Vice and virtue in Victorian architecture

Victorian houses in America differ so radically from their 21st-century counterparts in style and layout that they beg us to ask why.

The Victorians lavished ornament on the outsides of their houses to a degree that has seemed excessive, even repulsive, to later generations. They indulged in architectural whimsies like turrets, stained-glass windows, widow's walks, muliple gables, and exotic paint schemes that expressed the exuberance of the age (we don't think of the Victorians as exuberant, but they were) as well as its ostentation. Only the passage of many decades has made these excesses seem venerable and quaint rather than sentimental and tasteless.

But other features of Victorian houses reveal forgotten virtues of the people who lived in them. Nearly all Victorian houses had relatively large, roofed verandas; middle-class houses usually had a front parlor which was reserved for the reception of guests; and they built their houses close to the street, putting their grander houses on big, busy streets or on corners.

Thus, in Greensboro, the Sternbergers built large houses that fronted Summit Avenue, a road which Caesar Cone himself helped finance as a major thoroughfare between his textile mills and Greensboro's downtown.

The Victorians' devotion of so much of their houses' square footage and design to spaces for social interaction tells us how greatly they valued the virtues of hospitality and engagement in community life. Read, for example, some of the advertising copy that went along with the house plans I've posted above, which were drawn up for a physician:

The walls are wainscoted, ceiling finished in wood, giving an old-time welcome and an hospitable appearance to those coming in to visit the family, and that which should be felt on entering any house, no matter how humble it may be . . . . The Doctor said he wanted no paint, no graining, but his pine was to be pine--his ash, ash. No deception was to be put in his house and he has got none . . . This home is not an expensive one, but a home in every sense of the word, where the homely virtues daily grow stronger, and the true, manly acts of kindness, charity and good feeling toward all men are the ruling principle.

It is revealing, too, that the doctor's house was built so that he could receive patients there, in his own home.

Now compare some typical real-estate advertising copy from last Sunday's News & Record:

Backyard private paradise offers multi-level outdoor living w/gazebo, hot tub, & bar. Hardwoods . . . . Beautiful sunroom that overlooks yard and backs up to woods . . . . Fireplace w/gas logs, renovated Kitchen w/stainless gas range . . . . Great ranch on cul-de-sac! Den with skylight and wet bar. Extra large Master Bedroom.

On the whole, I think it's fair to say that the Victorians saw their houses as places to exercise and strengthen "the homely virtues" of both public and private charity, kindness, and hospitality. They believed in this strongly enough that saying so helped sell house plans! Whereas we (myself very much included) tend to see our houses primarily as retreats for privacy, restoration, and pleasure. Or, as Philip Bess once put is, as places devoted to "the care and tending of the autonomous self."

Of course, we're never going back to the Victorian way of life. But I think we could learn a thing or two from they way they thought about their houses.