One way to decorate an old farmhouse for either a Victorian flavored or country flavored theme is to use antiques. For the Victorian look, preserving antiques in the best original condition is something that is well sought after. Solid oak armoires, cherry dining room tables and Victorian era fainting couches and chairs should be bought in their original condition or refinished to resemble the original masterpiece. Antique lamps with restored Victorian lampshades finish the room and keeps the room well lit too!
August 30, 2010
August 23, 2010
Victorian On the Farm
Decorating an old farmhouse should lean toward embracing its age, character and overall charm. Farmhouses were originally built as the workhouse of a farm. Their simplistic but functional design often carried out into their decor—something highly sought after in farmhouse interior design. Farmhouse interior design tends to lean in either a classic country design with primitive antiques and wooden handicrafts or toward a rich Victorian design with elegant crystal and porcelain accents. Victorian lampshades add the finishing touches and often turn your century old farmhouse to a lavish country estate!
August 20, 2010
Victorian Lampshades as Art
Victorian lampshades can help those who are seeking to make their home into a haven; not a precious or purist re-creation of the past, but a shelter in the best sense of the word, comfortable and welcoming. Art work is not only defined as a wall hanging, but envelopes furniture, windows, wallpaper, flooring, and lampshades.
August 13, 2010
Where to Find Modern Victorian
Nothing demonstrates better the renewed interest in Victorian domestic architecture than the resurgence of manufacturers, craft studios and designers covering virtually every aspect of period restoration. On our site, plainjaneshop.com, you’ll find hundreds of period lampshades and an ample selection of period lamps. We also have links to sites where you’ll find period fittings and decorations, both genuine antiques and authentic reproductions.
August 9, 2010
An Edge to Decorating Victorian
An acquaintance with the developments of Victorian style gives an edge to the decorator. The aim here has been to show what Victorian houses were like, and why, and to show how they may be adapted to modern living without loss of character. It is easy to find photographs which illustrate houses that have been decorated in a wide variety of Victorian fashions and complementary modern styles and will allow each decorator to incorporate color, style, and details into a room. Even black and white line illustrations can help give accurate details of a huge range of Victorian hardware, woodwork, plaster moldings, door furniture and other fittings and furnishings. Ultimately, the end result will be a home with a vintage feel.
August 4, 2010
A Feel For Victorian
What is important today is not so much the pursuit of total authenticity as finding a balance which reconciles our own way of living with what is valuable in Victorian style and decoration. Gaslight, with its gentle hiss and mellow tone, is most attractive, but electricity is more convenient; Victorians would not have used a coffee table, but having one may suit the way we live. The degree to which we shape a period house to modern requirements is a highly individual matter; to accomplish this with tact and sensitivity does not require textbook knowledge so much as a feel for Victoriana that can be acquired through familiarity.
August 3, 2010
Victorian Museum
The appeal of 19th-century housing is based on much more than bricks and mortar, but a house must, first and foremost, provide a sound and practical place in which to live. There are people in England who have turned the restoration of their Victorian house into a rigorously purist exercise, creating something akin to a museum-piece, but in the end they are left in a period cocoon. Their gaslight, coal boilers, tub baths and belfast sinks may be irreproachable, but nothing will stop the world going on its way outside. Cars will pass in the street, not carriages, and their children will come in wearing jeans, not pinafores.
August 2, 2010
Victorian Acceptable Again
As with most things, with the passage of time, people’s view of Victoriana changed. With time the art and architecture of the Victorian age was reviewed in a more sympathetic light. The new theories, case studies and aesthetic polemics had failed to solve the problems of society, and are actually felt by many to have aggravated them. The universal high-rise building has come to be seen by some as blight on the landscape, a hostile and impersonal environment that does little to foster human values or community spirit. Victorian houses, in contrast, no longer strike us as gloomy and forbidding but as cozy and cheerful.
July 30, 2010
Nostalgia Was Not Enough
This nostalgic inclination was a natural enough reaction. The generation which knew at first hand the darker side of 19th-century life — the grinding drudgery of factory life or the suffocating respectability of a middle-class Sunday — felt little nostalgia for the period. After World War I, the blueprint for the Modern Movement in architecture often called the International Style – was drawn up. Its basic tenets — austerity, the absence of ornament and the simple lines created by the machine tool — were the antithesis of everything Victorian architecture stood for. The widespread building after World War II allowed the architects of the International Style to put their ideas into practice on a large scale, and the urban renewal that followed saw many old buildings swept away as the impractical, squalid survivors of a recent, unloved past.
July 28, 2010
Victorian Taste
Nostalgia may be an element of the charm which Victorian buildings hold for us, but it can be a misleading quality. We can only see Victorian houses through 21st-century eyes, and cannot transport ourselves back to the aesthetic, moral and social climate of more than a hundred years ago, any more than the Victorians could feel empathy with the Georgian era. Their dislike of 18th-century architecture was echoed in our own age by the condemnation of Victorian taste by many “enlightened” people until quite recently.