Ogden Codman Jr. (January 19, 1863 – January 8, 1951) was an American architect and interior decorator in the Beaux-Arts styles, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design.
Early life
Codman family manuscripts collection. Ogden Codman, Sr. and wife Sarah Bradlee Codman
Codman was born on January 19, 1863, in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of six children of Boston native Ogden Codman Sr. (1839–1904) and his wife, the former Sarah Fletcher Bradlee.[1]
He was influenced in his career by two uncles, John Hubbard Sturgis, an architect, and Richard Ogden, a decorator. He greatly admired Italian and French architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as well as English Georgian architecture and the colonial architecture of Boston.[3]
After brief apprenticeships with Boston architectural firms, Codman started his own practice in Boston, where he kept offices from 1891 to 1893, after which time he relocated his main practice from Boston to New York City.[4] Codman also opened offices in Newport, Rhode Island as early as 1891, and it was in Newport that he first met novelist Edith Wharton. She became one of his first Newport clients for her home there, Land's End. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote:[5]
We asked him to alter and decorate the house—a somewhat new departure, since the architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field up to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables.[5]
Codman viewed interior design as "a branch of architecture".[6]
Wharton subsequently introduced Codman to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who hired Codman in 1894 to design the second and third floor rooms of his Newport summer home, The Breakers, which he did in a clean eighteenth-century French and Italian classical style. Codman was not a draftsman, and it is said that in Paris he hired a talented group of students from the École des Beaux-Arts to draw up the sketches for Vanderbilt.
All told, Codman designed 22 houses to completion, as well as the East Wing of the Metropolitan Club in New York. He also began the trend of lowering the townhouse entrance door from elevated stairways to the basement level. He designed a series of three houses in Louis XIV style at 7 (his own residence), 12, and 15 East 96th Street from 1912 to 1916. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission later described the facade of number 7 as being "full of gaiety and frivolous vitality" and further, "on approaching the house, Paris and the Champs-Élysées immediately come to mind." ......
In 1920, Codman left New York to return to France, where he spent the last thirty-one years of his life at the Château de Grégy, wintering at Villa Leopolda in Villefranche-sur-Mer, which he created by assembling a number of vernacular structures and their sites: it is his masterpiece, the fullest surviving expression of his esthetic.
In 1918, Codman leased the former Newport cottage of society leader James Vanderburgh Parker, known as "Sans Souci" and located on Merton Road, for the summer.[14]
^Doyle, Jnr, David D. (Oct 2004). ""A Very Proper Bostonian": Rediscovering Ogden Codman and His Late-Nineteenth-Century Queer World". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 13 (4): 446. doi:10.1353/sex.2005.0022. S2CID145674902.
^Ferentinos, Susan. Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 135–7.
