The Decoration of House: Cultivating Connoisseurship

We started our study of this book by identifying that one of its surprising threads was that of simplicity. Today we are looking at the book’s final three parts, a chapter on The School – Room and Nurseries, which I’m imagining will feel slightly more relevant than it might have in the pre-pandemic era, a chapter titled Bric-a-Brac, which is a term that makes me think of the scenes on Portobello road in the movie Bed knobs and Broomsticks, and the conclusion. All continue to address this issue of simplicity – In fact, the book ends with a collection of what read like proverbs on the subject, “The supreme excellence is simplicity;” “a great draftsmen represents with a few stokes what lesser artists can express only by a multiplicity of lines;” and, “the tact of omission characterizes the master hand.”  I’m not sure if you all have a collection of short essays by more contemporary thinkers and design practitioners at the end of your copy like I do in mine, but in the one I have by William Cole he says, “the book might equally be called, The Graces of Life - for its real subject is not just about houses, but the quality of life in them. Edith and Ogden are definitely not advocating for the simple life in the sense we think, but they are calling for unity not just in the composition of the home, but in one’s life. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s chapters.