October 25, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode of Home in Progress, host Dan Hansen explores the rich and intricate world of Victorian architecture—a collection of styles that flourished during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901.Hansen unpacks the key visual hallmarks of the period—turrets, spindles, gingerbread trim, bay windows, and ornate color schemes—and the social and technological forces that made them possible. He traces how the Industrial Revolution transformed craftsmanship, allowing mass production to bring beauty and ornamentation within reach of the middle class.Listeners will hear the dramatic story of the Great Fire of 1834 that destroyed the Palace of Westminster and sparked a design competition that launched one of the most influential collaborations in architectural history: Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. Hansen explains how their Gothic Revival masterpiece reshaped British identity and inspired the exuberant architectural language that became synonymous with the Victorian era.The episode also highlights the philosophical contributions of thinkers like John Ruskin and Pugin, who saw beauty and ornament as moral imperatives—an idea that spread from cathedrals to cottages. Hansen then follows the movement’s evolution into ever-richer styles like High Victorian Gothic and Queen Anne, before charting its decline under the influence of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.Finally, the episode reflects on the lasting legacy of Victorian architecture—its optimism, craftsmanship, and celebration of individuality—and concludes with a look at Benjamin Moore’s 2026 Color of the Year and a special listener contest.Episode Timeline00:00 — Introduction and Overview00:07 — Victorian Architecture: An Era of Styles01:52 — The Great Fire of 1834: A Turning Point02:54 — The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact04:57 — The Rise of the Middle Class and Architectural Changes07:36 — The Gothic Revival and Its Champions12:38 — John Ruskin: Beauty as a Moral Good17:14 — From Philosophy to Painted Ladies18:24 — Ruskin’s Influence and High Victorian Gothic19:45 — Ornamentation and the Machine Age20:44 — Queen Anne: Victorian Eclecticism at Its Peak23:39 — Inside the Victorian Home: Layers of Luxury27:54 — The Decline of Victorian Design32:24 — The Lasting Legacy33:59 — Benjamin Moore’s 2026 Color of the Year and Contest
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, thanks for tuning in. You're listening to Home
and Progress, sponsored by Repcolite Paints and Benjamin Moore. Now,
on today's episode, we're going to dig into another architectural
style in our ongoing series, and this one's got a
fascinating story behind it. We'll be exploring Victorian architecture. You know,
those ornate homes with turrets, spindles, gingerbread, trim bay windows,
(00:22):
bold colors, you know the ones. They're impossible, absolutely impossible
to miss. But here's what most people don't know. Victorian
architecture isn't actually one style. It's a whole collection of
styles from Gothic Revival to Queen Anne, all happening during
Queen Victoria's reign from eighteen thirty seven to nineteen oh one.
So it's actually Victorian era architecture that we're talking about
(00:45):
when we talk about Victorian architecture. All right, Now, all
of that decoration that we think of when we think
about Victorian homes, you know, all that elaborate ornamentation that
we associate with the houses. It wasn't just about showing off.
The Victorians had this belief that ornament was connected to
moral goodness. And I know that sounds a little bit
strange to modern ears, but stick with me. We're going
(01:08):
to explore exactly how that idea developed and why it
led to some of the most maximalist architecture in history.
So we'll talk about that. We're also going to talk
about why just a few decades later people were so
exhausted by all that excess that they embraced the simpler
arts and crafts aesthetic that we covered, you know, I
think a couple months ago. All Right. The whole thing
(01:30):
is this big story about faith fire. Fires involved the
Industrial Revolution. It's a story about moral crusades. It's a
story about how ideas shape the buildings that we live in.
So it's a huge story. And to understand all of it,
or at least the part we're going to cover, we
got to start with that fire that I talked about,
(01:52):
all right, So picture London on October sixteenth of eighteen
thirty four. There will not be a quiz on the dates,
but October sixteen, eighteen thirty four, the medieval Palace of Westminster,
which is home to Parliament and has been for centuries.
That building is burning, all right. October sixteen, eighteen thirty four,
(02:12):
it's on fire. Massive flames light up the Thames as
thousands gather on bridges to watch history. You know, burn.
It's a national disaster, but it's also an opportunity. The
decision about what's going to rise from those ashes ends
up defining an entire era of architecture. Okay, So before
(02:34):
we get to that, though, I do need to back
up just a little bit, because to really understand Victorian architecture,
we need to understand the Victorians themselves, you know, what
they believe, the world they were living in, and so on.
So let's look back at that just briefly, and then
we'll get back to that fire. All right, So let's
go to like eighteen thirties, eighteen forties. At that point,
(02:55):
Britain is being transformed by forces that really no other
earlier generation could have imagined. And I think it's hard
for us sometimes in the modern world to think about that,
but think about your grandparents. You know, what they saw,
you know, the changes that they saw over their lifetime
is pretty dramatic. When you think about all the things
(03:18):
that they saw. We make jokes about how they can't
handle technology, you know, how like my grandparents can't handle technology,
or my mom and dad struggle with technology. But think
about it, you know, when they were little kids, I
don't even know if paper existed at that point. And now,
you know, just in seventy years, they've got iPhones or whatever,
(03:38):
and we've expected them to figure out everything from pencils
all the way up to laptops, and they've done a
pretty good job. You know. I know we've got to
get a hold of them and help them out at
inconvenient hours when they've forgotten their passwords to everything. But
think you know, they they mastered the pencil and now
(03:58):
they're trying to mask uter the iPhone or the iPad
or whatever. So our parents have seen a lot of changes.
Our grandparents have seen crazy changes. Well, same thing was
happening in the eighteen thirties eighteen forties for the Victorians.
You know, they were seeing changes that no other generation
really could have imagined. The Industrial Revolution. It's in full swing. Factories,
(04:19):
they're roaring railways, they're connecting cities that once felt a
world apart. You know, everything's connected now, everything's within reach.
New technologies are flooding the market with goods that used
to be handmade. You know, for the first time you
can mass produce beauty. You know, carved wooden brackets, ornate
iron railings, elaborate plaster moldings. Things that used to require
(04:42):
skilled artisans can now be stamped out by machine. So decoration,
you know, it used to be rare, it used to
be costly. Now it's affordable. That's really important, you know,
to consider everything that's coming At the same time. Money's
flowing in all kinds of new directions. You know, it's
not just the aristocracy who can build great, big, grand
houses anymore. A whole new middle class is rising. Factory owners, merchants, professionals.
(05:08):
They're all coming into their own a little bit, and
they want their homes to reflect that success. You know,
they're learning their knowledge, their place in the world, in society.
But this new industrial age also is a little bit
scary to them. It feels cold, it feels mechanical. You know,
the air's full of smoke. The cities are expanding faster
(05:28):
than anybody can really process and manage, and a lot
of people are uneasy. So the medieval world, with its cathedrals,
it's handcrafted goods and all of that, and its sense
of spiritual order all of that starts to look comforting.
You know, Romanticism is sweeping through art and literature. People
are reading Sir Walter Scott's novels about knights and castles.
(05:50):
They're looking at Gothic ruins through a haze of nostalgia,
you know, the good old days kind of a thing.
That's the world that young Queen Victoria inherits in eighteen
thirty seven, and when she takes the throne at just
eighteen years old, and the architecture of her reign captures
all of these contradictions. You know, modern machines, building, all
these things that get layered and you know, crafted into
(06:13):
something that almost has a medieval look. You've got industrial
wealth wrapped up in spiritual you know, ornamentation, which I'm
going to explain all of that in a little bit.
You've got mass production, but it's kind of disguised as craftsmanship.
All right, all of that's going on, all right, that's
what the Victorian era is like, that's what these people
are living with. Now, let's get back to that fire,
(06:35):
all right, the fire on October sixteenth, eighteen thirty four,
when Parliament is burning to the ground, all right, when
that building burned. A design competition was launched for the
new building. Because we burned one down, we got to
replace it. We need a new one. Let's find one.
Let's have a competition. You know. It's kind of like
what we do. We do a lot of little competitions
(06:56):
and contests. I'll explain a new one that's running at
the end of the show. But they were doing the
same thing, probably giving away gift certificates to Repcolite or
something like that. But they had a contest to see
who was going to be designing this new building. And
they had a couple requirements that had to be done
in the Gothic or Elizabethan style and classic architecture, you know,
(07:19):
Greek columns, Roman temples. That was banned. You know, it
felt too pagan, it felt too French. Nobody wanted that.
