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The English Country House Creates Gracious Living
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11528 |
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LIFE
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10 / 1986 |
1,346 Words |
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Rochelle Larkin
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The look itself has been around for at least the last two hundred years - some elements of it even longer. That is how it should be; that is what the look exemplified - an unstudied timelessness, an ongoing accumulation, a layering of one's inherited past in one space. It was never given a name or considered to be a particular style. Inigo Jones and Grinling Gibbons and William Kent, who designed and carved and decorated some of the greatest houses in England, and other artists like them may or may not have had posterity on their minds when they wrought their masterpieces. They most certainly couldn't have conceived of Masterpiece Theatre or its vehicle, television. Yet, that is precisely the medium that has brought us their message.
With the enormously popular mini-series Upstairs, Downstairs, the drawing room was brought into out living rooms, and our Sunday nights were capped with weekends, English country-house - variety. Certainly the lives of the servants, the Downstairs portion, were poignant and involving, as good storytelling always is, and may have captured our interest and sympathy, but that was it. Far more simpatico to the snob in all of us was the vivid re-creation of upper-class life during late Victorian and Edwardian times. The houses especially were, and are, the stuff of fantasy. Then came Waugh's Brideshead, filmed at Castle Howard, to overwhelm us completely.
The rich in England and their American counterparts have long lived with the cultured eclecticism of inherited artifacts mixing with (rather than matching) their ancestral furniture. It's an ambience they achieve easily, by the artful means of never throwing anything away. Some of the stuff is often very good indeed: one-of-a-kind furniture, porcelain, silver, and art that any world-class museum would empty its coffers for. There are Rembrandts and Rubenses and da Vincis in some rural corners of England, cheek by jowl with the spoils of war and collected exotics of a perversity, if not downright tackiness, that would make the mail-order merchant of an extremely dubious catalog blush and think again.
The one thing about the look is that it cannot be achieved with any authenticity instantaneously, although some, like Thackeray's celebrated Becky Sharp, have tried. When a guest in her new (read: nouveau) drawing room asked that archetypical arriviste whether the portraits on the walls were her ancestors or her husband's cheeky Becky replied at once that they were in fact hers: she had bought them the previous week.
Spread throughout the British Isles and across the centuries, English country style conforms to no strict interpretation: the very diversity of the elements that have found their way there is a great part of the charm. However, aside from the congenial clutter, there are some aspects of the style that do translate well for contemporary and comfortable living. And there are interpretations that range from the more to the less formal. The very openness of the sun-filled rooms and furniture placed for use rather than display, the abundance of plants that bring the outdoors inside - these are some of the prettiest and healthiest elements, and they go a long way toward dispelling the emptiness of overdraped windows and shelves upon shelves, floor to ceiling, of glass-enclosed books that are never read.
Taking the more appropriate and easily translated elements, it is possible, and attractive, to utilize some of the look's major
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