The Importance of Being Furnished

Exploring the fascinating lives of four gay contemporaries, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home traces the advent of professional interior decoration in America against the backdrop of the homes these men created for themselves. All now public museums, these fascinating sites not only reflect the intimate lives of their owners, but also serve as monuments to the Queer shaping of the American home as we know it today.

Readers will encounter Charles Leonard Pendleton, (1846-1904), one of the greatest furniture collectors of his age and the first to create the “period room” in an American museum (a recreation, in fact, of his own home); Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951), whose successful 1897 manifesto, The Decoration of Houses, co-authored with novelist Edith Wharton, summoned his family’s 18th century Massachusetts home – and the ancestral ghosts it contained; Charles Hammond Gibson. Jr. (1874-1954), whose domestic embodiment of the elite “Boston Brahmin” evolved into a camp persona that shocked this very milieu; and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934) who established his national design reputation through Beauport, the eccentric home he created for himself, and as tribute to the man he loved.

Fully illustrated with color plates and period photographs, this book pays tribute to Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty,” a cause these men promoted in a dazzling range of designs. Readers will feel they’ve stepped across these once-private thresholds as guests – and as witnesses to the birth of the contemporary American interior.