At Home

• CHAPTER XIII •

THE PLUM ROOM

I

We call it the plum room for no other reason than that the walls were painted that color when we moved in, and by accident the name stuck. There is no telling what the Reverend Mr. Marsham called this room. It appeared on the original plans as “the Drawing Room,” but then that key room was moved next door during the reshuffle that deprived the servants of the proposed “Footman’s Pantry” and gave Mr. Marsham a spacious dining room instead. Whatever it was called, this room was clearly intended as a kind of parlor, probably for the receiving of favored guests. Mr. Marsham might have called it the library, for one section of wall is filled with a built-in bookcase reaching from floor to ceiling and large enough to hold about six hundred books, a respectable number for a man of his profession in that day. By 1851, books for reading were widely affordable, but books for show remained expensive, so if Mr. Marsham’s shelves held a collection of tooled calfskin it is entirely possible that that was display enough to give the room its name.

Mr. Marsham seems to have lavished a good deal of care on this room. The cornice moldings, wooden fireplace surround, and bookshelves are all in a semiexuberant classical style that bespeaks expense and thoughtful selection. Nineteenth-century pattern books offered homeowners an almost infinite array of shapely, esoterically named motifs—ovolos, ogees, quirks, crockets, scotias, cavettos, dentils, evolute spirals, even a “Lesbian cymatium,” and at least two hundred more—with which to individualize projecting surfaces of wood or plaster, and Mr. Marsham chose liberally, opting for bubble-like beading around the doorcase, fluted columns at the windows, ribbony swags fluttering across the fireplace breast, and a stately show of repeating demi-hemispheres in a style known as egg-and-dart around the ceiling trim.

Such decorative gusto was actually out of fashion by this time and marks Mr. Marsham out as something of a rustic, but we may be grateful to him now, for the classical styles he selected take us in a straight line to the most influential architect in history—himself a rustic, as it happens—and onward to two of the most interesting houses ever built, both in America, both the work of rustics there. So this is really a chapter about architectural style in a domestic setting and some rustics who changed the world. It touches in passing on books, too—not inappropriately, I hope, for a chapter coming from a room that may or may not once have been a library.

For the story of how the plum room’s stylistic features, and a great deal else in the built world beyond, got to look the way they do, we need to leave Norfolk and England, and take ourselves to the sunny plains of northern Italy and the pleasant and ancient city of Vicenza, halfway between Verona and Venice in the region known as the Veneto. At first glance, Vicenza seems much like any other northern Italian city of its size, but almost all visitors are soon overtaken by an odd sense of familiarity. Again and again, you turn corners to find yourself standing before buildings that you feel, in an almost uncanny way, you have seen before.

In a sense you have. For these buildings were the templates from which other important buildings all over the Western world were derived: the Louvre, the White House, Buckingham Palace, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and uncountable numbers of banks, police stations, courthouses, churches, museums, hospitals, schools, stately homes, and unassuming houses. The Palazzo Barbarano and Villa Piovene clearly share architectural DNA with the New York Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Berlin Reichstag, among many others. The Villa Capra, on a hillside on the edge of town, brings to mind a hundred domed structures, from Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Villa Chiericati, with its striking portico of triangular pediment and four severe columns, isn’t just rather like the White House, it is the White House, but weirdly transferred to what is still a working farm a little beyond the city’s eastern edge.

The person responsible for all this architectural prescience was a stonemason named Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza from his native Padua. There he befriended an influential aristocrat, Giangiorgio Trissino. Had it not been for this lucky acquaintanceship, the young man would very probably have passed his life as a dusty hewer of stone, his genius unplumbed, and the world today would be a very different-looking place. Happily for posterity, Trissino perceived some talent worth nurturing within the boy. He brought him into his home, had him schooled in mathematics and geometry, took him to Rome to see the great buildings of antiquity, and put before him every other possible advantage that would allow him to become the greatest, most confident, most improbably influential architect of his age. In the course of things, Trissino also bestowed upon him the name by which we all know him now: Palladio, after Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece. (Their relationship, I feel oddly bound to note, seems to have been entirely platonic. Trissino was a well-known ladies’ man, and his young mason was happily married and en route to becoming the father of five children. Trissino just liked Palladio a good deal. It seems that most people in Palladio’s life did.)

