The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Furniture Finishing

The worst of this period of decadence, such as Eastlake and New Art, has been hidden or forgotten, the best is known as Victorian. At its first dawning even Sheraton, like Duncan Phyffe in America, had been affected and his Nelson chairs and pseudo Empire sideboards were plain freakish. Thomas Hope, an architect, attempted to revive pure classic and achieved only the cold rigidity of a museum display room; Augustus Pugin sought a vain revival of Gothic, but the desire for novelty had become too great—the architect no longer controlled; he could merely protest or suggest.

The only successful exponent of a new style was Eastlake, an English architect who published a book of designs in 1868. The style was produced extensively in mahogany and walnut, with tufted red plush upholstery and a profusion of fringes, tassels, knobs, spindles, corkscrews, spools and scalloped edges as the chief characteristics. No attention was paid to beautiful veneers, decoration or fabrics—the eye was entirely taken up with fussy outline and meaningless detail.

We are perhaps too close to the so-called Victorian style to judge it impartially. The modern verdict condemns it as thoroughly bad, with its glistening black hair-cloth sofas, plush brocade chairs, what-nots and general air of fixed smugness. Yet a visit to Roosevelt House, the restored birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt in New York City, reveals it in a new light of substantial elegance and spacious comfort, the mahogany and rosewood stained a deep blackish tone, the walnut a light reddish brown, either varnished or waxed. It is its bulky awkwardness and general immobility that make it unsuitable for our age of small homes and simplified housekeeping.

At the London Exhibit of 1851, brass and iron beds were first shown and at the Paris Exposition in 1889, the first effort was made to introduce a new French style, by name "L'Art Nouveau." Presuming to draw its inspiration from nature the lines were curving, attempting in the flowing pattern of the carving to reproduce the effect of twisted branches, vines, roots and leaves. It waa worked out in gilt, mahogany and pastel shades of enamel and died the early death of all extremes.

About the close of the nineteenth century a style developed known as Mission which ran to the simplest of straight lines. It was the outgrowth of furniture found in the California missions which was in turn a development of Spanish styles prevailing in the eighteenth century as reconstructed by the missionary friars of southern California with what tools they could find at hand.