The Modern Interior

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The dining room of Sedgley New Hall, Manchester, c. 1880.
with many of its artefacts, framed mirrors surmounting mantelpieces, for
example, clearly echoing noble dwellings. Nowhere in the late nineteenth
century, perhaps, was the link between domestic interiors, social aspiration
and material display more apparent, however, than in the late nineteenthcentury
us, where a generation of nouveau-riche clients, architects and
decorators together created some of that era’s most ornate homes. The
hugely wealthy ‘arrivistes’ of Newport, Rhode Island had their vast summer
homes, or ‘cottages’, as they called them, decorated like palaces. Richard
Morris Hunt’s design for Marble House, built between 1888 and 1892 for
Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt and given by the former to the latter as
a birthday present, was decorated by the Paris-based decorators Allard and
Sons. The extensive use of marble and gilt in its interiors reflected the huge
sums of money that were poured into that house to create a visual,
material and spatial representation of wealth or, more importantly, of
refinement and class. Cornelius Vanderbilt, William’s elder brother, displayed
an even higher level of conspicuousness in his Hunt-designed
summer house of 1895, The Breakers, some of the rooms of which were
decorated by Allard and Sons and others by the American architect, Ogden