Liverpool : Sudley House.

  I was having a chat in a pub with a local who referred to the Sudley House as, "a Georgian home dressing up as Victorian." Apparently that is because of the owners of the home. The original owners were during the Georgian Era (1714-1837) when the house was built in 1821, but the last family to own it purchased it in 1883 and decorated it was during the Victorian Era (1837-1901).

 

  Personally, I find the exterior to be a little dull. It's kind of blocky, like it just sprouts new cubed rooms as it ages and could do with a bit of ornamentation like the manor homes of the area around. I think this might also deal with it not really having neighbors abreast, nor really a streetfront, so it faces all directions while prioritizing none of them as the front. The second owners also changed the main entrance from the east to the north. Although, from not having a front, it does have a lovely back with a covered porch and glass greenhouse that looks out over a park with the River Mersey in the distance.

  Where this home truly shines though is inside.

  The Victorian owner of the home, George Holt, had the home decorated in styles of his era. His daughter, Emma, continued to live in the home after his passing until her passing in 1944 when the house was then given to the city and became a museum. It appears that the city made a regrettable mistake upon receiving the home to sell the furniture and other details of the interior. The museum is now trying to track back down the original pieces, with some on display being on loan from those who purchased from the regrettable sale.

The Library.

  This house was my first time running into the use of flocked wallpaper. It was developed as a means of mimicking the expensive velvet and silk that would be mounted on the walls of lavish homes. "This type of tightly compressed flock was patented by Frederick Aumonier for the firm of Woollams & Co. in 1877. It was made by machine from ground up wool fibres, which were dusted onto the paper over a design applied first in size, a type of glue. The fibres stuck to the sized design, producing a raised effect. Once mounted on the wall, the paper was painted then given a glaze of a contrasting colour, which was quickly wiped off the surface. This made the colour on the raised surface stand out against the colour left in the crevices beneath, giving the design more depth." (Liverpool Museums) I loved the textural qualities of this wallpaper. How it would play with light and shadow, but how from a distance it just looked like a lightly textured wall. Of course, from a standpoint of maintenance, I can understand why they have implemented using a picture rail system and wainscoting throughout these rooms. Patching a hole or a blemish with this texture would be quite complicated if one was looking to hide the repair.

  In designing the room, the bookcases follow the height of the wainscoting of the room, creating a solid definition of upper and lower wall only broken by the fireplace, doors, and windows. Also, with the great shelf space wrapping around the room, it pushes the people away from the being able to interact with the wall and potentially damage any of the flocked wallpaper.

A reading table to share with friends.

  The furniture in the library seems a little sparse and less like something that someone would want for spending hours on end getting lost in the pages of literature, so I wonder how they might have filled the room. The use of lace curtains makes for such a beautiful encapsulating atmosphere. The lace lets through the light from outside in a diffused manner and (much like the flocked wallpaper) adds a texture to the room. Also, like the wallpaper, it adds a sense of play with shadow and light. 

  The tiling on the fireplace reflected the nature of the room with the imagery of the figures, as well as also functioning to reflect the heat from the fireplace out into the room. I enjoyed how the imagery seemed to be an Arts and Crafts interpretation on medieval art. The arts meeting the natural world via artisans.

The Drawing Room.

  Moving onto the Drawing Room, the green theme continues but changes in shade. Being a room for entertaining guests, the furniture increases in this room as a means in which to provide people a means to sit, play piano, rest their glasses upon, etc.

Looking up.

  This room, as well, includes flocked wallpaper adding a texture, but it is a bit more subdued here. What becomes more pronounced is the textural detailing to the ceiling and gold stenciling around the frieze. All the painted detail here reminds me of this notion that I have of detail being a form of meditation. Of course the artisan while painting the detail could have had their moments of contemplative meditation, but I think what is also interesting is how the aftereffect can as well have meditative qualities. Much like how following the repetitive elements of artisan made works are not unlike letting one's mind clear to lose focus on the self. Perhaps detailing could be a nonreligious tapping into of practices like the creation and viewing of a Buddhist Mandala. An enlightenment of the artisan class. But that's a whole side tangent of wondering. Another side tangent is that I once owned a Victorian teacup designed for mustaches that was a motif of pink and white. Being for mustaches the pink motif in our contemporary take of gendered colors is a bit unexpected, but in the Victorian era pink was considered a diluted version of red which was the color of blood and masculinity. Looking beyond that, pink is still a light version of red, which is the contrasting color to green, which is the color of this room. So, it is a fun examination of color to see subtle contrast being used here.

