Suitability

Definition

Suitability is Elsie de Wolfe's first principle of decoration: the fitness of a room's contents to the people who live in it, to the room's architecture, and to the life lived there — placed, in her method, before proportion and permanently attended by simplicity: "When I am asked to decorate a new house, my first thought is suitability. My next thought is proportion. Always I keep in mind the importance of simplicity. First, I study the people who are to live in this house, and their needs, as thoroughly as I studied my parts in the days when I was an actress" (p. 82). Its faculty is common sense rather than expertise: "we can exert our common sense and decide whether a thing is suitable" — "A technical knowledge of architecture is not necessary to know that a huge stuffed leather chair in a tiny gold and cream room is unsuitable, is hideously complicated, and is as much out of proportion as the proverbial bull in the china-shop" (p. 83). Its positive instrument is comparison across periods, not fidelity to one: "Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared" (p. 84) — suitability releases furnishing from period-dictation by judging qualities rather than pedigrees. Its practice is preached: "My business is to persuade you to use your graceful French sofas and your simple rush bottom New England chairs in different rooms – in other words, to preach to you the beauty of suitability. Suitability! Suitability! SUITABILITY!!" (p. 84).

Key Thinkers

• Thomas Hope — the criterion's earliest form in the wiki's sources (1807): "that apt accord between the peculiar meaning of each imitative or significant detail, and the peculiar destination of the main object, to which these accessories belonged" (p. 154) — ornament judged by its fit to the object's "peculiar destination," applied to "things so humble in their chief purpose and destination as a table and a chair, a footstool and a screen" (p. 154) — suitability as the accord between a thing's meaning and its destination, sixty-one years before Eastlake's use-razor.
• Elsie de Wolfe — the concept's author and its apostle ("Suitability! Suitability! SUITABILITY!!"); suitability as the founding term of the professional decorator's method (1913).
• Billy Baldwin — the method's mid-century restatement: "Everyone has his own needs, his own preferences, his own ways of using space. When a decorator disregards these needs, or tries to superimpose an alien personality, he cannot bring off that wonderful warm atmosphere of a private, personal place" (p. 27) — suitability as client-reading.
• Catharine E. Beecher & Harriet Beecher Stowe — the economical register of the same principle: rooms planned to the needs and means of their inhabitants ("to persons of limited means"), the advice-tradition's ancestor.
• Charles L. Eastlake — the criterion's pioneer formulation (1868), forty-five years before de Wolfe's triad: fitness-to-use as the only legitimate ground of difference between rooms — "It is of course unnecessary to fit up a boudoir with furniture of the size and capacity which we require in a dining-room side-board" (p. 102) — while refusing the ungrounded differences (round seats vs square seats) that have "a mystery which no one but an upholsterer could explain" (p. 102). Suitability here is the razor that separates use-based variation from convention.

