Appreciating Edith Wharton's Other Career John Arthur The library at the Mount, in western Massachusetts. In 1911, her marriage in tatters, Edith Wharton sailed to Europe, where she remained for the rest of her life. Ahead were many productive years of novel writing and a Pulitzer Prize. Behind was the Mount, her country estate in western Massachusetts, to which she applied her formidable design skills. Wharton was no dilettante. In 1897, she and the architect Ogden Codman, who had worked on her homes in New York and Newport, R.I., published "The Decoration of Houses," a book that railed against the decorative excesses of the Gilded Age and called for a return to classical principles like symmetry. Wharton was championing nothing less than an American Renaissance, said Richard Guy Wilson, an architectural historian at the University of Virginia and the author of "Edith Wharton at Home: Life at the Mount," out next week from Monacelli Press ($45). The book, which is illustrated with archival and recent photos of the estate (it currently serves as a cultural center, attracting 30,000 visitors a year), marks the 150th anniversary of Wharton's birth and the 100th anniversary of the year the Mount officially left her hands. What is Edith Wharton's contribution as a designer? "The Decoration of Houses" is arguably the most influential book ever published by an American on interior decoration and design. And there is an element in her fiction that unfortunately a lot of scholars don't recognize: how important setting is. She is what I would call a behavioralist, in the sense that she believes that it is environment that creates us. That can be seen in your quote from her novel "New Year's Day": "The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman's way of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room." You also quote Henry James saying that her taste was "almost too impeccable." Meaning what? That she wanted to control everything. There's this element of exactness. Unfortunately, the interiors of the Mount were not photographed that much, and it's hard to know certain things. But she and Codman outlined a lot in "The Decoration of Houses": What specific rooms are for; the relationship of floor to ceiling to walls; what type of decoration is appropriate and not appropriate; the right sort of furniture. What is the right sort? What they pick as their best example is French 18th-century furniture. But, at a deeper level, they are arguing basically the same thing as the Arts and Crafts movement: "We've got to vacuum out these interiors and get rid of all this horrible Victorian clutter. There's got to be a relationship between exterior and interior and the décor of a room. In her memoir, Wharton wrote, "I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness." Are there things she considered ugly that you or I would not? I do admire a lot of Victorian stuff - for instance, some of the Newport cottages, which she revolts against. The dining room of the Breakers - can you get more calories into that interior? But you have to admire the genius of doing that. She would say, my God, no way! She and Codman argued that decorating should be considered a branch of architecture, "an assertion that each generation seems to discover anew." Shouldn't it be obvious? Of course, architects are the most brilliant people on the face of the earth, and they know everything and can design everything. But the fact of the matter is that interiors are frequently not really well thought out. Working from a large scale down to a small scale does not involve two different sides of the brain, but it is different ways of working. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher also said there had to be this relationship, but in reality, for some reason, it just never gets through to the architect. One of the consequences of this is, very frequently, in schools, interior design is a separate thing from architecture. I don't think it's right, but that's the facts, ma'am. Codman comes off as the villain of your book. When Wharton collapsed in his home in France and died a few months later, he was irritated that she disrupted his social schedule. He was a twerp. He was a talented person, no doubt about that. But he was also extremely interested in his social status. He spent World War II in bed reputedly eating chocolates. So is the lesson to never befriend your architect? Edith's involvement in all of this was so intense. There are those quotes where she's telling him to do this and do that. Boy, can you imagine a client telling an architect today to do that sort of thing? After all her work on the Mount, she lived there for just a decade, and then only part time. Does that make you sad? Edith was a restless soul; there was constant movement in her life. Even when they were in Newport, they were constantly on the move, going to Europe or back and forth to New York. Is it that some people like to move a lot, or is it an escape from something? That's always going to be the question.