If you’ve been watching Julian Fellowes’s lavish new series The Gilded Age, set in New York in the final decades of the 19th century and featuring much marble, many digs about new money, and real historical characters combined with fictional creations, you might wonder at its similarity to certain of Edith Wharton’s novels. The truth is that it was the Pulitzer-prize-winning Wharton—and most particularly The Custom of the Country, her novel about a ruthless social climber—who inspired Fellowes to be a writer. But Wharton’s first book, co-written with Ogden Codman, the architect she employed to work with her on her house in Newport, Rhode Island, was a treatise on decorating houses, entitled, simply, The Decoration of Houses. An ode to nobility, grace and timelessness, her ideas about proportion and simplicity are still the bedrock of any scheme, and the book has been described as the equivalent of the King James version of the Bible.
But first, Newport, where we saw Larry Russell pretending to play croquet in the first episode of The Gilded Age, having been tasked by his calculatingly ambitious mother with befriending Carrie Astor (a real person; the Russells, meanwhile, are based on the Vanderbilts, who were dependent on Mrs. Astor’s acceptance if they were to achieve their aims of joining the crème of New York society). Between the years of 1870 to 1910 or so, Newport’s waterfront was where some of the world’s wealthiest people owned summer ‘cottages’, and it is those houses that have been used for many of The Gilded Age interior scenes.
The Russells’ Manhattan ballroom is in fact the music room at The Breakers, the Renaissance-style palace built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt (also a real person; though the fictional Russells did not use him, but Stanford White—again real—who genuinely designed Fifth Avenue mansions before being murdered at the Madison Square Theatre). The room itself was made in France, and then shipped over in the 1890s. Filming has also taken place at The Marble House, built by William K. Vanderbilt and his wife, Alva, to outshine The Breakers, also using Hunt. Modeled on the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, only bigger, the façade was made from 500,000 cubic feet of white marble, while the dining room was modeled after the Palace of Versailles’s Salon of Hercules, and the ballroom after its Hall of Mirrors.
While neither The Breakers nor The Marble House were influenced by Wharton’s book—they were finished before The Decoration of Houses was published 1897—there’s a chance that they inspired certain passages, for her ideas on the dangers of the new (and their behaviour) at face value look similar to Agnes van Rhijn’s; “The vulgarity of current decoration has its source in the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness,” she wrote.