Interiors

Period-appropriate window treatments, like most things in interior design, can be plain or fancy. It depends on your taste and budget, because there is historical precedent for both. The first owners of our row houses, free standing homes and apartments had many of the same choices we do today. In the last four chapters on this topic, we’ve looked at the historic window treatments of the late 18th and most of the 19th centuries. Current fashion, all through those one hundred plus years, went back and forth from ornate to simple, with several constants running throughout the entire time period: window shades, blinds and simple hanging draperies. Fancy windows, with valances, lots of fabric, trims and layers of materials came and went, and got more complicated as the 19th century progressed.

They were all a part of the phenomenon of the proliferation of consumer goods available through the wonders of the industrial and technological advances that dazzled the mid-19th century. The Industrial Revolution created a new workforce of urban factory workers. It created a middle class of management and office workers, and it allowed an elite comprised of inventors, manufacturers, wholesale merchants, financial and real estate men and other wealthy professionals to build great homes and estates and to spend money on all of the new and wonderful things available in all of the enormous stores that were opening everywhere. (more…)

If you live in the later brownstone neighborhoods of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant Heights, Clinton Hill and Crown Heights, chances are your row house or flats building was built during a time of great changes in the decorative arts, known as the Aesthetic Movement. From the mid-1870s through the 1890s this movement, often called the “Cult of Beauty,” mesmerized and then inspired great advances in all kinds of art, literature, music and culture including architecture and the interior decorative arts.

It was brought to life by Englishman William Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Then the movement gained steam, drew in its other superstars and influenced craftspeople, architects and artists of all kinds as well as the popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic. “Beauty for beauty’s sake” was one of the mantras, and what better place to show off one’s taste and love of beauty than in one’s home?

Like most things in the world of culture and the arts, there is no one moment where one style of anything ends and another is born. There is always a flow, an evolution of design that leads from one form to another. In Brooklyn architecture, the Neo-Grec brownstone, with its Eastlake-inspired, incised, carved lines, geometric patterns and shapes, was falling out of favor by the beginning of the 1880s.

Replacing it was the expansive massing of the Romanesque Revival, followed soon after by the freestyle Queen Anne period, which expanded on the Romanesque Revival themes. The Neo-Grec was order and line, Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne were imaginative and open, given to, well, more. In the house itself, more woodwork, more built-ins, more, and better, lighting, much more stained glass, color and texture. (more…)

What to do with the windows? This is not a new dilemma; it has been on the minds of homemakers since our houses were built. There has always been the choice between the simple and the ornate, no matter what the period, and the choices people made, then and now, had to do with function, location, and of course, money. In our last two entries, we looked at the historic window treatments of the late 18th through early 19th century in Part One, and continued up until about the 1870s in Part Two. Today, we’ll continue, looking at the late 1800’s, the time period during which most of the row houses in Brooklyn were built. But first a little background and context.

In 1868, English architect and tastemaker Charles Eastlake published “Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and other Details.” The book was a runaway hit, both in England and here in the United States, where it was published in 1872. Eastlake’s book became the bible of the decorating world, so much so that six editions were printed here in in the next eleven years, in order to keep up with the demand.

England, like the United States, was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, that great time of invention and innovation, where machines and technology had developed that could produce all kinds of products, that before, had to be hand made by skilled craftsmen of all kinds. On both sides of the Atlantic, the advances in technology had helped create a new middle class; the white collar worker, and this new class of people had more disposable income than ever before, and they wanted to show off their new station in life with material goods. Just like we do today, they wanted stuff. (more…)