Nobody wanted it to feel too French, too pagan. Britain
wanted something that looked distinctly English and morally upright, all right,
So that's the contest that they're running. The winning design
came from two men, Charles Barry, an experienced architect, and
(07:42):
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. He was a young passionate Gothic revivalist,
and I want to take just a quick second here
to say that for any history buffs out there, go
subscribe to the Home in Progress podcast or at least
check it out. Next Tuesday, I'm going to drop a
bonus episod so that dives into the full story but
(08:02):
behind this fire plus the crazy partnership between Charles Berry
and Augustus Pugin. I can't get into all of it here,
but it's a great story. It's funny, it's a little
bit funny, it's tragic, and it's honestly kind of unbelievable
in certain regards. Just to give you a quick teaser,
the British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne at the time called
(08:22):
the cause of the fire one of the greatest instances
of stupidity on records. So we'll talk about that and
why it was so stupid, and also we'll talk about
why the working relationship between Barry and Pugin spiraled into
a feud that lasted nearly a century. So a ton
of drama in that story, and we'll cover it all
in that bonus episode next Tuesday that will drop if
(08:42):
you're subscribed to the podcast. You'll get the notification automatically
and you won't miss it. Otherwise, you can catch it
anytime at repco light dot com. All right, back to
the story at hand. As I mentioned, Charles Berry and
Augustus Pugin worked together on this new project for the
Palace of Westminster Barry. Charles Berry handled the layout. Pugin
(09:03):
poured his heart into the whole Gothic thing, you know,
all the detailing, the spires, the arches, the tracery. But
he was more than a decorator. He was an absolute crusader.
And this is really important to the story. In eighteen
thirty six, a couple of years later, he published a
book called Contrasts. And on one page in that book,
and you can go find the book online and kind
(09:23):
of flip through the page as it's interesting, But on
one page he draw a medieval church, you know, soaring, spiritual,
full of purpose, and then on the facing page he'd
have a modern factory or you know, some utilitarian workhouse.
It was ugly, it was soulless, it was dehumanizing, and
his point was really really blunt. You know, the architecture
of the Middle Ages was Christian and honest, and the
(09:45):
architecture of modern industrial England was morally bankrupt, you know,
that was his idea. He believed that architecture revealed the
soul of a nation. So a Gothic building, he felt,
shows its structure honestly. You know, you look at it
and you can see the flying buttresses doing their job.
Nothing's hidden, nothing's fake. Classical buildings, on the other hand,
(10:08):
sometimes used things like even decorative columns, you know, columns
that didn't do anything. You know, they didn't hold anything up.
They were just there for looks. It was a lie
in stone, as he saw it. It's interesting Pugin actually
converted to Catholicism in eighteen thirty four, the same year,
you know, the Palace of Westminster burned. And what's fascinating
(10:29):
in that. The reason I say that's interesting is that
his conversion was deeply architectural in nature. You know, it
was theological too, but deeply deeply architectural. He didn't just
study medieval churches. He found his faith in the architecture
that they were built with. You know, to Pugin, Gothic
architecture wasn't just beautiful. It was true, every point at arch,
(10:51):
every carved detail, all of It was a visible expression
of faith. You know. It was like praying in stone
in a way. I know it sounds a little weird,
but that's what was going on. He saw so much
beauty and so much truth in it, so much power
in that architecture and that conviction that he had, that conversion,
and all of that shaped everything that he designed afterwards,
(11:12):
so churches, altars, tiles, wallpaper, even furniture, and all of
it came together really, really spectacularly in his work on
the New Palace of Westminster. He worked himself to exhaustion
over the course of his life, and he died in
eighteen fifty two. You know, he's just forty years old,
so workaholic. He really poured everything he had into this stuff.
(11:33):
But even though he died young, his influence was massive.
He transformed Gothic revival from this quirky, old fashioned kind
of thing into a moral and national cause. And the
Houses of Parliament, you know, the new building that he designed,
completed way after his death in the eighteen sixties, still
stands as his monument, you know, a building that declared
to the world that Gothic wasn't just beautiful, it was British.
(11:55):
It was moral, it was official, it was upright, it
was true, all of those things. And again, I've got
way more info to that story. Subscribe to the podcast
and you'll catch that on Wednesday. A lot of really
interesting stuff in that, all right. So that's Pugin and
if he made Gothic moral, John Ruskin, another guy we
(12:15):
need to talk about, made it emotional. You know. He
made beauty itself a moral good. And we're going to
get to that and how that shook out right after.
This Home in Progress is brought to you by Repcolite
Paints and Benjamin Moore, Top tier paint expert advice. Your
next project is way easier than you think it's going
to be. All Right, We've looked at Augustus Pugin and
(12:38):
his role. Now let's look at John Ruskin. And while
Pugin argued that Gothic design was moral in nature, you know,
we talked about that. While he did that, John Ruskin
took it further and advocated that beauty and ornamentation themselves
were moral goods. Ruskin, he wasn't an architect, He was
an art critic. He was a social philosopher. You know.
(13:00):
He was kind of like a nineteenth century influencer, you know,
rather than creating little TikTok videos or Instagram posts. He
was writing. And the books he wrote, The Seven Lamps
of Architecture, the Stones of Venice. Some of these books
were best sellers, and they do sound kind of exciting, right,
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, you know, Sinbad and the
(13:22):
Seven Lamps of Architecture, or Indiana Jones and the Stones
of Venice. Really they could have been movies, but you know,
movies weren't all that big back then, not like they
are today, and so he just wrote books. But they
were best sellers and they went and inspired generations of builders,
artists and reformers. But the ideas in the books about ornament,
(13:44):
they were radical, and they changed how people thought about
decoration beyond just you know, in that era, it really
changed it. You know, moving forward, we're still living with
some of the ideas that he was advocating in those books.
Here's his main argument. He's floating the idea that ornament
isn't a luxury. You know, decoration isn't just a luxury.
(14:06):
It's not something that you tack on after the real
building work is done. Ornament or decoration or whatever you
want to call it is essential to human dignity and
spiritual health. That's his argument. Now, why why in the
world is this important or essential? He says, it's because
when we create ornament, it requires creativity, it requires skill,
(14:27):
and it requires joy. So when a medieval craftsman would
carve a column, you know, the very top of the
column or something, or when he would carve a decorative
stone way up high on a ceiling, when he did that,
you know, so high that nobody's really even going to
see it, but he's still putting all this design and
intricacy into that work. When he's doing that, he's expressing
(14:47):
that craftsman is expressing his God given creativity. So that
part's really important. And also he loved the little irregularities
in the carvings, you know, the uneven leaves, the lopsided
faces that show up from time to time. Those aren't
flaws to Ruskin. They're absolute proof of human freedom. They're
absolutely beautiful. You know, a machine makes perfect copies, and
(15:09):
that's boring. A person makes variations, and those variations are
the mark of a soul at work. So big heady
thinky people stuff here. You know, that's what's going on.
Ruskin went so far as to claim that you could
judge the moral health of an entire society by its architecture.
So Medieval Venice, with its richly carved Gothic palaces, was
a place that celebrated creativity. Renaissance Venice, with its restrained
(15:33):
classical symmetry, had already started to value order and precision
over the spirit of the craftsman. You know, that's what
Ruskin is saying here. Ruskin also believed that ornament taught people.
You know, a building carved with flowers, animals, figures, stories,
you know, all of that play out on the walls
of the building. Those things could educate, and they could uplift.
(15:55):
It could bring beauty into everyday life, and it would
make the ordinary sacred. You know. The same idea is
true of great, big, amazing, beautiful churches. You know, sometimes
the argument is that they shouldn't be there, you know,
that money should be spent on something else. And yet
the argument that could be made against it is that
(16:16):
by having it in these instances and in these buildings,
it's free and available for anybody to experience and to enjoy.
And we all work through our daily lives, you know,
the grind and the mundane of it, and we can stop,
buy some of these massively beautiful places and experience just
a touch of the sacred in our ordinary life. You know,
(16:38):
that's the notion that he's expressing. A plane wall teaches nothing.
