Customer Reviews

The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual--and the Modern Home Began

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An excellent overview of a pivotal moment in the history of Western design, too often passed over and taken for granted as simply a change of 'style.' DeJean traces the evolving philosophy of design, which erupted into high modernism in the 20th century, by discussing the changing ideas of the home and how one should live in it. From this, we learn of a new idea of architecture, one that focuses on function, i.e., meeting the needs of its users, rather than merely impressing its viewers. The chapters provide an enormous wealth of material on the origins of much of what we hardly notice today, the "furniture of our everyday lives." Couches, sofas, easy chairs, toilets, night tables, mantels, mirrors - the full range of bric-a-brac and essential items is discussed: the evolution of the decorating "musts" and the formation of modern taste is described. Fascinating!

This book has some great material. Unfortunately it seems to have been put hastily together from a series of lecture notes. No one bothered to give it chronological coherence, to eliminate repetitions or even to check the spelling (Mme de Pomadour????)

It is true that this book contains a tremendous amount of material, but it is extremely repetitive and, to some extent, limited. The author's constant references to Madame de Pompadouor and Monsieur Crousat leave the impression that these two individuals constitute the sole basis for most of her observations. I also wonder who the readership is supposed to be. If it is an academic public, I find the author's style tawdry - expressions like she "got away with murder" when referring to the excesses of Louis XIV's granddaughter are out of place. If, on the other hand, the author is aiming at a more general public, the book is overly detailed and, ultimately, boring. There was no need to write separate chapters on each different piece of furniture; combining them into a cohesive whole would have been much more interesting. But doing that would have required thoughtful editing which is totally lacking here. Finally, the last chapter on the body is superficial and leaves the impression that the author did not know how to end her study. As noted, throughout the book she (or her editor) allow the same thing to be said over and over again, for example the great actress who is described the same way at least ten times. This book was very disappointing. As another reviewer has noted, it is a collection of lecture notes carelessly cobbled together and not checked. I would recommend that you save your money and buy something else.

How much is too much? Joan DeJean addresses these questions in her history of 17th and 18th century French architecture and design, "The Age of Comfort."

The story begins at the grandiose court of Louis XIV. Essentially since the renaissance, rulers had been building bigger and less comfortable edifices. When news of the Florentine Renaissance reached the popes in Rome, they wanted much the same thing only bigger. When France discovered, under its late 15th century kings, the innovations of Italy (during wars with the Holy Roman Empire to gain control of it) they wanted the same thing. Buildings became bigger and more grand and at the same time less comfortable, harder to heat and more and more oppressive.

Versailles was the crescendo of these attempts at royal grandeur making. It is very likely that during his lifetime Louis XIV never at hot food in his life, the kitchens were so far removed from the dining room. While it set the standard for regal living quarters, every ruling house built something along its lines, Versailles with its uncomfortable furniture made out of silver, and its lack of comforts sent people in a radical new direction.

The novel approach was to build and design for comfort and not just show. This meant houses with flush toilets, smaller easier to heat rooms and more effective chimneys, bathing. Furniture was to be upholstered instead of wood with no padding. The arm chair and the sensual sofa came into vogue.

This desire for comfort by the courtiers of Versailles was seen as the thin edge of the wedge in terms of standards declining. Had not one of Louis's mistresses, the formidable Madame de Montespan, this 17th century comfort craze might have died on the vine. Montespan sponsored a generally loosening of standards, if not stays which appalled members of the old order. In their minds good courtiers reflected grandeur in cold rooms, uncomfortable clothing and never had the desire to sit down. While Louis indulged in such revolutionary behavior in private, he took a dim view of this slackening in what was viewed as "standards" and the dangerous innovations proposed by the new generation. Had Montespan not been the king's mistress, she surely would have been dismissed as a "communist" if not a fascist for her instance on bathrooms in lieu of urinating in the corners (the traditional approach).

The comfort revolution received a shot in the arm with the death of Louis and the declaration of the regency under Phillip duc D'Orleans. He was the person who New Orleans was named after and as one might expect, a firm believer in all forms of comfort to the point of debauchery. The shift of court life to Paris during his time as regent created a vogue for building there that involved not only the aristocracy, but also the new commercial classes, empowered by the easy credit of John Law. The collapse of Law's financial schemes created both new rich and impoverished aristocrats (who got burned by the vagaries of the market).

Under the new world of the regent, architecture took on a different character. Influenced by classical forms, it assumed a more human scale. Patronage was, probably for the first time, not just a product of the aristocracy. If one looks at the paintings of De Troy, which are largely genre paintings of bourgeois domestic life, these are quite different from the allegories that featured Louis XIV as a figure from Greek mythology.

Probably the most amusing chapter deals with the invention of the sofa. Like comic books, radio, the internet, and chewing gum, the sofa was seen as a threat to public morals and a source of moral turpitude. Moralist would not have one of these new furniture inventions since artists tended to portray them as alters of seduction. While it was too early for a popular movement trying to ban them (one of the advantages of aristocracy is the lack of importance given over to paranoid ranters), members of the clergy predictably tried to limit their use. However, comfort by this point was here to stay, having acquired an new champion during the reign of Louis XV, the middle class born, Madame de Pompadour. Jefferson would latter seek to import ideas of French comfort to his home in Virginia.

This is a very entertaining book that shows how conveniences and attitudes evolved today that we take for granted. DeJean brings together a number of trends and attitudes to show how people came to take the idea of comfort not as a sinister movement, but as necessary to human happiness.

What a wonderful book this is. I loved it and passed it on to several friends who feel the same. Truly educational and very well written. Engaging and erudite without being pedantic. Highly, highly recommended.

This is one of those books that I picked up because the topic seemed interesting. Did it find it to be so? Yes! But as I read it, I realized that there is no one in my life who would want to read this book and discuss the evolution of furniture with me. It's really hard to say who the intended audience for this book is. It's a little casual for serious historians, almost gossipy when DeJean confides that the granddaughter of King Louis XIV "got away with murder". But I can't say that the Average Joe is really all that interested in the many variations of `sofa' created by the French in the 17th and 18th century.

The overarching theme of the book is that as the idea of a `private' life became a greater part of daily living amongst the wealthy French, specialized rooms and furniture developed to help sustain it. Each chapter focuses on a different furniture item or room. There's a chapter, complete with multiple diagrams, about the flush toilet. Another talks about the boudoir, which was originally intended as a counterpart to a man's study - a place for a woman to relax and work on improving her mind - but quickly developed a reputation for other activities. Mini-biographies of some of the great innovators of the era - both the artists who designed the furniture and the patrons who paid for it - help provide greater context. There's a fair amount of repetition from one chapter to the next, making me wonder if this book was pulled together from lecture notes or a series of presentations.

This so-called `Age of Comfort' eventually spread throughout Europe, but DeJean concentrates almost exclusively on the contributions of the French. Granted, she's an author who specializes in French culture, but it would have been nice to hear a little more about what was happening in other countries. She mentions England a few times, but only to point out that they haven't gotten France's revolutionary ideas about comfort yet.

If you're interested in the beginnings of the art of interior design, this would be a good book for you to read. I liked it, and thought the book was pretty neat. It's a different way to look at the Rococo period of French art, architecture, and furniture design.