A HABITATION FOR HERSELF

Land’s End

Land’s End

Garden at Land’s End

Wharton’s keen interest in interior design and architecture continued throughout her career. Henry James once said that “No one fully knows our Edith who has not seen her in the act of creating a habitation for herself.” Wharton grew up in New York City and spent the warmer months in Newport. Soon after her marriage to Edward “Teddy” Wharton in 1885, she moved into Land’s End, a mansion in Newport. She writes in her autobiography that Land’s End was “an ugly wooden house with half an acre of rock and illimitable miles of Atlantic Ocean.” Yet Wharton loved the home for its “windows framing the endlessly changing moods of the misty Atlantic, and the night-long sound of the surges against the cliffs.” As seen in the images below of the drawing room and glass room interiors, the windows that Wharton so valued abounded in her Newport home.

According to Wharton, the writing of The Decoration of Houses and her time at Land’s End were entwined. Through the design of this home, Wharton initiated her friendship with Codman and began to develop her ideas about interior design and architecture. She remembers that the exterior of the house was “incurably ugly,” but she managed to improve the situation through the addition of hedges and niches like those seen in the photographs to the right.

Drawing Room at Land’s End

Glass Room at Land’s End