Newspaper Article

History Lessons

Calloway, Stephen, Stephen Calloway is a writer and an associate curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London

1990

Overview

This sort of intricacy in planning also characterized ''the jewel box,'' a detailed space geared to one individual's taste. Throughout history, connoisseurs and collectors have delighted in the fitting-up of these little rooms, in which they could enjoy their most precious treasures. These dens of art and curiosities ultimately gave rise to our great public museums, but in earlier centuries, they were intensely private spaces, dedicated to tranquillity and study. Like the studiolo, the often minuscule office/library/retreat of the Renaissance prince, they offered a different kind of spaciousness: an escape from the cares of the world through the gathering together of everything rare, refined and delightful. In, for example, the Duke of Urbino's studiolo, intricate intarsia woodwork created in the 15th century features trompe l'oeil panels that depict cupboard doors half open, revealing shelves of scientific instruments, books, armor and other curiosities. Nearer our time and perhaps closer in scale are the space-saving solutions of the designers and architects of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Georgian town house, for instance, was a model of rational arrangement. Though tall and narrow, it customarily had at least two good rooms on each of three, four, or five floors, comfortably accommodating a family and servants. Even at that time, however, houses were often subdivided, and in fashionable areas, smart bachelors would take a ''set'' of rooms, which often contained a fold-down bed concealed by a dummy bookcase or disguised as a handsome mahogany bureau. How much more elegant and livable these seem than the sleeping platforms often found in today's one-room apartments. Even [Thomas Jefferson]'s talent in planning spaces pales when measured against that of the great English Regency architect Sir John Soane. Over a long period of building and collecting, Soane transformed his London house in Lincoln's Inn Fields into nothing less than a Rubic's Cube of shifting levels, false walls and trompe l'oeil tricks played with mirrors. Within, he kept one of the finest collections of architectural fragments, plaster casts, books and drawings ever assembled. But his particular, almost fanatical, genius lay in his ability to compress architectural grandeur into small spaces, and to tease the mind with his visual and historical ambiguities. His spatial games become most complex toward the back of the house, where corridors that feel like tunnels suddenly burst into the light and become vertiginous galleries overlooking a chamber that houses Soane's Egyptian sarcophagus and Roman cineraria. Above are busts and vases on hundreds of nails that extend up to the house's tall skylights, once filled with colored glass that cast an eerie glow. As his life progressed, even Soane's picture collection grew unmanageable, and the cunning architect devised a small room whose walls consist of vast panels that swing out to reveal another layer of paintings behind the first.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: CALLOWAY, STEPHEN / INTERIOR DESIGN / Soane, John / SPECIAL SECTIONS