Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion

Author: Elsie de Wolfe Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; excerpts from The House in Good Taste [1913], Ayer Company Publishers reprint, 1998 — original excerpts pp. 17–23, 25–6) Source type: chapter (extract from The House in Good Taste reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, John Wiley & Sons, with the editors' framing introduction)

Raw file: raw/chapters/de-wolfe-2006-suitability-simplicity-proportion.md

Summary

De Wolfe's 1913 advice text — the founding manifesto of America's first female professional interior decorator, reprinted in Intimus — sets out a decorator's method in three terms: "my first thought is suitability. My next thought is proportion. Always I keep in mind the importance of simplicity." The method begins with people, not things ("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"), proceeds through the architecture of wall openings and light before any upholstery, and ends in a program of elimination: clearing "junk — this heterogeneous mass of ornamental 'period' furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room 'look cozy'" until "the architecture of the room becomes its decoration." Around the method runs a social-moral theory of the interior: the room is the involuntary evidence of its owner's character ("We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture"; "A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not"), taste is the guarantee of that character ("It is a compass that never errs… she will never cause a scandal!"), and the shams of the display interior (imitation velvets, fake 'works of art', the museum-like 'Marie Antoinette' room) are the vulgarity the simple, comfortable commonplace redeems. The editors' introduction reads the text's gender politics explicitly: "Claimed to be the concern of the woman of the household, comfort and decoration are not only the measure of a woman's skill and cleverness at establishing tranquillity but a political form of resistance towards patriarchy within the social and design spheres," and credits "her design principles of light-hued surfaces and mirrors to produce visually unified interiors" with establishing her as "America's first female professional interior decorator."

Key Claims

• The decorator's fixed order of operations: "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" (p. 82) — people first, openings second, elimination always.
• Empathic role-taking as professional method: "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. For the time-being I really am the chatelaine of the house" (p. 82) — the decorator learns the client as an actress learns a role, then "let[s] that go" to consider the house.
• Architectural openings outrank upholstery: "It is much more important that the wall openings, windows, doors, and fireplaces should be in the right place and should balance one another than that there should be expensive and extravagant hangings and carpets" (p. 82).
• Lighting placement is the first design act: "My first thought in laying out a room is the placing of the electric light openings" — against the "over-magnificent hotels and residences" where one faces "a mirror as far removed from the daylight as possible"; "There must be lights in sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of the dressing-table, and so on" (p. 82).
• Heat and air as design problems: "We Americans are slaves to steam heat. We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat"; a fireplace in each room, wood fires, and "do arrange in the beginning that the small rooms of your house may not be overheated" (p. 83). The hotel anecdote — a cold, "cheerless empty fireplace," a chimney "that never had a fire in it," the proprietor who "would rather not take such a risk!" — as the type of unreadable comfort systems (p. 83).
• The interior as character-evidence: "We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings. We judge her temperament, her habits, her inclinations, by the interior of her home. We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture. We attribute vulgar qualities to those who are content to live in ugly surroundings" (p. 83).
• Taste as moral guarantee: "what surer guarantee can there be of a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste? It is a compass that never errs. If a woman has taste she may have faults, follies, fads, she may err, she may be as human and feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!" (p. 83) — taste as scandal-prevention, and as both innate ("inherent and inherited") and developable.
• The triad is learnable by laypersons through three faculties: "we can exert our common sense and decide whether a thing is suitable; we can consult our conscience as to whether an object is simple, and we can train our eyes to recognize good and bad proportion" — no "technical knowledge of architecture" needed to see "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).
• The environment speaks involuntarily: "A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not" (p. 83); shams — "fake 'works of art'," "imitation velvets or silks," "paper floors and iron ceilings" — are read as insincerity (pp. 83–84).
• The comfortable commonplace defended: "We are too afraid of the restful commonplaces, and yet if we live simple lives, why shouldn't we be glad our houses are comfortably commonplace? How much better to have plain furniture that is comfortable, simple chintzes printed from old blocks, a few good prints, than all the sham things in the world?" (pp. 83–84).
• The house arranged for legible reassurance: "A house is a dead-give-away, anyhow, so you should arrange it so that the person who sees your personality in it will be reassured, not disconcerted" (p. 84).
• The 'Marie Antoinette' room as the American pathology: "the most comfortable room in the house is given up to a sort of bastard collection of gilt chairs and tables, over-elaborate draperies shutting out both light and air, and huge and frightful paintings" — museum-like "mausoleums" (p. 84). The Louis XVI ballroom anecdote supplies the anti-dictum epigram: the proud hostess's "This is my Louis XVI ballroom" is demolished by the English guest's quiet "What makes you think so?" (p. 84).
• Against period-dictation: "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. It isn't at all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared" (p. 84) — suitability compares qualities across periods instead of enforcing period-consistency.
• 'Authentic period furniture' as sham: "apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures in the form of tassels, and such horrors… under the guise of being 'authentic period furniture'" (p. 84). Connoisseurship democratized: "Only a connoisseur can ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes" (p. 84).
• Suitability preached as gospel: "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).
• Decoration by elimination: "It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How many rooms have I not cleared of junk" (p. 85); "Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture of the room becomes its decoration" (p. 85) — the decorated room's paradoxical apotheosis: decoration achieved by removing decoration, so that architecture supplies the ornamental order.
• Editors' framing (Taylor & Preston): the text's "call for use of common sense and practical design becomes the basis for good taste in early twentieth-century American domesticity"; comfort and decoration are "a political form of resistance towards patriarchy within the social and design spheres"; her message is "what we would now recognise as modernism's aesthetic of the simple and unencumbered interior," promoted through her celebrity "as a former stage actress as a designer for the wealthy and famous"; "her design principles of light-hued surfaces and mirrors to produce visually unified interiors helped to establish her as America's first female professional interior decorator" (editors' introduction).