An ornamented wall is kind of like a public gift,
so to Rusk, and ornamentation and decoration weren't frivolous, they
were morally essential. Beauty wasn't a luxury, you know, it
was a necessity for human flourishing. You know, if we
wanted to become the best we could be, we need
(16:59):
this beauty in our our buildings and our architecture and
our homes. That's the idea. A plain, undecorated building, you know,
that's not to him a sign of modesty or a
sign of honest simplicity. It's a sign of spiritual poverty
in a sense, and it's a denial of human creativity.
All right. That's the beginning of the story of you know,
Victorian architecture and all that it entails. And it's a
(17:21):
quick look at some of the key characters and the
idea is driving them. But how do we get from
those ideas, you know, lofty ideas about moral the moral
power of beauty. How do we get from that to
the multi colored, painted lady Victorian houses that we picture
in our minds. Well, we're going to get to that
right after this. This is home in progress where the
to do list is long. And that's all right. We're
(17:44):
not crabbing at you. We're not going to yell at you.
That's how it is. It's how ours is too. It's
probably supported by Repcollite Paints and Benjamin Moore because home
projects are easier when you've got people you can trust.
All right, So how do we get from all of
that philosophy stuff, that heady stuff to the bold, extravagant,
you know, opulent houses, the painted ladies that we think
(18:05):
about today when we think about Victorian architecture. Well, to
get to this part of the story, we need to
remember a couple of things. And I hinted at him
and talked briefly about him at the very beginning. But
we're in an age at this point of mass production.
So Ruskin, you know, we specifically talked about him last segment.
He personally hated machine made ornament, you know, that was
(18:27):
something that he absolutely detested it lacked the irregularity of
the human hand. He hated the perfection with which these
things could be stamped out. But his followers and the
public missed that subtlety. You know, as they're processing and
adapting and applying his ideas, they missed the nuance there.
(18:49):
They latched onto the bigger idea that decoration equals beauty
and beauty equals virtue. But they missed the whole concept
that machine made ornamentation is a negative. So they're really
good with the idea of machine made ornamentation for reasons
we'll get to. And they're operating with the idea that, okay,
(19:10):
decorations beauty, beauty is virtuous. So if you can afford
to decorate, you really should be. So now you can
start to see where things start to get a little exaggerated,
a little exuberant, let's say. And you know, by the
eighteen sixties eighteen seventies, Ruskin's influence is showing up everywhere
in what we call high Victorian Gothic. You know, you're
(19:33):
getting bold, polychromatic brickwork, pointed arches and multiple colors, heavily
carved details, unapologetic ornament It's just gone nuts at this point.
And there's one big reason all of this could happen.
We've already talked about it. It's technology. You know. The
Industrial Revolution made it possible for people to be able
to order decorative pieces from a catalog. You know, if
(19:54):
you want to fancy brackets for your porch, all of
a sudden, now you can flip through some pages and
and there they are. They look good, and they're in stock.
You know, Amazon's going to drop them right off. If
you want cast iron railings or you know, press tin ceilings, whatever,
just pick your pattern from the book and it's all
going to be shipped to you by rail. So for
the first time, ordinary people could afford ornament. You didn't
(20:17):
need to be wealthy to have an ornate house. You
just needed to be middle class. And that was a
whole new thing going on. And if Pugen and Ruskin,
the people that, you know a lot of people were
aware of their writings and their thoughts, if they were
preaching that ornament was morally uplifting, then why wouldn't a
respectable middle class homeowner want as much ornamentation as possible.
(20:39):
I want to be as moral as possible, so I'm
going to put on wallpaper on top of my wallpaper. Well,
that idea eventually finds its most vivid expression in Queen
Anne's style. Now, I mentioned it earlier, but there's no
one single Victorian style of architecture. We talked about that. Instead,
the Victorian era saw numerous types of architecture arise, and
(20:59):
all of them are considered Victorian. There's Gothic Revival we
covered that, there's the Italianate style that took off in
the eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, Second Empire style that arrived
in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, and Queen Anne.
That style came about by the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties.
This is the style that most of us picture when
(21:20):
we hear the word Victorian. Now, the funny thing about
Queen Ann's style is that it really doesn't have all
that much to do, if anything, to do with the
real Queen Anne from the early seventeen hundreds. You know,
Victorians just borrowed the name. You know, they needed something
that sounded respectable, that sounded historic, so they came up
with Queen Anne, and it gave their new style a
(21:42):
touch of old world class, right, what they actually were
doing was creating this style that was this huge mix
of everything they loved. It was absolutely as eclectic as possible.
You know, a Queen Anne house, you can't draw it symmetrically,
you know, on paper, you can't draw it metrically. It's
all towers and turrets, you know, wrap around porches, bay
(22:03):
windows and gables. You know, pretty much every single angle
that you look at reveal something new. You've got a
stained glass window over here, a big band of you know,
fish scale shingles over there. You've got turned spindles, you know,
carved brackets, intricately, intricately carved brackets, bits of trim wherever
you look. You know, it's just a lot going on.
(22:25):
And that's just those elements, you know, those trim elements
or whatever you want to call them. You've got the
color on top of that. And we've referred to these
houses already as painted ladies. But you know, that name's
a name that stuck for a reason. They didn't paint
their house as white. We all know that, you know,
three colors on the house. That was completely conservative at
(22:47):
that point. You know, a painted lady, a true painted lady,
might wear five six even seven colors all at once,
and each one is going to be highlighting a different detail,
you know, the gables, the porch posts, the gingerbread trim,
the window frames. It was architectural drama made visible through paint.
You know, they highlighted all of these different elements with
(23:08):
different colors. You know, it was crazy in that regard.
The textures. They were just as lively as the colors.
You know, you might have smooth clapboard siding over here,
you know, on the first floor. Then you might have
patterned shingles, you know, maybe scalloped or fish scale or
something like that on the upper story, and then a
little half timbering up in the gables, different materials doing
(23:29):
different jobs, all loudly, loudly on display. Victorians weren't trying
to hide construction. They were celebrating every single aspect of
their home. Now inside, the same thing happened. The same
thing continued through. You've got high ceilings with elaborate plaster work,
pocket doors between parlors, built in cabinets. Every single room
(23:49):
had its own personality and its own purpose, and that
purpose was largely expressed through decoration. The Hacking and Hume
homes in Muskegan absolute, you know, stellar examples of all
of this. If you've never been through those homes and
you don't know what I'm talking about, look into it.
You know, you can arrange tours. I think they're open
(24:11):
for tours from May through October. You'd have to check
out their website. But Hackley and Hume homes, you know,
excellent examples of this Queen Anne style that I'm talking about.
All Right, at the end, let's recap and put all
of this together and hopefully answer that big question that
we started with, And that's why did Victorians build this way?
You know, why all the layers, why the flourishes, why
(24:33):
the sense that no surface should be left untouched and undecorated. Well,
five things to take take away from this. First off,
they did that because they believed that beauty mattered. You know,
it wasn't luxury, it was essential. Augustus Pugin, we talked
about him. He taught that honest ornament was morally right.
Ruskin taught that it reflected human creativity and dignity. So
if you could make something beautiful, they would argue that
(24:56):
you should. A plane building wasn't noble. It was almost
a failure of goodness itself. So they did it because
beauty mattered. Second, they did it because they could for
the first time. You know, we talked about that industry
was making beauty affordable. The moral urged to build beautifully
lined up perfectly. You know, everything came together with the
ability to be able to do it. Third, they built
(25:18):
this way because in this new industrial society, your home
mattered more than ever as a statement of who you were.
You know, it's always been true to some degree, but
now at this point, the middle class could finally afford to,
you know, make a literal statement, you know, with their homes.
They could talk about who they were through their homes.
And in a fast growing city full of newcomers, family
(25:39):
names didn't mean as much anymore. But your house that
did that could tell people exactly who you were and
how you fit into society. You know. The style of
the home, its ornament, its color, all of it communicated
taste and education and refinement. So they built that way
because it was important in that regard. A fourth reason
they did it is because they were anxious. You know,
(26:00):
we talked about it. Life was fast at that point,
it was noisy, it was uncertain, and they did what
we do. You know, we look back to what we
call the good old days, you know, the quieter times,
the time when there weren't eight million people on the
road trying to go exactly where I want to go.