And so under the older man’s tutelage Palladio became an architect—an unusual step for someone of his background, for architects at that time normally began their careers as artists, not artisans. Palladio didn’t paint or sculpt or draw; he just designed buildings. But his practical training as a mason gave him one invaluable advantage: it permitted him an intimate understanding of structures, and allowed him, in the phrase of Witold Rybczynski, to understand the how of a building as much as the what.

Palladio’s was a classic case of right talents, right place, right time. Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage to India a quarter of a century earlier had broken Venice’s monopoly over the European end of the spice trade, undermining its commercial dominance, and now the wealth of the region was migrating inland. Suddenly there was a new breed of gentleman-farmers who had both wealth and architectural ambitions, and Palladio knew exactly how to take the one to satisfy the other. He began to dot Vicenza and the surrounding district with the most perfect and agreeable houses ever built. His particular genius lay in the ability to design buildings faithful to the classical ideals yet more beguiling and inviting, more endowed with comfort and élan, than the more severe ancient forms from which they derived. It was a reinvigoration of classical ideals, and the world would come to love it.

Palladio didn’t design many structures—a few palazzos, four churches, a convent, a basilica, two bridges, and thirty villas, of which only seventeen still stand today. Of the missing thirteen villas, four were never finished, seven were destroyed, one was never built, and one is missing and unaccounted for. Called the Villa Ragona, if it was ever built, it has never been found.

Palladio’s methods were based on rigorous adherence to rules and modeled on the precepts of Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century BC. Vitruvius wasn’t a particularly distinguished architect; he was really more of a military engineer. What made him valuable to history was the accidental fact that some of his writings survived—the only architectural text from classical antiquity to do so. A lone copy of Vitruvius’s work on architecture was found on a shelf at a monastery in Switzerland in 1415.

Vitruvius laid down exceedingly specific rules regarding proportions, orders, shapes, materials, and anything else that could be quantified. Formulas ruled everything in his world. The amount of spacing between columns in a row, say, could never be left to instinct or feeling, but was dictated by strict formulas designed to confer an automatic and reliable harmony. This could be dizzyingly particular. For instance:

The height of all oblong rooms should be calculated by adding together their measured length and width, taking one half of this total, and using the result for the height. But in the case of exedrae or square oeci, let the height be brought up to one and a half times the width.… The height of the tablinum at the lintel should be one eighth more than its width. Its ceiling should exceed this height by one third of the width. The fauces in the case of smaller atriums should be two thirds, and in the case of larger one half, the width of the tablinum.… Let the busts of ancestors with their ornaments be set up at a height corresponding to the width of the alae. The proportionate width and height of doors may be settled, if they are Doric, in the Doric manner, and if Ionic, in the Ionic manner, according to the rules of symmetry which have been given about portals in the Fourth Book.

Palladio, following Vitruvius, believed that all rooms should be one of seven elementary shapes—one circular, one square, five rectangular—and that particular rooms needed always to be built in particular proportions. Dining rooms, for example, had to be twice as long as they were wide. These shapes alone made for pleasing spaces, though why they did exactly he didn’t say. (Neither, come to that, did Vitruvius.) In fact, however, Palladio followed his own precepts only about half the time. Some of the rules Palladio decreed are doubtful, in any case. The idea of a hierarchy among column types—Corinthian always above Ionic, and Ionic always above Doric—appears to be the invention of Sebastiano Serlio, a contemporary of Palladio’s. The rule isn’t mentioned by Vitruvius at all. Palladio also made one very fundamental error. He put a portico with columns on every villa he built, unaware that these were found only on Roman temples and never on homes. This is probably his most copied device and yet it is, from the perspective of fidelity, completely wrong. But it may also be the happiest error in architectural history.