Connections

Concepts: Suitability · Simplicity · Proportion · Taste · The Decorative · Domestic Interior · Interior as Biography · Comfort · Gender and the Interior · Rule-Breaking · Style · Modernism · Sterility of Perfection · Domestic Feminism · Interior Design · Ugly and Ordinary · Natural Finishes Authors: Elsie de Wolfe · Taylor & Preston (editors and framing introduction) · Billy Baldwin (the heir and the critic of her dictum-life) · Catharine Beecher & Harriet Beecher Stowe (the advice tradition de Wolfe inherits and professionalizes) · William W. Braham (de Wolfe's "simplicity and reticence" and her glowing library, via the convention history) Debates: Ornament vs. Purity — the pre-Loos interior-side position of decoration by elimination · Interior Design vs. Architecture — the decorator's founding knowledge-claim: openings, services and suitability before connoisseurship · Tradition vs. Innovation — old English chairs in Twentieth-Century homes: mixed periods as the anti-period method Related source notes: Baldwin — The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (the 1972 continuation: de Wolfe's roses as "unalterable dictum," the proof of the advice genre's fossilization) · Beecher & Stowe — A Christian House (1869: the advice tradition's founding program; de Wolfe adds the professional decorator's voice) · Braham — A Wall of Books (de Wolfe's library as "subversive decoration"; her "simplicity and reticence" converging with Post and The International Style) · Taylor & Preston — Proximities (the anthology introduction that frames taste, the decorative and gender) · Csikszentmihalyi — Design and Order in Everyday Life (the empirical version of the interior-as-biography claim: objects as "concrete symbols") · Summerson — The Classical Language of Architecture (the ratio doctrine of proportion against which de Wolfe's perceptual, domestic proportion reads as an alternative tradition)

Direct Quotes

"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." (p. 82)

"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. For the time-being I really am the chatelaine of the house." (p. 82)

"It is much more important that the wall openings, windows, doors, and fireplaces should be in the right place and should balance one another than that there should be expensive and extravagant hangings and carpets." (p. 82)

"My first thought in laying out a room is the placing of the electric light openings. How rarely does one find the lights in the right place in our over-magnificent hotels and residences!" (p. 82)

"There must be lights in sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of the dressing-table, and so on." (p. 82)

"We Americans are slaves to steam heat. We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat." (p. 83)

"I once had the temerity to do this in a certain hotel room where there was a cold and cheerless empty fireplace. I summoned a reluctant chambermaid, only to be told that the chimney had never had a fire in it and the proprietor would rather not take such a risk!" (p. 83)

"We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings. We judge her temperament, her habits, her inclinations, by the interior of her home. We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture." (p. 83)

"After all, what surer guarantee can there be of a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste? It is a compass that never errs. If a woman has taste she may have faults, follies, fads, she may err, she may be as human and feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!" (p. 83)

"We must learn to recognize suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our needs." (p. 83)

"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)

"A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not." (p. 83)

"How can we believe that a woman of sincerity of purpose will bang fake 'works of art' on her walls, or satisfy herself with imitation velvets or silks? How can we attribute taste to a woman who permits paper floors and iron ceilings in her house?" (pp. 83–84)

"We are too afraid of the restful commonplaces, and yet if we live simple lives, why shouldn't we be glad our houses are comfortably commonplace? How much better to have plain furniture that is comfortable, simple chintzes printed from old blocks, a few good prints, than all the sham things in the world?" (pp. 83–84)