You know, we remember those days when man, maybe the
(26:21):
roads had a biker or two on them, you know,
and that was a pedal biker, not even a motorcycle rider.
It was just quiet and we could go wherever we wanted.
They were living the same way back then. They were
inundated with the whole Industrial Revolution and a lot of
growth that happened very fast, a lot of noise, a
lot of busyness, and they just started looking back to
(26:42):
historical stuff and saying, man, those good old days, sure
do like that. And that's how Gothic and Italianate and
Queen Anne, all of those styles kind of came to be,
and they gave people a sense of comfort and continuity
and a link to the past, you know, something solid
to the good old days. Fifth reason they built this way,
and this one's a no brainer. They did it because
(27:04):
they thought it looked good. You know, they really did
find beauty in this. You know, we might see clutter,
but they saw craftsmanship and care, they saw beauty in
all of that. So that's the story behind the growth
of what we refer to as the Victorian era in architecture.
But there's one more important part to the story that
I want to cover, and that's its decline. You know,
(27:24):
why did it all drop off? When? And when did
that happen? We're going to get to that right after this.
You're listening to Home in Progress, where the projects are real,
the mistakes, they're educational, sometimes painful, mostly educational. And the
only thing more stubborn than that old wallpaper on your
bathroom wall is your determination to get it fixed. Proudly
(27:46):
sponsored by Repcolite Paints and Benjamin Moore Paint with a purpose,
people who care, and everything you need to get the
job done right. All right, let's wrap this conversation up
by looking at the eventual decline of the Victorian style. Now,
by the time Queen Victoria died in nineteen oh one,
the style that bore her name was already fading. You know, interestingly,
(28:07):
the same currents of thought that helped create it, you know,
especially Ruskin's love of honest handcraft, you know, handcrafted goods,
that idea you know, the love of those handcrafted items
was turning against the movement, the Arts and crafts movement.
We talked about it a few weeks about ago, but
it was led by figures like William Morris, and that began.
(28:28):
That movement began as a kind of moral correction for
the Victorians. Morris agreed with Ruskin that medieval craftsmanship, you know,
literally making things by hand, represented honesty and dignity, and
it was the better way to go. He completely rejected
the mass produced ornamentation that was filling up these late
(28:49):
Victorian homes. Now we talked about it already, but Ruskin
himself wasn't big on how people adopted these mass produced items.
He didn't like that either. He did like that handcrafted
goodness at hand crafted goodness. But Morris, you know, he
took it to a new level. He was a loud voice,
and he steered things in a completely new direction. You know,
he advocated for simplicity, for restraint, for visible, honest construction,
(29:14):
actual handcrafted work. And if you'd like more info on that,
go back again to the podcast and check out episode
four twenty four where I really dig into William Morris
and why he was so important. It's a really good segment,
and it'd be really nice to pair that one with
this one, you know, so after catching this one, go
(29:35):
check out that one, episode four twenty four. It's like
pairing the right meal with the right wine or something
like that. That's how wonderful these two would be together. Anyway,
William Morris kind of kicked against the Victorian opulence as
he saw it, and he wasn't alone. You know, people
were growing tired of the excess, you know, the layers
upon layers, the seven color paint schemes. They wanted something,
(29:56):
you know, more authentic, less busy. They wanted colors that
they could member when they needed to repaint. I'm convinced
of that, you know, I'm looking at this from a
practical point of view. You know, think about it. You
paint your bathroom right, and then three years later, you know,
unless you save the can or wrote the color down,
none of us have any idea what that color actually
(30:17):
was anymore, right? Can you imagine doing that with seven
colors on the outside of your home and then on
the inside. You know, I did mention the heckleyan humehouses
in Muskegan in the last segment the exteriors of those
houses have thirteen or fourteen different colors on each one,
and the insides, you know, the insides of the homes.
(30:38):
I think in there there's over I believe it's over
one hundred different colors, you know, all kinds of stencil work.
It's nuts, it's amazing. You know, our Meskegan Repcolite has
helped with a lot of the color matching through the
years at those houses, so I know the numbers are
insane for the amount of colors, the number of different
colors in those homes. And one more thing about the
(30:58):
Heckley and Hume homes. The Hackley house features more handcarved
ornamentation the Hume home because money was a little more
of a consideration. That home is going to feature more
machine produced ornamentation. And I could be slightly off on that.
It's been quite a while since I've been there, but
I think I'm right. And more importantly, just go check
(31:19):
those homes out. But my bigger point of bringing those
up again is to say check them out, but also
to talk about the number of colors. You know, can
you imagine one hundred and some colors in your interior?
You would need a full time person just to catalog
and chronicle which colors were used where and which color
was needed when a repaint was necessary. Well, people were
(31:39):
sick of that. They didn't have money for all these
extra people to catalog their colors. They didn't want to
have to go through all of that create databases in
order to figure out what was in the bathroom, you know,
color wise. They wanted simplicity, They wanted to move away
from all of that busyness, and so people like William
Morris their idea started to catch on. New modernist thinkers
(32:01):
were declaring things like ornament is crime. You know, ornament
was beauty not even too long from this point, but
now it's completely flipped on its head, and ornament is
crime and something, you know, another mantra that came out
of this era. It's something that we still hear today.
Less is more, you know, that's where that idea comes from,
a direct reaction to the Victorian era. But even so,
(32:25):
with all of that said, it's really important to point
out that the Victorians left us with something really amazing.
You know, their architecture shaped our cities in tons of ways.
You know, they filled all of our cities with imagination.
You know, they're row houses, their churches, their their their
train stations, whatever their public buildings. They're still among the
(32:46):
most recognizable and beloved buildings in the world. You know,
we love looking at Victorian homes as we drive around
through neighborhoods. It's just it's so intriguing. It's so amazing,
you know, to see all of what's going on in them.
So even though we may don't maybe don't want that
for ourselves, it's still wonderful to see that, and it
(33:06):
really creates a lot of interest. They left a powerful
idea behind, you know, that architecture isn't just engineering, it's communication.
You know. It should be expressive, it should be varied,
it should be meaningful, It should tell stories, it should
evoke emotions, you know, and that's an idea that we
still hold on to and one that will never go
away and shouldn't go away. You know, we talk about
(33:26):
it at Repcolite with paint colors, you know, the paint
colors you choose, that that should tell a story. It
shouldn't just be well that tan matches with whatever tan
in your couch. You know, that's important, but having that
vision for where you want to go with a room,
the story you want that room to tell. It sounds crazy,
but the paint color can help you get there. And
(33:46):
that idea doesn't necessarily start with the Victorian movement, but
it really really came to the four you know, the
forefront in the Victorian era. All Right, speaking about telling
your story with color, I want to talk briefly about
Benjamin Moore's new color of the Year for twenty twenty six,
and I don't have much time left, but I want
to say that they revealed it last week, and if
(34:08):
you don't know, it's silhouette. It's a brown color with
hints of charcoal in it. It's really earthy. It's pretty
much what a lot of people were predicting, at least
the type of color. You know on earthy color and
the supporting color trends colors, they're all earthy as well,
and they work really well with it. Now, over the
next few weeks, from time to time, we're going to
talk about these new colors, how to work with them,
(34:30):
why it's worth bothering with all of those things. But
I bring it up right now, mostly because way earlier
in this episode I mentioned a contest that we're running
right now, and I told you that I get to
it by the end. So here's the deal. Find Repcolite
on Facebook and Instagram and you'll find a post showing
you some of these color trends for twenty twenty six.
(34:50):
That post has all of the details for the contest.
But here's the quick scoop. Go there and in the
comments on one or both Facebook and Instagram. In the
comment on either one of those or both, write down
which of the color trends colors moves you to paint
a room in your house. You know, all you got
to do is say rain dance moves me to paint
my living room something like that. Super easy. Tell us
(35:11):
which color moves you to paint which room in your home.
Every comment you enter counts as an entry into the contest.
And then on November sixteen, I'll draw four random winners
and each one is going to receive a two hundred
and fifty dollars gift certificate to Repcolite. So four huge prizes,
all for leaving a comment on a social media post.