Had he merely built a scattering of fine homes around Vicenza, Palladio’s name would never have become an adjective. What made him famous was a book published in 1570, toward the end of his life. Called I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), it was partly a book of floor plans and elevations, partly a declaration of principles, and partly a collection of practical advice. It was full of rules and particulars—“Of the height of the rooms,” “Of the dimensions of the doors and windows”—but also useful tips. (For example: don’t place windows too near corners, for they weaken the overall structure.) It was the perfect book for gentlemen amateurs.

Palladio’s first and greatest champion in the English-speaking world was Inigo Jones, the theatrical designer and self-taught architect who discovered Palladio’s work on a visit to Italy twenty years after Palladio’s death and was smitten to the point of obsessiveness. He bought every Palladio drawing he could lay his hands on—some two hundred in all—learned to speak Italian, and even modeled his signature on Palladio’s. On his return to England, he began putting up Palladian buildings at every opportunity. The first was the Queen’s House in Greenwich, built in 1616. To modern eyes, it is a rather dull square block that brings to mind the central police station in a small midwestern city, but it was stunningly crisp and modern in Stuart England. Every building in the country suddenly seemed to belong to another, fussier age.

Palladianism became particularly associated with—and largely indistinguishable from—the Georgian period. This era of architectural orderliness began in 1714 with the accession of George I and lasted through the reigns of three more Georges and the son of a George, William IV, whose death in 1837 brought in Queen Victoria and a new dynastic era. In practice, of course, things were not that precise. Architectural style doesn’t change just because a monarch dies. Nor does it stay still during the course of a long dynasty.

Because the Georgian period went on so long, various architectural refinements and elaborations arose and either fell away or prospered independently, so that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish meaningfully between Neoclassical, Regency, Italianate Revival, Greek Revival, and other terms intended to denote a particular style, aesthetic, or block of time. In America, Georgian became an unappealing label after independence (it wasn’t actually much liked before), so there Colonial was coined for buildings predating independence, and Federal for those built after.

What all these styles had in common was an attachment to classical ideals, which is to say to strict rules, and that wasn’t always a terribly good thing. Rules meant that architects sometimes scarcely had to think at all. Mereworth, a stately home in Kent designed by Colen Campbell, is really just a copy of Palladio’s Villa Capra—only the dome is somewhat altered—and many others are not a great deal more original. “Fidelity to the canon was what mattered,” as Alain de Botton noted in The Architecture of Happiness. Though some splendid Palladian buildings were built—Chiswick House, Lord Burlington’s outsized folly in West London, springs shiningly to mind—the effect over time was repetitious and just a little numbing. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner has observed that “it is not easy to keep apart in one’s mind the various villas and country houses built during the period.”

Palladio’s Villa Capra (“La Rotonda”) (top); and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (bottom) (photo credit 13.1)

So there is a certain satisfaction in the thought that perhaps the two most interesting and original Palladian houses of the age were built not in Europe by trained architects, but in a distant land by amateurs. But what amateurs they were.

II

In the autumn of 1769, on a hilltop in the piedmont of Virginia, on what was then the very edge of the civilized world, a young man began building his dream home. It would consume more than fifty years of his life and nearly all his resources, and he would never see it finished. His name was Thomas Jefferson. The house was Monticello.

There had never been a house like it. This was, almost literally, the last house in the world. Before it lay an unexplored continent. Behind it was all the known world. Perhaps nothing says more about Jefferson and his house than that it faces away from that old world and into the unknown emptiness of the new.

What was really distinctive about Monticello was that it was built on a hilltop. People didn’t do that in the eighteenth century, and for good practical reasons. Jefferson created many disadvantages for himself by building where he did. For one thing, he had to run a road to the top, then clear and level acres of rocky summit—both huge jobs. He also had constantly to deal with the problem of water supplies. Water is always a problem on hilltops since it is in the nature of water to run downhill, so wells had to be dug unusually deep. Even then they ran dry on average about one year in five and water had to be carted up. Lightning was a chronic worry, too, as his house was the highest point for miles.

