apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Those look fantastic! If I was close enough to visit, I'd spend sooo much time there. Thanks for posting this.

I love this kind of thing. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has (or once had) dioramas of Victorian roomscapes on display. I was there once alongside a woman with a young son who was peppering her with questions about why these rooms looked so different from rooms he was used to seeing (Why are there fancy patterns on the wall? Why do they have so many pictures? Pretty perceptive kid come to think of it...)

Eventually the mother got exasperated and told him, "That's just how people decorate in New York!"

There is also a set of different Thorne Rooms at the Phoenix Art Museum, should any western readers want to visit some.
http://phxart.org/collection/thorne_mini.asp

I worked at the museum or AIC as we used to call it, and the major consensus was that the Thorne rooms weren't actually "art" and shouldn't be in the museum. However, they are a huge draw - along with the paper weight collection and the arms and armour - all things the art snobs would scoff at. Regardless, I would go down on a dead Wednesday afternoon and look at the little rooms - I always wanted to put a living mouse or lizard inside.

I grew up in a hardscrabble little town in the middle of the Central Illinois corn belt, and the Thorne rooms were the closest I ever got to seeing a professionally decorated room until I was in high school and my family moved to Wisconsin. In Clinton, a beautiful room was a room in which a gigantic lamp with a ruffled shade like a square dancer's dress was plunked down smack in front of the picture window, so coming across these incredible rooms on a field trip to the city was like discovering another world.

My classmates from Clinton Junior High--well, the girls, anyway--oohed & aahed over the cuteness of it all, but it wasn't the Thorne Rooms' small size that made an impression on me, it was their beauty & richness, and even though it was another 30 years--and a detour through another whole career--before I got my interior design degree, I began my study of historic decorating right there, and if I wasn't the only kid in the 7th who read Dorothy Draper's decorating column, I was the only one who admitted it.

When the Thorne Rooms were new, back in the 193Os, they reperesented--allegedly--the wide-ranging decorating styles of the last few centuries in (mostly) the countries that really counted: that is, France & England & our own. But looking back with the advantage of seven extra decades' hindsight, these dreamlike rooms say more about the vanished world of the upper classes as they lived between the two big wars than they do about the historic periods those rooms were copying, and in their furniture's waxy patina & the perfectly parallel folds in the curtains at the windows, they imply just as much about the armies of invisible servants that once existed to maintain the comforting illusion of a perfected past. I look at these rooms and I don't see Berkeley Square in the 176Os , or a Parisian salon looking out over the Bois de Boulogne in 1810, I see a French provincial living room in Lake Forest, or a Tudor dining room overlooking Lake Shore Drive. These truly are windows into a lost world. Regards, Magnaverde.

When I saw this tonight I felt a little better about liking something that seemed more like a little kid doll house like. I have always loved going to this area of the museum to get a look. It seems to be such a great study and you can take in so much at once. Thanks for freeing this up for me.

I love decorating dioramas and doll houses and miniature furniture! How did I miss these when I was in the AIC?

The Thorne Rooms aren't Art? Well, as I often say, the main thing about having a graduate degree in any branch of art history is that it makes you comfortable with your own bad taste.

I even bought one of the post cards. The Japanese room has a tiny zushi, just like the ones I collect. And worse, framed the post card and put it beside the collection.

I'm glad you included the San Francisco interior; that was always my favorite as a child.

Who wouldn't adore tiny perfect historically correct dioramas? They have a lovely coffee table book of all the rooms - perfect for a Holiday gift!!

i love miniatures. i have a huge doll house and i'm decking it out with 1 inch scale furniture.

My family went frequently to the AIC when I was younger, and the Thorne Rooms were a pretty regular stop. The installation wasn't as nice as it is now, but I loved looking at them, and seeing how the design of the rooms evolved. I was there on Saturday, and decided to stop in and see them again. It was jammed with people, more so than the exhibits that were the point of my visit.

On my one and only trip to Chicago, I had the blessed good fortune to see these. I don't remember if I knew about their existence prior to my visit or not.
They're absolutely exquisite.
And now I know there are some in Phoenix!
Wende, if I ever get down there, you'll have to get Marva and Brian to take me.