Photography by Katherine Bish
Anybody who’s ever hated the present has fantasized about living in the past—which is, in the privacy of your own home, quite possible. But the visuals are tricky. If details are off by a century, the mood’s wrong or you’ve misunderstood your own fantasy, it turns silly fast.
We asked Jeffrey Pounds—who is principal of SOTADesigns.com and teaches the history of architecture and design at Maryville University, Washington University and Patricia Stevens College—to name a few mistakes he’s come across. “Actually, very little is ever gotten right!” he retorts. “French Empire, I mean good heavens, the number of times I’ve seen a bee-motif fabric on a Louis XV chair! It makes my skin crawl. That’s the Napoleonic bee!
“Floral fabric on Empire is dumb,” he continues. “And using a multicolored pastel brocade on a Baroque piece is dumb, because that’s a Rococo fabric and pastels are Rococo colors. Rococo was a reaction against the heavy, ostentatious Baroque; the French wanted frippery and happiness and frivolity. And then the Victorians reproduced it in stuffy velvet.
“Many of these styles are tied tightly to class,” he adds. “The Victorian era marked the rise of the middle class. But if you talk about Baroque or Rococo, what you are really talking about is court furniture. The best cabinetmakers followed the money; they went where the king was, and that meant to the city. ‘Provincial’ furniture often exemplifies a lack of sophistication. But really, what is sophistication? Sophistry is the pretense of understanding; it is often the quality of the nouveaux riches, whose main drive is to impersonate those they have always believed to be their betters. Provincial furniture is often the more honest furniture.”
And just when you’re ready to go buy a houseful of French provincial furniture, he adds sadly, “The most popular kind is derivative Rococo, so you get lots of cabriole legs and surface ornament, but you lose the daintiness of Rococo court furniture, and you lose that sense of excess.”
In the end, everything’s derivative; it all depends on who copied whom—and on what you want in your own home. And what most people don’t want is to live as people lived in the original historic period. “We can’t afford the domestics, for one thing,” Mr. Pounds says dryly. “Look at the Campbell House—it’s an extraordinarily accurate Victorian in its eclectic mess. It’s what people who made a lot of money thought they should do. And it held 20 people, three-fourths of them servants. How else do you keep a big new house full of tchotchkes dusted? And how do you get away from all those servants? There’s no privacy. So the doors are always closed. Architects only started using an open plan when the servants went away.
“A lot of things that accrete accidentally and become hallmarks of a style are things we don’t want—like all the busy layering of pattern in a Victorian house,” Pounds remarks. “With the door closed, you couldn’t see the pattern of the next room’s carpet or wallpaper, so it didn’t matter.
“You have to take these houses apart, analyze how people lived in them and figure out how you want to live. The Victorians were busy people: There were whatnot shelves and tchotchkes all over, because people were traveling and collecting and showing off. But the Victorians were not light and airy people. Those Victorian bird cages you see went in the solarium, a specially designed and very specific room. And the Victorians used jewel tones, not the saccharine pastels we think they used, because we saw their interiors after the paint faded—or had been repainted by the heirs.
“Victorian was such a revisionist style anyway—there was neo-Gothic, neo-Rococo, neo-Baroque,” he rattles off. “With the invention of the bandsaw and a greatly heightened sense of financial security, people wanted to emulate those they had always seen as their betters. And even the Victorians got what they were knocking off wrong. They would do neo-Gothic—say, an oak reproduction of a Gothic settle—and then put a dark stain on it to make it look like it was hundreds of years old. Eventually the ends of the arms would be paler, because the dark stain had worn off; the chair had aged backwards. In earlier centuries, nobody did that. Nobody stained wood to age it. They made it to look new, and then time took over.”
Mr. Pounds doesn’t resist mixing decades: In his Arts & Crafts dining room, he put up massive oak beams, stained them and hung—yes—track lighting, on thin black wire that disappears, so he could spotlight certain works of art. Then he hung stained-glass pendants at the corners. He felt he was being true to the spirit of the Arts & Crafts movement—which used all available technology, even as it emphasized hand craftsmanship.
It is the spirit that matters. Mr. Pounds inserted a few great Art Deco pieces in a Modernist room, because “both are attempting to be cutting-edge and reacting to the world in similar ways.
“Each style has its own psychology, its own mood,” he explains. “Baroque is a power style, an opulent power style, and so is Empire, with its military motifs.” He’d never mix Empire with Rococo or Art Nouveau, which he characterizes as “the sort of feminine, frivolous styles that tend to come in transitional periods, dangerous periods right before things get bad and people return to classicism, order and opulence. The Rococo period was setting the stage for the French Revolution; Art Deco for the Great Depression. It’s when you mix those moods that a room looks disjointed and schizophrenic.”
Reinventing history’s a delicate proposition: You can lie about some things and not about others. Mr. Pounds lives in dread of faux materials, for example: “Marbling almost always looks terrible. The biggest mistake in the world is to take something and make it what it is not—tile that tries to look like stone, laminates that try to look like wood. And cultured marble doesn’t belong anywhere; that stuff is atrocious. It was actually founded on an interesting principle: scagliola, a method of mixing powdered stone residue into plaster and burnishing it with beeswax. But it never tried to be stone.”
On the other hand, Mr. Pounds doesn’t mind the fib of a little distressing: He ordered a massive $20,000 wood-and-metal railing for a client’s spiral staircase and brought in people with chains to beat it.
And he’s not bothered by creative reuse: “Sure, there’s no such thing as a pre-Modernist entertainment center. I think entertainment centers are dumb anyway. But you can build a TV into an armoire, because what else are we going to use an armoire for? We have closets now. There’s no more closet tax.” He took a client’s never-used Victorian pocket doors, pulled them out of the pockets and pivoted them, mounting a plasma TV on one, so it could be seen from either the living room or
dining room.
“I think what bothers me most is the lack of quality in many reproductions,” he muses. “Bombay Company is set design. If you’re not going to use it, it’s great. But if you are going to do a period style in your home, don’t go buy cheesy reproductions in the first place. They will never have that lived-in quality, at least not for years and years. If you can’t afford to buy everything period, start with just one fabulous piece, and let it happen over time. People rush it; better to have one great chair than an icky suite you’ll be sick of in five years and ready to change.
“In the height of the Rococo period, trendy Parisians redecorated seasonally,” he says, eyebrow arched. “Keep up with that! Now, they bankrupted the country, there was a revolution and most of the nobility lost their heads ...
“If you are trying to build a home,” he concludes, now earnest, “take your time. If you want to use a particular period, research it.” Then, don’t be too literal. Capture its spirit.