Monticello is Palladio’s Villa Capra, but reinterpreted, built of different materials, standing in another continent—gloriously original, but faithful to the original, too. The Age of Enlightenment was the perfect time for Palladian ideals. It was an intensely scientific period in which it was believed that everything, including beauty and its appreciation, could be reduced to scientific principles. That Palladio’s book of plans was also a suitable primer for amateur architects made him practically, as well as spiritually, indispensable to a man like Jefferson. About 450 handbooks of architecture were produced in the half century or so before Jefferson began work on Monticello, so he had plenty to choose from, but it was Palladio to whom he was devoted. “Palladio is the Bible,” he wrote simply.

Jefferson, at the time he began Monticello, had never been anywhere larger than Williamsburg, the colonial capital, where he had attended the College of William and Mary, and Williamsburg, with some two thousand people, was hardly a metropolis. Although he later traveled to Italy, he never saw the Villa Capra and would almost certainly have been astounded by it because the Villa Capra is enormous compared with Monticello. Though they look very similar in illustrations, Palladio’s version is built on a scale that makes Monticello seem almost cottagelike. Partly this is because Monticello’s service areas—the dependencies, as they were known—are built into the slope of the hill and are invisible from the house and garden. A lot of Monticello is essentially underground.

The Monticello visitors see today is a house Jefferson never saw but only dreamed of. It was never finished in his lifetime, or even in really good shape. For fifty-four years Jefferson inhabited a building site. “Putting up and pulling down is one of my favorite amusements,” he remarked cheerfully, and it was just as well, for he never stopped tinkering and messing. Because the work was so protracted, some parts of Monticello were actively deteriorating while others were still abuilding.

Many aspects of Jefferson’s designs were tricky. The roof was a builder’s nightmare because it involved unnecessarily complicated joining of hips to slopes. “It was one place where he was definitely more amateur than professional,” Bob Self, architectural conservator of Monticello, told me while showing me around. “The design was perfectly sound, but just a lot more complicated than it needed to be.”

As an architect, Jefferson was fastidious to the point of weirdness. Some of his plans specified measurements to seven decimal points. Self showed me one measuring a strangely precise 1.8991666 inches. “Nobody, even now, could measure anything to that degree of accuracy,” he said. “You are talking millionths of an inch. I suspect it was just a kind of intellectual exercise. There isn’t anything else it could be really.”

The oddest feature of the house was the two staircases. Jefferson thought staircases a waste of space, so he made them only two feet wide and very steep—“a little ladder of a staircase,” as one visitor put it. The stairs were so narrow and twisting that almost everything that needed to go up them, including all but the smallest pieces of visitors’ luggage, had to be winched up and hauled in through a window. Buried so deep in the house that no natural light reached them, the stairs were forbiddingly dark as well as steep. Negotiating them, particularly in descent, is an unnerving experience even now. Because of the danger, visitors are not allowed up to the second or third floors, so much of Monticello is, of unhappy necessity, off limits. (The space is mostly used for offices.) This means that visitors cannot see the most agreeable room in the house—the sky room, as Jefferson called it, occupying the space within the dome. With its yellow walls and green floor, its cool breezes and expansive views, this would make a perfect study or studio or retreat of any kind. But it has always been difficult to get to, and in Jefferson’s day it was unusable for about a third of the year because there was no effective way to heat it. In consequence, it became an attic room used for storage.

In other ways, the house was a marvel. The dome, Monticello’s defining feature, had to be built in an odd way to fit onto existing load-bearing walls at the back. “So although it looks completely regular,” Self said, “it isn’t. The whole thing was a huge exercise in calculus. The ribs that support it are all of different lengths, but they had to span the same radius, so its design was all about sines and cosines. Not many people could have got that dome up there.” Other flourishes were generations ahead of their time. For one thing, Jefferson put thirteen skylights into the house, so it is unusually bright and airy.