  Speaking of color and theories of it, there would seem to be some interesting things to say about green. It is the most easily processed color by our eyes, which can make it a very calming color as it doesn't strain us to process it. Architecturally speaking about it I have loved how it reacts with light as an interior wall color. Where there is light hitting it is almost seems to glow, but when it is in shade it quickly turns dark. With forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) becoming a more accepted concept for calming one's self, I wonder if green rooms can be a similar version upon the mind. Of course we still need nature and plants around us, but perhaps the Victorians were onto this same thought with some of their interior design. Sadly, it seems that most of the Victorian interior design of decorating the space with plants has been relegated to old photographs. Within the confines of an urban industrial city a green painted room filled with plants could arguably be incredibly comforting, Perhaps these museums preserving Victorian homes should employ some more plant people as an immersive experience. Although the free city greenhouses seem to be doing a good job of creating lovely places to get lost in living jungles while still in the city.

The rope says, "no getting near the furniture."

  The green theme continues into the Dining Room, with stained wood taking over the lower section of the wall again. (I think I might have found someone who enjoyed green walls as much as I do.)

The Dining Room.

  There are only two pieces of original furniture left in the house, and one of them is the buffet at the end of the Dining Room. The donation of the house in the 1940s was for it to be used as an art museum, with the collection of art already there finding a public. So, the furniture was much less a priority at the time and I can only imagine how that regret passes through time. One can hope that the proceeds from those sales actually helped preserve the home and give it the financial foundation that it needed to grow into what it is.

  An interesting detail to come out of visiting and looking at the details of Victorian architecture is that the most of the fixtures that one would touch are made of brass. In an era of pandemic, it is fascinating to note that brass is antimicrobial and works as a means of protecting the health of people who use it. In a time in which we are wiping things down after people use them in the fight against Covid-19, it is appealing to note that there are things that work without this wiping. It seems that conversations are beginning that perhaps we should be returning to once again using brass (or copper alloys) for high contact points like door knobs as we search to make healthy spaces. Apparently, increased surface area through the use of making the material not smooth also helps in this destruction of microbes. Perhaps there was something more to these detailed doorknobs than just looking pretty.

  Something that was new for me to find here was that there were embedded into the floor spring-loaded doorstops. Unlike a normal wedging doorstop it has a back and a front that holds the door in exactly one place so it doesn't swing too far in either direction. Of course, in that idiom of if it has moving parts it can break means that there have probably been many of these around me but after 100 years of use they had probably had their spring break to become useless. Still, it was a nice touch to prevent a pressure change from a window opening causing the door to slam. There was even a corresponding metal plate to the door so that the doorstop wouldn't damage the wood of the door, wearing it down until the stop became useless.

  Moving on to the Office we finally enter a room that isn't green. Instead, this room has walls covered in a mustard yellow (perhaps still on a green spectrum but muddied) wallpaper showing a busy detail of vines and flowers. This color choice seems to blend the gold frames of the pictures instead of making them pop like in the previous green rooms.

The Office.

  It feels as though the desk is dwarfed within this room and I wonder how it was filled arranged when it was actually used. Perhaps filing cabinets and some chairs for people to sit and talk on either side of the desk would have helped fill the room.

  And from there we wander to the middle of the ground floor for the stairs to go up and a central marble sculpture. All under a glass dome to let light filter into the middle of the home.

  Thus concludes my ramblings about the groundfloor. The upstairs had seen significant modfication to the interior design and the bedrooms had been modified to basically serve as little gallery rooms for art and a room to be a playpen for the children visiting the museum. It was neat that they were also tryign to bridge what it meant to be a playing child by having a little display in that room showing the toys of the Victorian era and some others from the early 20th C. An era before screens and smart devices.

Here are some details I also enjoyed from the house :