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Edition 18: The Details

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HYLAND HYLAND I n 1897 the novelist Edith Wharton and her architect friend, Ogden Codman, Jr. published a work, not of fiction, but a manual of interior design, The Decoration of Houses, a treatise well in the vanguard of its time in terms of promulgat- ing rationalism—the exaltation of space and architectural line rather than contents—in the realm of interior design. Yet no matter how we banish clutter, a human impulse, one might say a need to collect, seems always to survive. Wharton and Codman, at the end of their manifesto, acknowledged this stubborn atavism in a chapter entitled "Bric-a-Brac," which attempts to rationalize –and indeed, perhaps surreptitiously to preserve--this residue by distinguishing among "household ornaments" three gradations of quality: bric-a-brac, bibelots (trinkets) and objets d'art. For the inclusion of such appar- ently superfluous items in an interior, Wharton sets an exacting standard, "a counsel of perfection." An ugly chair may be excused, if none other is available, but an offensive knick- knack is without quarter. Bric-a-brac demands the taste of angels, Tanagra figurine as opposed to china pug. My own conception of an idealized room is the opposite of Wharton's. Long before I engaged in totalized schemes of design, rethinking walls and windows, moldings and hearth, and long before I could afford chairs, beautiful or ugly, I orga- nized, almost unconsciously, rooms around one or two small, cherished objects, talismans of my own taste. The display of such objects was in the spirit of shrine or votive offering: my bric a brac was the raison d'etre for the room rather than the other way around.

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