Outside on the terrace Self pointed out to me a very beautiful spherical sundial in the garden that Jefferson had made himself. “It’s not just that it is a terrific piece of craftsmanship,” he said, “but it’s also that it couldn’t be built without a thorough understanding of astronomy. It is quite amazing what he had the time and capacity to fit into his brain.”

Monticello became famous for its novelties—a dumbwaiter built into a fireplace, indoor privies, a device called a polygraph that used two pens to make a copy of any letter written on it. One feature, a pair of doors in which both opened when only one—either one—was pushed, charmed and mystified experts for a century and a half. It wasn’t until the inner mechanisms were exposed during remodeling in the 1950s that renovators discovered that the doors were invisibly linked by a rod and pulleys under the floor—a fairly straightforward arrangement, as it turned out, but astounding because it represented a lot of cost and enterprise for very little effort saved.

Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that itself ran to more than 650 pages. He kept a record of every cent earned and spent. He recorded how many peas it took to fill a pint pot. He kept full, individual inventories for his slaves, giving an unusually complete record of how they were treated and what they owned.

Yet, strangely, he didn’t keep a diary or an inventory of Monticello itself. “We know more about Jefferson’s house in Paris than this one, oddly enough,” Susan Stein, the senior curator, told me when I visited Monticello. “We don’t know what kind of floor coverings he had in most rooms and can’t always be sure about a lot of the furnishings. We know the house had two indoor privies, but we don’t know who got to use them or what they used for toilet paper. These things don’t get recorded.” So we are in the strange position with Jefferson that we know everything about the 250 types of edible plants he grew (he organized them by whether they were eaten for their roots, fruits, or leaves) but surprisingly little about many aspects of his life indoors.

The house was always terribly self-indulgent. When Jefferson brought his young bride, Martha, to Monticello in 1772, it was already three years into its building and clear at a glance that this was his house. His private study, for instance, was almost twice the size of both the dining room and marital bedroom. The things that featured in the house were designed to meet his needs and whims. He could, for instance, check the wind direction and speed from any of five locations in the house—not something that Mrs. Jefferson was crying out for.

After Martha’s early death, just ten years into their marriage, Monticello became even more decidedly his. Guests were not permitted into any of the private parts of the house—which is to say most of it—except under escort. Those who wished to browse in the library had to wait for Mr. Jefferson to take them in personally.

Of all the puzzling lapses in Jefferson’s record keeping, the most surprising perhaps is that he didn’t keep a record of his books and had no idea how many he actually had. Jefferson loved books and was very lucky to live in a generation when books were becoming commonplace. Until comparatively recently books had been really quite rare. When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year. Jefferson, over the course of his life, bought books at the rate of about twelve a month, accumulating a thousand every decade on average.

Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction, and useful instruction than I quattro libri.

Because of financial constraints and Jefferson’s endless tinkering, Monticello never looked its best or even close to it. In 1802, when a Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton came to visit, she was shocked to find she still had to enter across wobbly planks. By this time Jefferson had been working on the house for over thirty years. “Tho’ I had been prepared to see an unfinished house, still I could not help being struck with … the general gloom,” Mrs. Thornton marveled in her diary. Jefferson himself never much minded the inconvenience. “We are now living in a brick kiln,” he wrote happily at one point to a friend. Jefferson was not a great caretaker either. In Virginia’s muggy climate, exterior wood needs repainting at least once every five years. As far as can be determined, Jefferson never repainted at all. Termites began chewing up structural timbers almost as soon as they went up, and dry rot swiftly set in, too.

Jefferson was constantly in financial difficulties, but they were difficulties of his own making. He was a breathtaking spender. When he returned from five years in France in 1790, he brought back a shipload of furniture and household goods—five stoves; fifty-seven chairs; assorted mirrors, sofas, and candlesticks; a coffee urn that he had designed himself; clocks; linens; crockery of every description; 145 rolls of wallpaper; a supply of Argand lamps; four waffle irons; and much more—enough to fill eighty-six large crates. In addition he brought home a horse-drawn carriage. All of this he had delivered to his residence in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, and went straight out to buy more.

