Fashionable rooms now had their wooden floors carpeted, often wall to wall. Draperies were lavish, with fabric not just festooned across rods above the windows and hanging as curtains crossing over at the centre, but sometimes covering the walls as well. Other wall treatments included wallpaper and painted decorative effects such as marbling, graining and stencilling. Walls, furniture coverings and curtains might have the same pattern, frequently of flowers or of country scenes, sometimes of stripes (evoked by the military mood). Pale colours, with yellows and lime-greens among the most popular, gave rooms an airy look.

The architect Sir John Soane, a pupil of Henry Holland, was particularly skilled at creating rooms in an uncompromising Neoclassical style, with their rather cool austerity softened by the play of light from lantern windows and domes in arched recesses.

Rapid developments in British cotton manufacture made roller-printed chintzes and other fashionable materials available in larger quantities. Block and roller-printed wallpapers provided replicas of textile hangings and painted decoration. Tastes might change with whimsical speed and the fashionable set could now change their printed wallpaper and fabrics within months.

Antique Collector MagazineMirror glass, much used on the walls, gave a feeling of greater space and also improved the light — as did large windows and, at night, cascading cut-glass chandeliers. A few people might have portraits by Thomas Lawrence on their walls, but this favourite artist of the Regent was much in demand and his fees high. Sporting pictures by Ben Marshall and scenes by J. M.W. Turner were also in great demand. Old Masters were in favour, too, and might be picked up in one of the London auction houses, for London had become the centre of the European art market.

Family and guests would wander around informally through a suite of several rooms — the library (now used as a general living room), the drawing room, and the breakfast room. The rooms were filled with light pouring in at the carefully placed long windows, and often opened onto a conservatory.

With houseplants in the rooms, views through the large windows and, for the first time, French windows opening directly onto the garden, inside and outside formed a harmonious whole. This was, after all, the age of the Romantic movement in literature and art, which rated instinct and emotion highly and revelled in nature and landscape.

The linking of indoors and outdoors was fostered particularly by the landscape gardener Humphrey Repton, who was for several years in partnership with John Nash, the architect who is most readily associated with the Regency period. Nash was the Prince

Regent’s most favoured architect after 1812. He was responsible for developing the area of London that stretches north from Pall Mall as far as Regent’s Park.

 

Buildings for a Gentle Life

Prime examples of Nash’s grandest style are the magnificent buildings around Regent’s Park — massive villas and terraces whose brilliant ivory-white stucco facades, with columns, pediments and side pavilions, draw heavily on styles that were used in Greek, Palladian and Tuscan architecture.

Their less grand counterparts are seen in the terraces, crescents, squares and villas designed by Nash, Decimus Burton, Joseph Kay and others, which sprang up in several other cities, spa towns and seaside resorts such as Tunbridge Wells and Hove, as one of the most memorable manifestations of Regency taste.

Under low-pitched roofs and wide eaves, the walls are of brick, or smoothed over with painted stucco, and pierced by tall windows with thin glazing bars and no surround. There is little decoration, but the facades may be gracefully dressed with bow-fronts, umbrella- roofed cast-iron balconies and verandahs, and curved or angled bay windows. The houses were increasingly built with convenience in mind, and architects finally abandoned the symmetry first taken up in Elizabethan times.

In such elegant surroundings, the genteel gatherings of the social season at spas and resorts were generally presided over by a master of ceremonies. Foremost among these was ‘Beau’ (George) Brummel, a close friend of the Prince Regent and a leader of society. Beau Brummel was notoriously fastidious in all matters of taste, and high society lived in fear of attracting his criticism — until he gambled his way into debt and in 1816 fled penniless to France. There he finally died in a madhouse. While Beau Brummel ruled, he was the arbiter of what gentlemen wore — dark, simply-cut coats, trousers rather than breeches, and fussy neckwear. Their ladies could have stepped straight off Grecian urns, with their hair dressed high in Grecian topknots and wearing what was virtually a uniform for the first two decades of the century — long dresses of muslin, with short sleeves, low neckline and a waistline raised almost to the armpits.

 

Romantic Themes Take over

Among the Romantics, fervour for the picturesque embraced not just nature but far-off countries and times. It encouraged a last great flowering of Chinoiserie during this period, as well as the introduction of some attractively novel Indian features in architecture.

No single building demonstrates this breadth of Regency taste better than the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, a small house enlarged for the Prince Regent first as a severely Classical domed temple by Henry Holland, and then redesigned by John Nash as an elegant, gleaming confection of Mogul domes, minarets, pierced stonework and crenellations. Inside, too, its imaginative and palatial rooms, some rich with gilding and drapery, some bright and airy, were a medley of delicate Classical restraint, Egyptian splendour and Eastern fantasy.

 

Towards Victorian Values

Nash was also one of the growing number of architects who were enthused by the Gothic Revival, which first surfaced in thermos and was now seizing the imagination of architects’ patrons, as it was writers and their readers. Old houses that had grown piecemeal, receiving asymmetrical additions over the centuries, fitted perfectly into the Romantics’ concept of beauty. If a genuine Medieval house was not available, then an imitation could be built and tricked out as a baronial fortress or a more modest cottage ome, or `ornamented cottage’.

As the decades of the mid-19th century unfolded, style was to shift more and more towards the Gothic. And accompanying this move came a more sombre and ponderous mood, the decline of informality and the reassertion of dignified ceremony.

Meanwhile in the larger world, where matters of fashion were remote, the Industrial Revolution was well under way, mechanisation was drawing production into factories and the factories were pulling in thousands to work exhaustingly long hours. The new methods made possible the great age of mass production that brought objects of fashion and style within easy reach of the middle classes of the Victorian age.

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