All right, it's all the time we've got today. If
you want to catch this episode again, you can find
(35:32):
it online at Repcolit dot com and don't forget scuff
X from Benjamin Moore is still on sale at all
Repcolite locations through October thirty one. It's over twenty four
bucks off per gallon. It's a huge savings for an
amazing product. That sale is going to end after October
thirty one, so don't miss out. All right, that's going
to do it for this episode of Home in Progress.
Thanks for tuning in. If you liked what you heard
(35:54):
and you want to hear more like this, definitely consider
subscribing to the podcast if you haven't done that already,
and also, if you feel so inclined, leave us a review.
A kindly review will help other people find the show,
and that really helps us out. Thanks again for listening.
I'm Dan Hansen for Home in Progress. I'll see you
next time.
Hey, everybody, thanks for tuning in. You're listening to Home
and Progress, sponsored by Repcolite Paints and Benjamin Moore. Now,
on today's episode, we're going to dig into another architectural
style in our ongoing series, and this one's got a
fascinating story behind it. We'll be exploring Victorian architecture. You know,
those ornate homes with turrets, spindles, gingerbread, trim bay windows,
(00:22):
bold colors, you know the ones. They're impossible, absolutely impossible
to miss. But here's what most people don't know. Victorian
architecture isn't actually one style. It's a whole collection of
styles from Gothic Revival to Queen Anne, all happening during
Queen Victoria's reign from eighteen thirty seven to nineteen oh one.
So it's actually Victorian era architecture that we're talking about
(00:45):
when we talk about Victorian architecture. All right, Now, all
of that decoration that we think of when we think
about Victorian homes, you know, all that elaborate ornamentation that
we associate with the houses. It wasn't just about showing off.
The Victorians had this belief that ornament was connected to
moral goodness. And I know that sounds a little bit
strange to modern ears, but stick with me. We're going
(01:08):
to explore exactly how that idea developed and why it
led to some of the most maximalist architecture in history.
So we'll talk about that. We're also going to talk
about why just a few decades later people were so
exhausted by all that excess that they embraced the simpler
arts and crafts aesthetic that we covered, you know, I
think a couple months ago. All Right. The whole thing
(01:30):
is this big story about faith fire. Fires involved the
Industrial Revolution. It's a story about moral crusades. It's a
story about how ideas shape the buildings that we live in.
So it's a huge story. And to understand all of it,
or at least the part we're going to cover, we
got to start with that fire that I talked about,
(01:52):
all right, So picture London on October sixteenth of eighteen
thirty four. There will not be a quiz on the dates,
but October sixteen, eighteen thirty four, the medieval Palace of Westminster,
which is home to Parliament and has been for centuries.
That building is burning, all right. October sixteen, eighteen thirty four,
(02:12):
it's on fire. Massive flames light up the Thames as
thousands gather on bridges to watch history. You know, burn.
It's a national disaster, but it's also an opportunity. The
decision about what's going to rise from those ashes ends
up defining an entire era of architecture. Okay, So before
(02:34):
we get to that, though, I do need to back
up just a little bit, because to really understand Victorian architecture,
we need to understand the Victorians themselves, you know, what
they believe, the world they were living in, and so on.
So let's look back at that just briefly, and then
we'll get back to that fire. All right, So let's
go to like eighteen thirties, eighteen forties. At that point,
(02:55):
Britain is being transformed by forces that really no other
earlier generation could have imagined. And I think it's hard
for us sometimes in the modern world to think about that,
but think about your grandparents. You know, what they saw,
you know, the changes that they saw over their lifetime
is pretty dramatic. When you think about all the things
(03:18):
that they saw. We make jokes about how they can't
handle technology, you know, how like my grandparents can't handle technology,
or my mom and dad struggle with technology. But think
about it, you know, when they were little kids, I
don't even know if paper existed at that point. And now,
you know, just in seventy years, they've got iPhones or whatever,
(03:38):
and we've expected them to figure out everything from pencils
all the way up to laptops, and they've done a
pretty good job. You know. I know we've got to
get a hold of them and help them out at
inconvenient hours when they've forgotten their passwords to everything. But
think you know, they they mastered the pencil and now
(03:58):
they're trying to mask uter the iPhone or the iPad
or whatever. So our parents have seen a lot of changes.
Our grandparents have seen crazy changes. Well, same thing was
happening in the eighteen thirties eighteen forties for the Victorians.
You know, they were seeing changes that no other generation
really could have imagined. The Industrial Revolution. It's in full swing. Factories,
(04:19):
they're roaring railways, they're connecting cities that once felt a
world apart. You know, everything's connected now, everything's within reach.
New technologies are flooding the market with goods that used
to be handmade. You know, for the first time you
can mass produce beauty. You know, carved wooden brackets, ornate
iron railings, elaborate plaster moldings. Things that used to require
(04:42):
skilled artisans can now be stamped out by machine. So decoration,
you know, it used to be rare, it used to
be costly. Now it's affordable. That's really important, you know,
to consider everything that's coming At the same time. Money's
flowing in all kinds of new directions. You know, it's
not just the aristocracy who can build great, big, grand
houses anymore. A whole new middle class is rising. Factory owners, merchants, professionals.
(05:08):
They're all coming into their own a little bit, and
they want their homes to reflect that success. You know,
they're learning their knowledge, their place in the world, in society.
But this new industrial age also is a little bit
scary to them. It feels cold, it feels mechanical. You know,
the air's full of smoke. The cities are expanding faster
(05:28):
than anybody can really process and manage, and a lot
of people are uneasy. So the medieval world, with its cathedrals,
it's handcrafted goods and all of that, and its sense
of spiritual order all of that starts to look comforting.
You know, Romanticism is sweeping through art and literature. People
are reading Sir Walter Scott's novels about knights and castles.
(05:50):
They're looking at Gothic ruins through a haze of nostalgia,
you know, the good old days kind of a thing.
That's the world that young Queen Victoria inherits in eighteen
thirty seven, and when she takes the throne at just
eighteen years old, and the architecture of her reign captures
all of these contradictions. You know, modern machines, building, all
these things that get layered and you know, crafted into
(06:13):
something that almost has a medieval look. You've got industrial
wealth wrapped up in spiritual you know, ornamentation, which I'm
going to explain all of that in a little bit.
You've got mass production, but it's kind of disguised as craftsmanship.
All right, all of that's going on, all right, that's
what the Victorian era is like, that's what these people
are living with. Now, let's get back to that fire,
(06:35):
all right, the fire on October sixteenth, eighteen thirty four,
when Parliament is burning to the ground, all right, when
that building burned. A design competition was launched for the
new building. Because we burned one down, we got to
replace it. We need a new one. Let's find one.
Let's have a competition. You know. It's kind of like
what we do. We do a lot of little competitions
(06:56):
and contests. I'll explain a new one that's running at
the end of the show. But they were doing the
same thing, probably giving away gift certificates to Repcolite or
something like that. But they had a contest to see
who was going to be designing this new building. And
they had a couple requirements that had to be done
in the Gothic or Elizabethan style and classic architecture, you know,
(07:19):
Greek columns, Roman temples. That was banned. You know, it
felt too pagan, it felt too French. Nobody wanted that.
Nobody wanted it to feel too French, too pagan. Britain
wanted something that looked distinctly English and morally upright, all right,
So that's the contest that they're running. The winning design
came from two men, Charles Barry, an experienced architect, and
(07:42):
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. He was a young passionate Gothic revivalist,
and I want to take just a quick second here
to say that for any history buffs out there, go
subscribe to the Home in Progress podcast or at least
check it out. Next Tuesday, I'm going to drop a
bonus episod so that dives into the full story but
(08:02):
behind this fire plus the crazy partnership between Charles Berry
and Augustus Pugin. I can't get into all of it here,
but it's a great story. It's funny, it's a little
bit funny, it's tragic, and it's honestly kind of unbelievable
in certain regards. Just to give you a quick teaser,
the British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne at the time called
(08:22):
the cause of the fire one of the greatest instances
of stupidity on records. So we'll talk about that and
why it was so stupid, and also we'll talk about
why the working relationship between Barry and Pugin spiraled into
a feud that lasted nearly a century. So a ton
of drama in that story, and we'll cover it all
in that bonus episode next Tuesday that will drop if
(08:42):
you're subscribed to the podcast. You'll get the notification automatically
and you won't miss it. Otherwise, you can catch it
anytime at repco light dot com. All right, back to
the story at hand. As I mentioned, Charles Berry and
Augustus Pugin worked together on this new project for the
Palace of Westminster Barry. Charles Berry handled the layout. Pugin
(09:03):
poured his heart into the whole Gothic thing, you know,
all the detailing, the spires, the arches, the tracery. But
he was more than a decorator. He was an absolute crusader.
