34 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
FURNITURE AND ITS ARCHITECTURAL BACKGROUND 
Which Considers the Late Georgian and Classical 
Revivals and Their Adaptation to the Modern Room 
ABBOT McCLURE and H. D. EBERLEIN 
Wilson Eyre & Mcllvaine, architects 
.4 striking example of period affinities is found in this room. The furniture is Adam, the 
architectural background is not wholly Adam—there is the reminiscence of Grinling 
Gibbon in the fruit swag over the mantel—and the ceiling is Italian 
T HE late Geor¬ 
gian period 
or the epoch of 
Adam influence 
saw such a radical 
change in the spirit 
of architectural 
and mobiliary de¬ 
sign that it forms 
one of the natural 
divisions of our 
subject and in¬ 
vites an inspection 
of the foundations 
on which it rested 
if we would un¬ 
derstand how best 
to treat the crea¬ 
tions of the date. 
A grasp of the 
principles is espe¬ 
cially timely just 
now in view of the 
increasing p o p u- 
1 a r i t y of Adam 
forms for both do¬ 
mestic and public 
architecture. 
The Ada m 
period m a y be 
characterized as 
the period of the 
d o m inance of 
straight lines in 
both furniture and 
architecture. Although curved lines ap¬ 
peared in structural work, both in furni¬ 
ture and architecture, they were very rare¬ 
ly supporting structural lines, but were 
ordinarily of a purely decorative nature. 
There were many round-headed doors and 
windows, but the arch as thus used was not 
an essentially structure-bearing feature. 
The real stress of weight was taken up 
somewhere else. There was the much 
favored oval but, in architecture, its use 
was confined to surface embellishment or, 
in the case of oval-shaped rooms, the oval 
occurred in a horizontal and not a vertical 
plane, and therefore affected only contour 
and structural conditions; in furniture its 
only structural employment was in the 
backs of some chairs which, from the struc¬ 
tural point of view, can scarcely be regarded 
as altogether satisfactory. Again the ellipse, 
when employed for fan lights or in the 
vaulting of ceilings, did not bear weight; 
the supporting 
stress was all dis¬ 
tributed elsewhere. 
The function of the 
design was purely 
ornamental. 
In f u r n i t u r e 
there were serpen¬ 
tine c u r v e s, el¬ 
lipses, ovals, cir¬ 
cles and semi-cir¬ 
cles, but all these 
curving contour 
lines cut horizon- 
t a 1 plane s—a 
shaped sideboard 
or table top offers 
an excellent exam¬ 
ple of what is 
meant — and not 
vertical planes. In 
other words, verti¬ 
cal planes of con¬ 
tour were straight 
up and down or, to 
be m ore explicit 
still, the sides and 
legs of furniture 
were perpendicular 
save in the case of 
chairs a n d settees 
where arms and 
backs were shaped. 
The cabriole legs 
that had enjoyed 
such popularity in the days of Queen Anne, 
the Early Georgian period and during the 
reign of distinctively Chippendale styles, 
passed quite out of fashion as did also the 
swelling or bornbe fronts of some of the 
finer cabinet work and French furniture 
with sinuous Louis Ouinze curves. 
Besides being a period of dominant 
straight structural lines—and most of the 
architecture and furniture of the day pro¬ 
claimed its structural composition fairly 
(r 
rminnnn" 
wl 
111 
IkJW 
nr 
F 
W>) 
r2>.V 
It ivill often be found that the mere repetition of decorative details and patterns on both architectural features and pieces of furniture 
loill create a certain bond of unity and key the whole together even when there is wide dissimilarity in other respects. In these 
parallel pictures, the architectural features are above and the furniture below 
