In the first half of the 19th century took shape the concept of eclecticism, which propounded that styles could legitimately be mixed together. On top of the popular Empire and Regency styles, Greek inspiration grew stronger together with an Italianate style fused with Elizabethan and Tudor touches. The revived Gothic style was most popular for private country houses and churches. Interior decoration grew heavier and more elaborate than ever before. Ornamentation came to be considered synonymous with elegance and patterns covered every surface possible. The reopening of Japan to trade also brought numerous artifacts from the Orient, which were integrated in households. It also became customary to decorate each room of the house in a different style. 

The 1851 Great London Exhibition constituted a watershed in the history of interior decoration, which became increasingly popular and available to all strata of society. Countercurrents also emerged such as William Morris’ Arts and Crafts, which rebuffed technology and mass production and aimed at reviving medieval dynamics of production. Morris’ ideas echoed far and wide and their impact can be seen in the Art Nouveau style of decoration in France in the Liberty in Italy and the Jugendstil in Germany. Reactions against overcrowded and fussy interiors gained strength in the latter part of the 19th century, when practical planning and literal classicism gained ground. The struggle between the desire to cling to tradition and the necessity of accepting a society based on mechanized industry came into the open at the turn of the century, when the idea that “form follows function” eventually led to the foundation of the Bauhaus, a school of design based in Weimar, Germany, that combined art and craft to combat the dehumanising effects of the machine.

Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (1870) contained advice on decorations for the interiors and the garden of houses intended as reflections of refined thoughts and chaste desires and in which beauty presides over the education of the sentiments. The beautiful is treated as the effect of pure ethics. The home is understood as the outside of a man, as its external vesture and the visible embodiment of his mental character. The home of good taste is not built by money but by the mind. To this end, the book covers marine aquariums, fern cases, miniature hothouses, chamber birds, conservatories, apiaries, pleasure gardens, rockeries and miscellaneous garden embellishments. 

The English Staircase (1911) is a study by means of illustrations of the principal types of staircases used in England and Scotland until the end of the 18^th century. The continual and public function of the staircase makes it, in the eyes of the author, Walter Godfrey, a subject worthy of thorough analysis in so far as it mirrors the various influences at work in the formation of architectural styles.

The Book of Topiary intends to cover topiarian history because the author, B. Gibson, thought that among horticultural subjects, that was particularly unresearched. Called the ‘art of the tree barber’ in the 18^th century, topiary reached its height in England in the 18^th century and was then eventually displaced by the rise of the so-called natural garden. A satiric essay on Verdant Sculpture by Alexander Pope in 1713 blew topiary out of fashion through mocking descriptions of unfinished sculptures and deformed sculptures that were heavily affected by the weather. Sculptural topiary gained new ground in the 1870s when the practice was rekindled by the growing interest in botany and other comparable sciences. IN the mid 1900s topiarists began creating portable pieces made of fast-growing and easily moulded plants trained over frames. The frame remains as a permanent trimming guide that can be stuffed with moss and then planted or placed around a pre-existing shrubbery. This style was first introduced by Disneyland in America. 

Garden Design and Architects’ Gardens (1892) stated its intentions from the outset. The book contains two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them ‘harmonise’ with architecture is barbarous, needless, and inartistic. 

Furnishing the Home of Good Taste (1912)