And this is really important to the story. In eighteen
thirty six, a couple of years later, he published a
book called Contrasts. And on one page in that book,
and you can go find the book online and kind
(09:23):
of flip through the page as it's interesting, But on
one page he draw a medieval church, you know, soaring, spiritual,
full of purpose, and then on the facing page he'd
have a modern factory or you know, some utilitarian workhouse.
It was ugly, it was soulless, it was dehumanizing, and
his point was really really blunt. You know, the architecture
of the Middle Ages was Christian and honest, and the
(09:45):
architecture of modern industrial England was morally bankrupt, you know,
that was his idea. He believed that architecture revealed the
soul of a nation. So a Gothic building, he felt,
shows its structure honestly. You know, you look at it
and you can see the flying buttresses doing their job.
Nothing's hidden, nothing's fake. Classical buildings, on the other hand,
(10:08):
sometimes used things like even decorative columns, you know, columns
that didn't do anything. You know, they didn't hold anything up.
They were just there for looks. It was a lie
in stone, as he saw it. It's interesting Pugin actually
converted to Catholicism in eighteen thirty four, the same year,
you know, the Palace of Westminster burned. And what's fascinating
(10:29):
in that. The reason I say that's interesting is that
his conversion was deeply architectural in nature. You know, it
was theological too, but deeply deeply architectural. He didn't just
study medieval churches. He found his faith in the architecture
that they were built with. You know, to Pugin, Gothic
architecture wasn't just beautiful. It was true, every point at arch,
(10:51):
every carved detail, all of It was a visible expression
of faith. You know. It was like praying in stone
in a way. I know it sounds a little weird,
but that's what was going on. He saw so much
beauty and so much truth in it, so much power
in that architecture and that conviction that he had, that conversion,
and all of that shaped everything that he designed afterwards,
(11:12):
so churches, altars, tiles, wallpaper, even furniture, and all of
it came together really, really spectacularly in his work on
the New Palace of Westminster. He worked himself to exhaustion
over the course of his life, and he died in
eighteen fifty two. You know, he's just forty years old,
so workaholic. He really poured everything he had into this stuff.
(11:33):
But even though he died young, his influence was massive.
He transformed Gothic revival from this quirky, old fashioned kind
of thing into a moral and national cause. And the
Houses of Parliament, you know, the new building that he designed,
completed way after his death in the eighteen sixties, still
stands as his monument, you know, a building that declared
to the world that Gothic wasn't just beautiful, it was British.
(11:55):
It was moral, it was official, it was upright, it
was true, all of those things. And again, I've got
way more info to that story. Subscribe to the podcast
and you'll catch that on Wednesday. A lot of really
interesting stuff in that, all right. So that's Pugin and
if he made Gothic moral, John Ruskin, another guy we
(12:15):
need to talk about, made it emotional. You know. He
made beauty itself a moral good. And we're going to
get to that and how that shook out right after.
This Home in Progress is brought to you by Repcolite
Paints and Benjamin Moore, Top tier paint expert advice. Your
next project is way easier than you think it's going
to be. All Right, We've looked at Augustus Pugin and
(12:38):
his role. Now let's look at John Ruskin. And while
Pugin argued that Gothic design was moral in nature, you know,
we talked about that. While he did that, John Ruskin
took it further and advocated that beauty and ornamentation themselves
were moral goods. Ruskin, he wasn't an architect, He was
an art critic. He was a social philosopher. You know.
(13:00):
He was kind of like a nineteenth century influencer, you know,
rather than creating little TikTok videos or Instagram posts. He
was writing. And the books he wrote, The Seven Lamps
of Architecture, the Stones of Venice. Some of these books
were best sellers, and they do sound kind of exciting, right,
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, you know, Sinbad and the
(13:22):
Seven Lamps of Architecture, or Indiana Jones and the Stones
of Venice. Really they could have been movies, but you know,
movies weren't all that big back then, not like they
are today, and so he just wrote books. But they
were best sellers and they went and inspired generations of builders,
artists and reformers. But the ideas in the books about ornament,
(13:44):
they were radical, and they changed how people thought about
decoration beyond just you know, in that era, it really
changed it. You know, moving forward, we're still living with
some of the ideas that he was advocating in those books.
Here's his main argument. He's floating the idea that ornament
isn't a luxury. You know, decoration isn't just a luxury.
(14:06):
It's not something that you tack on after the real
building work is done. Ornament or decoration or whatever you
want to call it is essential to human dignity and
spiritual health. That's his argument. Now, why why in the
world is this important or essential? He says, it's because
when we create ornament, it requires creativity, it requires skill,
(14:27):
and it requires joy. So when a medieval craftsman would
carve a column, you know, the very top of the
column or something, or when he would carve a decorative
stone way up high on a ceiling, when he did that,
you know, so high that nobody's really even going to
see it, but he's still putting all this design and
intricacy into that work. When he's doing that, he's expressing
(14:47):
that craftsman is expressing his God given creativity. So that
part's really important. And also he loved the little irregularities
in the carvings, you know, the uneven leaves, the lopsided
faces that show up from time to time. Those aren't
flaws to Ruskin. They're absolute proof of human freedom. They're
absolutely beautiful. You know, a machine makes perfect copies, and
(15:09):
that's boring. A person makes variations, and those variations are
the mark of a soul at work. So big heady
thinky people stuff here. You know, that's what's going on.
Ruskin went so far as to claim that you could
judge the moral health of an entire society by its architecture.
So Medieval Venice, with its richly carved Gothic palaces, was
a place that celebrated creativity. Renaissance Venice, with its restrained
(15:33):
classical symmetry, had already started to value order and precision
over the spirit of the craftsman. You know, that's what
Ruskin is saying here. Ruskin also believed that ornament taught people.
You know, a building carved with flowers, animals, figures, stories,
you know, all of that play out on the walls
of the building. Those things could educate, and they could uplift.
(15:55):
It could bring beauty into everyday life, and it would
make the ordinary sacred. You know. The same idea is
true of great, big, amazing, beautiful churches. You know, sometimes
the argument is that they shouldn't be there, you know,
that money should be spent on something else. And yet
the argument that could be made against it is that
(16:16):
by having it in these instances and in these buildings,
it's free and available for anybody to experience and to enjoy.
And we all work through our daily lives, you know,
the grind and the mundane of it, and we can stop,
buy some of these massively beautiful places and experience just
a touch of the sacred in our ordinary life. You know,
(16:38):
that's the notion that he's expressing. A plane wall teaches nothing.
An ornamented wall is kind of like a public gift,
so to Rusk, and ornamentation and decoration weren't frivolous, they
were morally essential. Beauty wasn't a luxury, you know, it
was a necessity for human flourishing. You know, if we
wanted to become the best we could be, we need
(16:59):
this beauty in our our buildings and our architecture and
our homes. That's the idea. A plain, undecorated building, you know,
that's not to him a sign of modesty or a
sign of honest simplicity. It's a sign of spiritual poverty
in a sense, and it's a denial of human creativity.
All right. That's the beginning of the story of you know,
Victorian architecture and all that it entails. And it's a
(17:21):
quick look at some of the key characters and the
idea is driving them. But how do we get from
those ideas, you know, lofty ideas about moral the moral
power of beauty. How do we get from that to
the multi colored, painted lady Victorian houses that we picture
in our minds. Well, we're going to get to that
right after this. This is home in progress where the
to do list is long. And that's all right. We're
(17:44):
not crabbing at you. We're not going to yell at you.
That's how it is. It's how ours is too. It's
probably supported by Repcollite Paints and Benjamin Moore because home
projects are easier when you've got people you can trust.