Although personally ascetic—Jefferson dressed less showily than his own household servants—he spent colossal sums on food and drink. During his first term as president he spent $7,500—equivalent to about $120,000 in today’s money—on wine alone. During one eight-year period, he purchased no fewer than twenty thousand bottles of wine. Even at the age of eighty-two and hopelessly saddled with debts, he was “still ordering Muscat de Rivesaltes in 150-bottle lots,” as one biographer notes with undisguised wonder.

Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of homegrown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.

Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 percent of British linen exports, 76 percent of exported nails, 60 percent of wrought iron, nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt, and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things—not least the beaver hats—were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories—a point that did not escape the Americans.

America’s small internal market and problems of distribution over such a large area meant that Americans couldn’t compete even when they dared to try. Several fairly substantial glass-making operations were set up in the 1700s, and some even prospered briefly, but by the time of the American Revolution no glass was being made in the colonies. In most households a broken window stayed broken. Glass was so rare everywhere that immigrants were advised to bring their own window glass with them. Iron, likewise, was in chronic short supply. Paper was often so scarce as to be effectively nonexistent. Only the most basic pottery was made in America—jugs, crocks, and the like; anything of quality, like porcelain and bone china, had to come from (or, even more expensively, through) Britain. For Jefferson and other Virginia planters the problem was compounded by the absence of towns. It was easier to communicate with London than with other colonies.

The consequence of this was that practically everything had to be ordered through a distant agent. Every wish had to be made known in exhaustive detail, but ultimately one had to trust to a stranger’s judgment and honest devotion. The scope for disappointment was vast. A typical order from George Washington (this one in 1757) gives some sense of the innumerable things Americans were unable to produce for themselves. Washington asked for six pounds of snuff, two dozen sponge toothbrushes, twenty sacks of salt, fifty pounds of raisins and almonds, a dozen mahogany chairs, two tables (“4 ½ feet square when spread, and to join occasionally”), a large Cheshire cheese, some marble for a chimney, a quantity of papier-mâché and wallpaper, one cask of cider, fifty pounds of candles, twenty loaves of sugar, and 250 panes of glass, among much else.

“N.B. Let it be carefully pack’d,” he added just a touch plaintively, but futilely, for nearly every shipment came with goods broken, spoiled, or missing. When you have waited the better part of a year for, say, twenty panes of glass, only to find half of them broken and the others of the wrong size, even the most stoic temperaments tended to unravel.

From the merchants’ and agents’ point of view, the orders were sometimes mystifyingly ambiguous. One from Washington instructed his London agent to acquire for him “two Lyons after the Antique Lyon’s in Italy.” The agent correctly surmised that Washington meant statuary, but could only guess the types and sizes. Since Washington had never been within an ocean’s breadth of Italy, it is likely that he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Washington’s letters to his London agency, Robert Cary & Co., constantly asked for items that were “fashionable” and “in the latest taste” or “uniformly handsome and genteel,” but his follow-up letters indicate that he only seldom felt that he had got what he’d asked for.

Even the most carefully drawn instructions were dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation. Edwin Tunis, in Colonial Living, relates the story of a man who enclosed with his order a drawing of the family crest that he wanted on his dinner service. To make sure his directions were fully understood, he appended a bold arrow to emphasize some detail. When the plates arrived the man discovered to his horror that the arrow had been faithfully copied onto every piece.

It was easy—and for many agents irresistibly tempting—to offload onto Americans clothes and furnishings that were unsold because they were no longer fashionable in England. “You cannot really form an idea of the trash that is to be found in the best shops,” an English visitor named Margaret Hall wrote home to a friend. A cheerful catchphrase of English factories became: “It’s good enough for America.” Being overcharged was a constant suspicion. Washington wrote furiously to Cary after one consignment that many of the products supplied were “mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had.”

