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Edith Wharton’s Houses (New Yorker)
Edith Wharton knows houses. Her first published book was "The Decoration of Houses," written with Ogden Codman, Jr., which argued for "house-decoration as a branch of architecture," and against "the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness." Wharton and Codman took a reformist stance, suggesting that clients stop treating the interiors and the exteriors of their houses as separate projects and start seeking more simplicity and less ornament. Wharton had an opportunity to play architect and decorator herself in Lenox, Massachusetts, where (with the help of professionals) she built the Mount, a Georgian mansion with a cascade of beautiful gardens. She wrote to her sometime lover Morton Fullerton, "Decidedly, I'm a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth… " Yet "The House of Mirth" is bookended by contrasting visions of domestic architecture. In the first chapter, we visit the lawyer Lawrence Selden's bachelor apartment with its "shabby leather chairs," "pleasantly faded Turkey rug," and shaded balcony, and it seems a personal oasis. In the last, we visit the unmarried heroine Lily Bart's spare boarding-house home, "where there was no other token of ...
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