All right, So how do we get from all of
that philosophy stuff, that heady stuff to the bold, extravagant,
you know, opulent houses, the painted ladies that we think
(18:05):
about today when we think about Victorian architecture. Well, to
get to this part of the story, we need to
remember a couple of things. And I hinted at him
and talked briefly about him at the very beginning. But
we're in an age at this point of mass production.
So Ruskin, you know, we specifically talked about him last segment.
He personally hated machine made ornament, you know, that was
(18:27):
something that he absolutely detested it lacked the irregularity of
the human hand. He hated the perfection with which these
things could be stamped out. But his followers and the
public missed that subtlety. You know, as they're processing and
adapting and applying his ideas, they missed the nuance there.
(18:49):
They latched onto the bigger idea that decoration equals beauty
and beauty equals virtue. But they missed the whole concept
that machine made ornamentation is a negative. So they're really
good with the idea of machine made ornamentation for reasons
we'll get to. And they're operating with the idea that, okay,
(19:10):
decorations beauty, beauty is virtuous. So if you can afford
to decorate, you really should be. So now you can
start to see where things start to get a little exaggerated,
a little exuberant, let's say. And you know, by the
eighteen sixties eighteen seventies, Ruskin's influence is showing up everywhere
in what we call high Victorian Gothic. You know, you're
(19:33):
getting bold, polychromatic brickwork, pointed arches and multiple colors, heavily
carved details, unapologetic ornament It's just gone nuts at this point.
And there's one big reason all of this could happen.
We've already talked about it. It's technology. You know. The
Industrial Revolution made it possible for people to be able
to order decorative pieces from a catalog. You know, if
(19:54):
you want to fancy brackets for your porch, all of
a sudden, now you can flip through some pages and
and there they are. They look good, and they're in stock.
You know, Amazon's going to drop them right off. If
you want cast iron railings or you know, press tin ceilings, whatever,
just pick your pattern from the book and it's all
going to be shipped to you by rail. So for
the first time, ordinary people could afford ornament. You didn't
(20:17):
need to be wealthy to have an ornate house. You
just needed to be middle class. And that was a
whole new thing going on. And if Pugen and Ruskin,
the people that, you know a lot of people were
aware of their writings and their thoughts, if they were
preaching that ornament was morally uplifting, then why wouldn't a
respectable middle class homeowner want as much ornamentation as possible.
(20:39):
I want to be as moral as possible, so I'm
going to put on wallpaper on top of my wallpaper. Well,
that idea eventually finds its most vivid expression in Queen
Anne's style. Now, I mentioned it earlier, but there's no
one single Victorian style of architecture. We talked about that. Instead,
the Victorian era saw numerous types of architecture arise, and
(20:59):
all of them are considered Victorian. There's Gothic Revival we
covered that, there's the Italianate style that took off in
the eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, Second Empire style that arrived
in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, and Queen Anne.
That style came about by the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties.
This is the style that most of us picture when
(21:20):
we hear the word Victorian. Now, the funny thing about
Queen Ann's style is that it really doesn't have all
that much to do, if anything, to do with the
real Queen Anne from the early seventeen hundreds. You know,
Victorians just borrowed the name. You know, they needed something
that sounded respectable, that sounded historic, so they came up
with Queen Anne, and it gave their new style a
(21:42):
touch of old world class, right, what they actually were
doing was creating this style that was this huge mix
of everything they loved. It was absolutely as eclectic as possible.
You know, a Queen Anne house, you can't draw it symmetrically,
you know, on paper, you can't draw it metrically. It's
all towers and turrets, you know, wrap around porches, bay
(22:03):
windows and gables. You know, pretty much every single angle
that you look at reveal something new. You've got a
stained glass window over here, a big band of you know,
fish scale shingles over there. You've got turned spindles, you know,
carved brackets, intricately, intricately carved brackets, bits of trim wherever
you look. You know, it's just a lot going on.
(22:25):
And that's just those elements, you know, those trim elements
or whatever you want to call them. You've got the
color on top of that. And we've referred to these
houses already as painted ladies. But you know, that name's
a name that stuck for a reason. They didn't paint
their house as white. We all know that, you know,
three colors on the house. That was completely conservative at
(22:47):
that point. You know, a painted lady, a true painted lady,
might wear five six even seven colors all at once,
and each one is going to be highlighting a different detail,
you know, the gables, the porch posts, the gingerbread trim,
the window frames. It was architectural drama made visible through paint.
You know, they highlighted all of these different elements with
(23:08):
different colors. You know, it was crazy in that regard.
The textures. They were just as lively as the colors.
You know, you might have smooth clapboard siding over here,
you know, on the first floor. Then you might have
patterned shingles, you know, maybe scalloped or fish scale or
something like that on the upper story, and then a
little half timbering up in the gables, different materials doing
(23:29):
different jobs, all loudly, loudly on display. Victorians weren't trying
to hide construction. They were celebrating every single aspect of
their home. Now inside, the same thing happened. The same
thing continued through. You've got high ceilings with elaborate plaster work,
pocket doors between parlors, built in cabinets. Every single room
(23:49):
had its own personality and its own purpose, and that
purpose was largely expressed through decoration. The Hacking and Hume
homes in Muskegan absolute, you know, stellar examples of all
of this. If you've never been through those homes and
you don't know what I'm talking about, look into it.
You know, you can arrange tours. I think they're open
(24:11):
for tours from May through October. You'd have to check
out their website. But Hackley and Hume homes, you know,
excellent examples of this Queen Anne style that I'm talking about.
All Right, at the end, let's recap and put all
of this together and hopefully answer that big question that
we started with, And that's why did Victorians build this way?
You know, why all the layers, why the flourishes, why
(24:33):
the sense that no surface should be left untouched and undecorated. Well,
five things to take take away from this. First off,
they did that because they believed that beauty mattered. You know,
it wasn't luxury, it was essential. Augustus Pugin, we talked
about him. He taught that honest ornament was morally right.
Ruskin taught that it reflected human creativity and dignity. So
if you could make something beautiful, they would argue that
(24:56):
you should. A plane building wasn't noble. It was almost
a failure of goodness itself. So they did it because
beauty mattered. Second, they did it because they could for
the first time. You know, we talked about that industry
was making beauty affordable. The moral urged to build beautifully
lined up perfectly. You know, everything came together with the
ability to be able to do it. Third, they built
(25:18):
this way because in this new industrial society, your home
mattered more than ever as a statement of who you were.
You know, it's always been true to some degree, but
now at this point, the middle class could finally afford to,
you know, make a literal statement, you know, with their homes.
They could talk about who they were through their homes.
And in a fast growing city full of newcomers, family
(25:39):
names didn't mean as much anymore. But your house that
did that could tell people exactly who you were and
how you fit into society. You know. The style of
the home, its ornament, its color, all of it communicated
taste and education and refinement. So they built that way
because it was important in that regard. A fourth reason
they did it is because they were anxious. You know,
(26:00):
we talked about it. Life was fast at that point,
it was noisy, it was uncertain, and they did what
we do. You know, we look back to what we
call the good old days, you know, the quieter times,
the time when there weren't eight million people on the
road trying to go exactly where I want to go.
You know, we remember those days when man, maybe the
(26:21):
roads had a biker or two on them, you know,
and that was a pedal biker, not even a motorcycle rider.
It was just quiet and we could go wherever we wanted.
They were living the same way back then. They were
inundated with the whole Industrial Revolution and a lot of
growth that happened very fast, a lot of noise, a
lot of busyness, and they just started looking back to
(26:42):
historical stuff and saying, man, those good old days, sure
do like that. And that's how Gothic and Italianate and
Queen Anne, all of those styles kind of came to be,
and they gave people a sense of comfort and continuity
and a link to the past, you know, something solid
to the good old days. Fifth reason they built this way,
and this one's a no brainer. They did it because
(27:04):
they thought it looked good. You know, they really did
find beauty in this. You know, we might see clutter,
but they saw craftsmanship and care, they saw beauty in
all of that. So that's the story behind the growth
of what we refer to as the Victorian era in architecture.
But there's one more important part to the story that
I want to cover, and that's its decline. You know,
(27:24):
why did it all drop off? When? And when did
that happen? We're going to get to that right after this.
