Owen Jones wrote thirty-seven rules for decorating interiors
Interior design grew from instinctive building into a managed profession once industrial cities and complex architecture demanded planned space. Architect Owen Jones, decorating Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851, pushed a daring red-yellow-blue ironwork palette that Queen Victoria unveiled to acclaim. His 1856 Grammar of Ornament set out 37 guiding principles.
Designers research, plan, inspect sites, and coordinate construction to make interiors healthier and more pleasing; they draw on visual-arts principles, not merely soft furnishings. In the United States the role is distinct from “interior decorator”; in the United Kingdom the title remains largely unregulated. Ancient Indian architects doubled as interior planners—Vishwakarma in myth—and Shekhawati still keeps about 2,000 painted havelis. Egyptian tomb “soul houses” encode ventilation and porticoes across dynasties. Wall painting is at least 5,000 years old at sites such as Ness of Brodgar beside Skara Brae; Greeks and Romans later systemized mosaic floors and bath interiors under writers like Vitruvius.
Through the early nineteenth century, homemakers, upholsterers, or architects’ craftsmen handled rooms. Mid-century furniture houses then sold whole-house schemes to a rising middle class until independent designers edged in by 1914. American Herter Brothers after the Civil War offered panelling, mantels, floors, carpets, and draperies from one firm. Pioneering British retailers included Waring & Gillow, James Shoolbred, Mintons, and Holland & Sons. London’s Post Office directory listed 80 interior decorators in 1882 and 127 individuals by 1915, ten of them women. Rhoda and Agnes Garrett trained professionally in 1874; their 1876 Suggestions for House Decoration reached a wide audience, ranked then with William Morris.
Mary Haweis urged personal taste over shop templates in the 1880s; the Institute of British Decorators formed in 1899 under John Dibblee Crace. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s 1897 Decoration of Houses attacked Victorian clutter and launched careers such as Elsie de Wolfe’s—her light Colony Club interiors of 1905 and 1913 book The House in Good Taste rejected heavy red drapes. Syrie Maugham later became famous for the first all-white room. Museums still teach the canon in miniature: Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s Chicago rooms, at one inch to one foot, include a Georgian dining room (c. 1937) modelled on Robert Adam’s Home House (1774–78) with Chippendale furniture and Wedgwood-style urns.
Source: Interior design
