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The Conservatory
Bringing the outside, in
One of our favourites rooms is a room outside and in. The conservatory. We love how furniture and sculpture can be complimented by the richness of flowers and foliage. How, gilded lanterns, white marble statuary and vibrantly upholstered seat furniture are offset by the verdant greens of plants and trees.
Indebted to Roman villas, the orangeries of Renaissance Italy and Nasrid palaces such as the Alhambra, the conservatory, or Winter Garden, was very much a 19th century creation.
The Great Conservatory at Chatsworth by John Paxton completed in 1840 and demolished in 1920.
The Victorian interest in botany, in collecting ferns and exotic plants, went hand-in-hand with international exploration. Budding collectors built vast glass houses to display their finds. By the middle of the century, architectural and engineering advances allowed for monumental glass houses, such as the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth built by Joseph Paxton, which was inspired by the waterlily’s huge leaves – ‘a natural feat of engineering’.
Interior of the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, showing the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, by Joseph Nash (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London / Public Domain).
Paxton’s subsequent marvel, the Crystal Palace, for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was half a kilometre long and needed over 293,000 panes of glass. Before the industrialisation of glass making, such vistas of glass were unimaginable, and all glazed windows were the preserve of the rich and subject to a wealth tax. Befittingly, given the Crystal Palace, the window tax was repealed in 1851.
Sébastien-Charles Giraud (1819-1892), Princess Mathilde’s Conservatory in the Mansion on Rue de Courcelles, Paris, 1864. Oil on wood (Inv. 36323 © Les Arts Décoratifs / photo: Jean Tholance / Public Domain).
Conservatories soon became more than garden spaces for botanical specimens but adjoined to the house and allotted an integral role in receiving and entertaining. For example, Princess Mathilde, cousin of Napoleon III, liked to welcome her friends in the conservatory. An evocative painting of her conservatory shows soft light filtering through exotic vegetation on to eclectic furnishings, including a Louis XVI giltwood armchair, a marble statue of Venus and a mamluk vase in a display case.
[The conservatory at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, looking east, circa 1850, watercolour -© The National Trust, 2007]
The conservatory was a perfect stage for the architectural eclecticism of the 19th century. A case in point was the conservatory at Wimple Hall which was designed as a kind of interior arcadia, half roman ruin and half medieval great hall.
[The Winter Garden at the Hôtel de la Païva, Paris]
Another favourite is the ‘jardin d’hiver’, at the Hôtel de la Païva, Paris, home of famous French courtesan Esther Lachmann, better known as La Païva (1819 –1884). Here the ceiling resembles the sky and painted amongst the clouds is a colourful swooping parrot. An ormolu Versailles type lantern hangs to the centre. The walls are panelled with trellis and marble tiles, and amidst the ferns and plants is terracotta sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and button upholstered armchairs around a rattan coffee table.
The athénienne was a completely new, multifunctional type of French Neoclassical furniture used as a jardinière, washstand, perfume burner or brazier. It derived from classical antique forms, such as the ‘Isis Tripod’ found at Temple of Isis in Pompeii in the 1760’s, and from Olympic choragic tripod torches, such as the one that graced the Athenian monument to Dionysus, popularly known as the ‘Lanthorn of Lysicrates’.
At the turn of the 20th century the conservatory became a natural habit for the elegant organic forms of Art Nouveau, which found expression most colourfully in stained glass.
Art Nouveau stained glass by Raphaël Évaldre at the Ursuline Convent Winter Garden, 1900, Belgium.
Fragile and costly to maintain, many conservatories belonging to great houses declined and were lost in the 20th century. Even the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth succumbed to such a sad fate and the Crystal Palace itself burnt to the ground in 1936 attracting some 100,000 spectators to Sydenham Hill to watch the blaze, among them Winston Churchill, who said, “This is the end of an age”.
[TheTurner Conservatory, Ballyfin, County Laois, Ireland]
Of the few conservatories that survived, fortunately some, such as at Ballyfin in Ireland have been painstakingly restored.
Designed by Richard Turner of London’s Palm House fame, the conservatory was originally built as an Orangery in the 1848, added by Sir Charles Coote to indulge in the Victorian trend of introducing exotic fruits and flowers to cooler climates.
In modern times the influence of the grand conservatory is everywhere, from Mies van der Rohe, to skyscraper Sky Gardens and even the Eden Project. The light-filled design of such monumental botanical gardens has filtered down to domestic interiors, modern glass houses and pool rooms.
The Glass House by Philip Johnson, 1949, in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Manufacture Jules Desfossé
‘Le Jardin d’Armide’ (‘The Garden of Armida’) A Rare Wallpaper Panel Designed By Édouard Muller
£28,000
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[The central fountain in The Biltmore Conservatory, a breathtaking Gilded Age Winter Garden inside the Biltmore Mansion Asheville, North Carolina]
Conservatories often benefit from a statuary focal point. Fountains and marble sculpture, antique and contemporary, can be used to great effect. Bright coloured tiles and ceramics also compliment the greenery.
[The Winter Garden of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna at the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, painted by Konstantin Ukhtomsky, Circa 1850]
The abundance of light means that comfortable chairs are a must for reading. Gilded embellishments such as giltwood mirrors and ormolu chandeliers help reflect light.
Conservatories make great dining rooms, giving the all-year-round joy of eating outside whilst protected from the elements. Materials should take inspiration from colourful flowers, and the decorative intension should be colour and opulence to ensure a conservatory feels warm and part of the house, year-round.
A conservatory dining room worthy of Princess Mathilde decorated by Gianluca Longo (Veranda Magazine / James McDonald)
