Trickle Down Taste

Trickle Down Taste

The trickle down effect of all of this was to hugely proliferate the concept of taste. Of course with increased wealth, people could now afford to concern themselves with ‘taste’: what it was and how to get it. Increased leisure time also meant that there was more of a point in having a room dedicated to entertaining, another for whiling away the morning, for writing a letter, for playing billiards or sipping tea among exotic plants and birds. You see this as much in the fashion for specialised rooms that reached a peak in the Victorian period, as in the mass production of furniture and decorative goods in often artless imitation of what was observed in country houses.

Now it seems the leisure rooms in our houses – and how odd and also fortunate that they aren’t also called that – are simultaneously going in two very different directions. On the one hand rooms are at once getting smaller and yet more numerous, as developers with an eye on margins squeeze in more or less. As any estate agent will tell you, at the lower end of the market there is a premium attached to the proliferation of rooms no matter how small.

On the other hand – and also the other end of the market – a separate drawing room is headed for complete extinction, with the rise in popularity of the American import of the ‘open plan’. Frank Lloyd Wright’s advocacy of open plan design in homes – also to be taken up by offices – was made possible by social and technological changes: with the rise of feminism and technological advances that made housework lighter, women were – purportedly – liberated from the kitchen ; meanwhile central heating and extractor fans meant that larger spaces could be both warm and unpolluted. The average British home now has 5.34 rooms, according to 2001 Census figures. It is to be seen whether this number will go up or substantially come down. How odd then that in the 21st century as the dividing walls in our homes have come down, we appear to have gone full circle, with this return to the medieval practices of cooking, eating and even sleeping in one big room. Understood in this way, ‘open-plan’ is therefore perhaps more ‘medieval modern’ than ‘mid-century modern’.

The drawing room at South Wraxall Manor, originally the 15th century Great Chamber.

The drawing room at Aynhoe, a masterpiece of a room designed by John Soane.

The drawing room at Stanway House in Gloucestershire is dominated by a pair of chinoiserie daybeds.

The vast drawing room at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire was created in the 1860s Jacobethan style by P.C. Hardwick.

The richly Gothic drawing room at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire.

The stately classical drawing room at Attingham Park in Shropshire.

But as far as Jeremy Musson’s beautiful and scholarly book on ‘The Drawing Room – English Country House Decoration’ is concerned, there is absolutely no question that this room, in this context, can only be called a ‘drawing room’. There are few people who are better placed than Musson in articulating the history and design of the English country house, and his book is exclusively devoted to the upper class manifestation of this room of reception. A room that is famous and imitated the world over and which is intimately associated with the English country house. This was the room in those great power houses of the ruling elite, that evolved with the architectural tastes and social realities of the great taste makers whose fashions and style have helped to define refined living the world over.

Like any room in our homes today the ‘drawing room’ – if that is what we choose to call it – has evolved to reflect our changing attitudes and use of space. The high point of the ‘drawing room’ historically was surely the 18th century, when the new modern era of neo-classical homes gave us the surviving model of drawing room as symmetrically paired up with the dining room, as the two principal rooms of a house. This was reflected in the sumptuousness of the decoration, and all other rooms one passed through were designed to incrementally prepare you for the opulence of these two rooms.

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