AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 106 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com I live in New York City, a place rich in traditional architecture from centuries past. Each day I leave my nineteenth-century loft in SoHo and walk past Washington Square—the epicenter of old New York, still flanked by neoclassical townhouses—en route to the equally antique building where our design studio is headquartered. But the views of those older structures are shadowed by modern, plain-sided buildings with glass walls. For someone like me, a devout classicist, it’s sometimes disheartening to be constantly faced with millions of square feet of glass towers devoid of any historical reference before say, 1950 (though, in all fairness, sometimes the buildings of old are reflected beautifully in their panes). I recently asked myself why we continue to consider and practice traditional decoration and what can the best treatise on the topic still teach us? First published in 1897, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.’s The Decoration of Houses is the level-headed, indispensable book on the subject, about which much has been written over the decades. It’s not an overstatement to say that it is the most important decorating book ever written—and there have been many since. The Decoration of Houses is like scripture: it is sometimes called the Bible of interior decoration. Like all sacred texts, it bears regular reading and rereading to find its meaning. Classical Principles is my response, as a practicing decorator, to their work. CLASSICAL PRINCIPLES for MODERN DESIGN LESSONS FROM EDI TH WHARTON AND OGDEN CODMAN’S THE DECORAT ION OF HOUSES BY THOMAS JAYNE Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, authors of The Decoration of Houses. Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Historic New England, respectively. “If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, [it] may be defined as the sanity of decoration.” [ The Decoration of Houses (1897), 31.] I first saw this New York drawing room when it was empty and painted white. We glazed the walls and installed new furnishings, including eighteenth- century chairs by Georges Jacobs. The walls are paneled in French boiserie from the mid-twentieth century.