Related Concepts

• Taste — suitability is taste made operational: the learnable, common-sense faculty through which taste is "develop[ed]" ("We must learn to recognize suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our needs," p. 83).
• Proportion — the triad's second term: balance of wall openings and trained-eye judgment, where suitability governs fit and proportion governs placement.
• Simplicity — the triad's watchword: suitability decides fit, simplicity conducts the elimination.
• Domestic Interior — the site of the fitness-judgment: rooms for people and lives, not for display.
• Rule-Breaking — suitability against the rule-book: period-dictation refused ("Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must select the furniture of some one period and stick to that"), the anti-period method Baldwin's free play inherits.
• Interior Design vs. Architecture — the knowledge-claim: a method that needs "no technical knowledge of architecture" yet is teachable, professional, and comparative.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — the criterion's architectural formulation, the appropriateness-test raised to buildings (1898, predating de Wolfe's triad by fifteen years): a building "must have a reason for being as it is and must be as it is for that reason," and its decoration "must harmonize with the structural limitations (which is by no means the same thing as saying that all decoration must be structural)" (p. 387) — the double test; the beauty-corollary: "since the beauty of all such features depends on their appropriateness, they may in every case be replaced by a more suitable form of treatment without loss to the general effect of house or room" (p. 388) — appropriateness as the sole ground of decorative beauty, hence "more suitable form of treatment" as the replacement standard; and the plan-side compulsion ("must be planned as it is because it could not, in reason, be otherwise," p. 387). Where Eastlake's razor grounds room-to-room difference in use, Wharton & Codman ground every feature's very beauty in appropriateness — suitability as the definition of decorative value itself. See the-double-test, proportion, rhythm-and-logic.
• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the criterion's earliest form (1807): the ornament-excellences include "that apt accord between the peculiar meaning of each imitative or significant detail, and the peculiar destination of the main object, to which these accessories belonged" (p. 154) — every accessory judged by the "peculiar destination" of the object it adorns; the same destination-doctrine governs the whole design task ("things so humble in their chief purpose and destination as a table and a chair, a footstool and a screen," p. 154); and the failure mode Hope diagnoses is exactly unsuitability — "injudicious appendages" that make the article "more expensive, without becoming more beautiful," embellishments whose "unmeaningness" occasions "rapid disgust" (pp. 154–155). Where Eastlake will ask whether room-to-room difference is grounded in use, Hope grounds every detail in its object's destination — the accord-doctrine from which the later lineage's suitability descends. See the-antique, upholsterer.
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the primary source: the triad's ordering (p. 82); the chatelaine method of client-study (p. 82); common sense as its faculty and the bull-in-the-china-shop test (p. 83); comparison of "Lines and fabrics and woods" against period-dictation (p. 84); the tripled gospel "Suitability! Suitability! SUITABILITY!!" (p. 84); the French-sofa/New-England-chair instruction (p. 84).
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the descendant doctrine: the decorator who disregards "his own needs, his own preferences, his own ways of using space" cannot succeed (p. 27); the client-reading phronesis that Baldwin names where de Wolfe practices it.
• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the criterion's founding use-case (1868, the earliest source in the advice-literature lineage): suitability-to-use admitted ("It is not sufficient for him to tell us that the dining-room table and sideboard should, on account of the use to which they are put, be made after a more solid fashion than the drawing-room table and the cheffonier" — Eastlake grants this "sufficient," p. 101; "It is of course unnecessary to fit up a boudoir with furniture of the size and capacity which we require in a dining-room side-board," p. 102) and suitability-violating convention refused (the inexplicable round/square seats, p. 102). Eastlake's razor — difference must be grounded in use, not in "a mystery which no one but an upholsterer could explain" — is the criterion in its testable form, half a century before de Wolfe's tripled gospel. See stylistic-unity, upholsterer.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the criterion extended to style-choice itself (1876): the Garretts argue that for "ordinary English houses" the eighteenth-century brick-and-wood style "now designated 'Queen Anne'" is "more suitable than the so-called Gothic house" (quoted p. 114) — style-selection justified by fitness to house-type, materials and national use rather than by period-piety; and their front-door prescriptions (the "good uniform shade of green or brown," the "brass or wrought iron of simple design," quoted p. 110) repeat Eastlake's fitness-and-economy reasoning ("a more honest and artistic… less expensive style of decoration") almost clause for clause — the criterion transmitted through imitation between the advice literature's first two professional voices. See queen-anne-style, house-decorator, advice-literature.
• source-notes/eastlake-2006-dining-room

Open Questions

• Is suitability a genuine criterion or a slogan? De Wolfe's tripled exclamation makes it a preached "beauty" — but the judgment ("a huge stuffed leather chair in a tiny gold and cream room") seems to collapse back into proportion and taste. What work does "suitability" do that "appropriateness" or "fit" do not?
• Suitability is addressed to the person who will live in the room — but de Wolfe's examples judge other women's rooms by their surroundings. Is suitability a design ethic or a surveillance vocabulary (see interior-as-biography)?
• Can suitability be taught without becoming a dictum? Baldwin's roses anecdote shows the advice genre's slogans fossilizing — is there a formulation of suitability that resists petrification, or is the criterion's life exactly the judgement Baldwin calls rule-breaking?
• De Wolfe claims suitability needs "no technical knowledge of architecture" yet gives architectural openings priority over hangings. Is suitability a lay criterion standing over professional knowledge, or the professional's translation of lay needs into technical priorities?