgetting pattern (cf. Hollis's "herstories" parallel) tell the historiography-of-the-interior?