"A house is a dead-give-away, anyhow, so you should arrange it so that the person who sees your personality in it will be reassured, not disconcerted." (p. 84)

"Too often, here in America, the most comfortable room in the house is given up to a sort of bastard collection of gilt chairs and tables, over-elaborate draperies shutting out both light and air, and huge and frightful paintings." (p. 84)

"Heaven knows poor Marie Antoinette had enough follies to atone for, but certainly she has never been treated more shabbily than when they dub these mausoleums 'Marie Antoinette rooms.'" (p. 84)

"'This is my Louis XVI ballroom.' My friend, who had been very patient up to that moment, said very quietly, 'What makes you think so?'" (p. 84)

"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. It isn't at all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared." (p. 84)

"I have seen what I can best describe as apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures in the form of tassels, and such horrors, in many houses of to-day under the guise of being 'authentic period furniture.'" (p. 84)

"Only a connoisseur can ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes." (p. 84)

"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)

"It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How many rooms have I not cleared of junk – this heterogeneous mass of ornamental 'period' furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room 'look cozy.'" (p. 85)

"Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture of the room becomes its decoration." (p. 85)

"What appears in this text by Elsie de Wolfe as a call for use of common sense and practical design becomes the basis for good taste in early twentieth-century American domesticity." — editors' introduction

"Claimed to be the concern of the woman of the household, comfort and decoration are not only the measure of a woman's skill and cleverness at establishing tranquillity but a political form of resistance towards patriarchy within the social and design spheres." — editors' introduction

"Her message of what we would now recognise as modernism's aesthetic of the simple and unencumbered interior, was promoted as much through her popularity as a former stage actress as a designer for the wealthy and famous." — editors' introduction

"De Wolfe's design principles of light-hued surfaces and mirrors to produce visually unified interiors helped to establish her as America's first female professional interior decorator." — editors' introduction

Open Questions

• The advice genre's paradox, in its purest form: de Wolfe preaches suitability against period-dictation and rule-following — yet within a decade her own maxims were being taken as "unalterable dictum" (Baldwin's client and the twelve red roses, p. 27 of the Baldwin text). Does every liberating rule in advice literature become a new rule-book, and can suitability escape its own petrification?
• De Wolfe holds taste to be "inherent and inherited" — "what surer guarantee… of a woman's character" — and in the same breath offers to teach it ("How can we develop taste?"). Is taste an inheritance, a cultivation, or (in Bourdieu's terms) a class position naturalized as birthright? Her double claim is the doctrine's contradiction and its selling point.
• The editors read comfort and decoration as "a political form of resistance towards patriarchy within the social and design spheres" — but the text's own judgments (vulgarity, scandal, the woman judged by her surroundings) deploy that same interior-judgment against women. Where does the resistance actually operate: in the professionalization of a woman's expertise, or in the moral policing the text performs? See domestic-feminism, gender-and-the-interior.
• Is the interior-as-give-away claim descriptive or coercive? De Wolfe both reports the social law ("We are sure to judge a woman… by her surroundings") and teaches people to enforce it — making "A house is a dead-give-away" a self-fulfilling surveillance regime she then advises women to manage ("reassured, not disconcerted").
• De Wolfe's anti-periodism ("Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared") sounds like Baldwin's free play with styles — but her own taste is for eighteenth-century French and English things. Is anti-periodism a genuine method, or the connoisseur's privilege of mixing only "good" periods?
• "The architecture of the room becomes its decoration" — is this a proto-modernist formula (as the editors read it), a decorator's paradox (decoration dissolving into its own absence), or the first statement of what Braham later names as the natural/applied convention ("simplicity and reticence" converging with Post and the International Style)? See simplicity, natural-finishes.
• The hotel's sealed chimney — comfort systems whose logic is illegible to their users ("There is usually no way to control it unless you turn it off altogether") — anticipates the modern building-services problem (cf. the McClures' hermetic seal). Is de Wolfe's fireplace-in-every-room demand an early comfort-user's manifesto against uncontrollable environmental systems?

(Note: the raw file's header reads "Intumus: Interior Design Reader" — an OCR corruption of the book's actual title, "Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader" — and renders the editor's name "Juleanna Preston" for Julieanna Preston. The excerpt preserves two original-pagination markers — "(… p 23)" after the Louis XVI ballroom anecdote and "(… p 26)" after the elimination passage — referring to The House in Good Taste (Ayer reprint, 1998), pp. 17–23 and 25–6. Direct-quote page numbers above are the Intimus pages 82–85.)