You're listening to Home in Progress, where the projects are real,
the mistakes, they're educational, sometimes painful, mostly educational. And the
only thing more stubborn than that old wallpaper on your
bathroom wall is your determination to get it fixed. Proudly
(27:46):
sponsored by Repcolite Paints and Benjamin Moore Paint with a purpose,
people who care, and everything you need to get the
job done right. All right, let's wrap this conversation up
by looking at the eventual decline of the Victorian style. Now,
by the time Queen Victoria died in nineteen oh one,
the style that bore her name was already fading. You know, interestingly,
(28:07):
the same currents of thought that helped create it, you know,
especially Ruskin's love of honest handcraft, you know, handcrafted goods,
that idea you know, the love of those handcrafted items
was turning against the movement, the Arts and crafts movement.
We talked about it a few weeks about ago, but
it was led by figures like William Morris, and that began.
(28:28):
That movement began as a kind of moral correction for
the Victorians. Morris agreed with Ruskin that medieval craftsmanship, you know,
literally making things by hand, represented honesty and dignity, and
it was the better way to go. He completely rejected
the mass produced ornamentation that was filling up these late
(28:49):
Victorian homes. Now we talked about it already, but Ruskin
himself wasn't big on how people adopted these mass produced items.
He didn't like that either. He did like that handcrafted
goodness at hand crafted goodness. But Morris, you know, he
took it to a new level. He was a loud voice,
and he steered things in a completely new direction. You know,
he advocated for simplicity, for restraint, for visible, honest construction,
(29:14):
actual handcrafted work. And if you'd like more info on that,
go back again to the podcast and check out episode
four twenty four where I really dig into William Morris
and why he was so important. It's a really good segment,
and it'd be really nice to pair that one with
this one, you know, so after catching this one, go
(29:35):
check out that one, episode four twenty four. It's like
pairing the right meal with the right wine or something
like that. That's how wonderful these two would be together. Anyway,
William Morris kind of kicked against the Victorian opulence as
he saw it, and he wasn't alone. You know, people
were growing tired of the excess, you know, the layers
upon layers, the seven color paint schemes. They wanted something,
(29:56):
you know, more authentic, less busy. They wanted colors that
they could member when they needed to repaint. I'm convinced
of that, you know, I'm looking at this from a
practical point of view. You know, think about it. You
paint your bathroom right, and then three years later, you know,
unless you save the can or wrote the color down,
none of us have any idea what that color actually
(30:17):
was anymore, right? Can you imagine doing that with seven
colors on the outside of your home and then on
the inside. You know, I did mention the heckleyan humehouses
in Muskegan in the last segment the exteriors of those
houses have thirteen or fourteen different colors on each one,
and the insides, you know, the insides of the homes.
(30:38):
I think in there there's over I believe it's over
one hundred different colors, you know, all kinds of stencil work.
It's nuts, it's amazing. You know, our Meskegan Repcolite has
helped with a lot of the color matching through the
years at those houses, so I know the numbers are
insane for the amount of colors, the number of different
colors in those homes. And one more thing about the
(30:58):
Heckley and Hume homes. The Hackley house features more handcarved
ornamentation the Hume home because money was a little more
of a consideration. That home is going to feature more
machine produced ornamentation. And I could be slightly off on that.
It's been quite a while since I've been there, but
I think I'm right. And more importantly, just go check
(31:19):
those homes out. But my bigger point of bringing those
up again is to say check them out, but also
to talk about the number of colors. You know, can
you imagine one hundred and some colors in your interior?
You would need a full time person just to catalog
and chronicle which colors were used where and which color
was needed when a repaint was necessary. Well, people were
(31:39):
sick of that. They didn't have money for all these
extra people to catalog their colors. They didn't want to
have to go through all of that create databases in
order to figure out what was in the bathroom, you know,
color wise. They wanted simplicity, They wanted to move away
from all of that busyness, and so people like William
Morris their idea started to catch on. New modernist thinkers
(32:01):
were declaring things like ornament is crime. You know, ornament
was beauty not even too long from this point, but
now it's completely flipped on its head, and ornament is
crime and something, you know, another mantra that came out
of this era. It's something that we still hear today.
Less is more, you know, that's where that idea comes from,
a direct reaction to the Victorian era. But even so,
(32:25):
with all of that said, it's really important to point
out that the Victorians left us with something really amazing.
You know, their architecture shaped our cities in tons of ways.
You know, they filled all of our cities with imagination.
You know, they're row houses, their churches, their their their
train stations, whatever their public buildings. They're still among the
(32:46):
most recognizable and beloved buildings in the world. You know,
we love looking at Victorian homes as we drive around
through neighborhoods. It's just it's so intriguing. It's so amazing,
you know, to see all of what's going on in them.
So even though we may don't maybe don't want that
for ourselves, it's still wonderful to see that, and it
(33:06):
really creates a lot of interest. They left a powerful
idea behind, you know, that architecture isn't just engineering, it's communication.
You know. It should be expressive, it should be varied,
it should be meaningful, It should tell stories, it should
evoke emotions, you know, and that's an idea that we
still hold on to and one that will never go
away and shouldn't go away. You know, we talk about
(33:26):
it at Repcolite with paint colors, you know, the paint
colors you choose, that that should tell a story. It
shouldn't just be well that tan matches with whatever tan
in your couch. You know, that's important, but having that
vision for where you want to go with a room,
the story you want that room to tell. It sounds crazy,
but the paint color can help you get there. And
(33:46):
that idea doesn't necessarily start with the Victorian movement, but
it really really came to the four you know, the
forefront in the Victorian era. All Right, speaking about telling
your story with color, I want to talk briefly about
Benjamin Moore's new color of the Year for twenty twenty six,
and I don't have much time left, but I want
to say that they revealed it last week, and if
(34:08):
you don't know, it's silhouette. It's a brown color with
hints of charcoal in it. It's really earthy. It's pretty
much what a lot of people were predicting, at least
the type of color. You know on earthy color and
the supporting color trends colors, they're all earthy as well,
and they work really well with it. Now, over the
next few weeks, from time to time, we're going to
talk about these new colors, how to work with them,
(34:30):
why it's worth bothering with all of those things. But
I bring it up right now, mostly because way earlier
in this episode I mentioned a contest that we're running
right now, and I told you that I get to
it by the end. So here's the deal. Find Repcolite
on Facebook and Instagram and you'll find a post showing
you some of these color trends for twenty twenty six.
(34:50):
That post has all of the details for the contest.
But here's the quick scoop. Go there and in the
comments on one or both Facebook and Instagram. In the
comment on either one of those or both, write down
which of the color trends colors moves you to paint
a room in your house. You know, all you got
to do is say rain dance moves me to paint
my living room something like that. Super easy. Tell us
(35:11):
which color moves you to paint which room in your home.
Every comment you enter counts as an entry into the contest.
And then on November sixteen, I'll draw four random winners
and each one is going to receive a two hundred
and fifty dollars gift certificate to Repcolite. So four huge prizes,
all for leaving a comment on a social media post.
All right, it's all the time we've got today. If
you want to catch this episode again, you can find
(35:32):
it online at Repcolit dot com and don't forget scuff
X from Benjamin Moore is still on sale at all
Repcolite locations through October thirty one. It's over twenty four
bucks off per gallon. It's a huge savings for an
amazing product. That sale is going to end after October
thirty one, so don't miss out. All right, that's going
to do it for this episode of Home in Progress.
Thanks for tuning in. If you liked what you heard
(35:54):
and you want to hear more like this, definitely consider
subscribing to the podcast if you haven't done that already,
and also, if you feel so inclined, leave us a review.
A kindly review will help other people find the show,
and that really helps us out. Thanks again for listening.
I'm Dan Hansen for Home in Progress. I'll see you
next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Male Room with Dr. Jesse Mills
As Director of The Men’s Clinic at UCLA, Dr. Jesse Mills has spent his career helping men understand their bodies, their hormones, and their health. Now he’s bringing that expertise to The Male Room — a podcast where data-driven medicine meets common sense. Each episode separates fact from hype, science from snake oil, and gives men the tools to live longer, stronger, and happier lives. With candor, humor, and real-world experience from the exam room and the operating room, Dr. Mills breaks down the latest health headlines, dissects trends, and explains what actually works — and what doesn’t. Smart, straightforward, and entertaining, The Male Room is the show that helps men take charge of their health without the jargon.