A painted ceiling in the Washington, D.C., home of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, circa 1900. Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston, collection of
the Library of Congress.
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RENOVATOR’S TOOLBOX
match.” Far away in a cottage at Mt. Vernon in Virginia,
in a parlor “finished in old rose and silver,” the ceiling
was “decorated with Colonial festoons, fuschias and a
flight of swallows,” we read in the March 1895 issue of
Scientific American.
Ads for rentals frequently mention the apartments are
“decorated.” An ad in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on October
25, 1895 went further and specified a flat at 308 Hicks
Street in Brooklyn Heights had “frescoed ceilings” in addition
to seven rooms, “cabinet mantels” and a dumbwaiter.
An elaborate but inexpensive wooden painted lady in
what is now Bed Stuy had a colorful and highly patterned
interior, traces of the original finishes show. Built as a
two-family without central heating in 1895, it boasted
a robin’s egg blue dining room with sugar pine woodwork
faux painted to resemble oak. The rope-pattern
picture-frame railings on the parlor floor were gilded
and polychromed. The slate mantels of the coal fireplaces
were ornamented with gilded incised decorations and
faux painted to resemble marble.
picked out in a variety of colors; geometric embellishments
dotted beams; and vines, ribbons or abstract
flourishes filled corners and panels.
Photographs, illustrations and written accounts of the
day show decorative painting was common in upper-
and middle-class homes - even in rental apartments. In
a brownstone on the corner of Lee Avenue and Hewes
Street in what is now south Williamsburg in 1888, a
front bedroom was decorated in shades of blue, “with
the ceiling frescoed to represent knotwork, in a mellow
tone of blue, with a deep frieze of Japoniens” - probably
a type of flower - an article, “Building Up Brooklyn:
And Also Making the City Beautiful,” in the February
26, 1888 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle relates. In
another house at 174 South 9th Street, the ceiling in the
rear parlor was “frescoed to represent the four seasons,
and the walls covered with silk plush extended over an
ornamental molding.” Next door to 512 Bedford Avenue,
a house had Lincrusta wainscotting in the hall, with
side walls “in terra cotta, painted in fine stencil work.
The ceilings are exquisitely frescoed in straw color to