The carelessness of agents and merchants drove Americans half mad with exasperation. Colonel John Tayloe, while building the famous Octagon House in Washington, ordered a fireplace from the Coade factory in London, waited a year or so for its delivery, and was reduced to helpless sputters when he opened the crate and found that they had forgotten to pack the mantelshelf. Rather than waiting for the shelf to arrive, he had a new one made from wood by a trustworthy American carpenter. The fireplace—still with a wooden top—remains one of the few Coade pieces in America.

Because of the difficulties of supply, plantation owners often had little choice but to make their own bricks. Jefferson fired his own—altogether some 650,000 of them—but this was a difficult business, as only about half from any load were usable because the heating was so uneven in his home-built kilns. He also began manufacturing his own nails. As tensions with Britain increased, matters grew more difficult still. In 1774, the Continental Congress passed a nonimportation agreement. Jefferson discovered to his dismay that fourteen pairs of very expensive sash windows he had ordered from England, and really quite earnestly needed, could not now reach him.

This suppression of free trade greatly angered the Scottish economist Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations, not coincidentally, came out the same year that America declared its independence) but not nearly as much as it did the Americans, who naturally resented the idea of being kept eternally as a captive market. It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American Revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.

III

While Thomas Jefferson was endlessly tinkering with Monticello, 120 miles to the northeast his colleague and fellow Virginian George Washington was facing similar obstacles and setbacks, and responding with the same kind of adaptive genius, with the rebuilding of Mount Vernon, his plantation home on the banks of the Potomac River near the modern District of Columbia. (The proximity is not coincidental. Given the job of choosing the site of a new national capital, Washington selected one that was an easy ride from his plantation.)

When Washington moved to Mount Vernon in 1754 after the death of his half brother Lawrence, it was a modest farmhouse of eight rooms. He spent the next thirty years rebuilding and expanding it into a mansion of twenty rooms—all elegantly proportioned and beautifully finished (and with many nods to Palladio). Washington enjoyed one brief youthful trip to Barbados but otherwise never left his “Infant Woody Country,” as he once called it. Yet a visitor to Mount Vernon was struck by its sophistication, as if Washington had toured the great houses and gardens of Europe and carefully selected the finest aspects of each.

He fussed over every detail. For eight years during the Revolutionary War, through all the hardships and distractions of battle, he wrote home weekly to inquire how things were going and to issue new or modified instructions for some element of design. Washington’s foreman wondered, understandably, whether this was a good time to be investing money and energy in a house that the enemy might at any moment capture and destroy. Washington spent most of the war bogged down in fighting in the north, leaving his own part of the country chronically exposed to attack. Luckily the British never reached Mount Vernon. Had they got there, they almost certainly would have spirited off Mrs. Washington and put the house and estate to the torch.

Despite the risks, Washington pressed on. Indeed, it was at the very lowest point of the war, in 1777, that Mount Vernon acquired its two most daring architectural features: its cupola and the open-air front porch, known as the piazza, with its distinctive rectangular pillars running the length of the east front of the house. The piazza was Washington’s own design and it was his masterstroke. “To this day,” writes Stewart Brand, “… it is one of the nicest places in America to just sit.” The cupola was Washington’s idea, too. It not only added a jaunty cap to the roofline but also served as a very effective air conditioner, catching passing breezes and directing them into the body of the house.

“The piazza is a really ingenious way of keeping the house shaded and cool and keeping the frontage attractive,” Dennis Pogue, associate director for preservation at Mount Vernon, told me when I was there. “He was a much, much better architect than he is nearly always given credit for.”

Because he was continually adding to an existing structure, Washington had to make constant compromises. For structural reasons, he had to choose between redoing much of the interior or abandoning symmetry on the back end of the house—which is to say the side of the house that arriving visitors first saw. He chose to abandon symmetry. “That was quite a brave and unusual thing to do in that age, but Washington was always pragmatic,” says Pogue. “He preferred a sensible interior layout to an imposed symmetry without. He hoped people wouldn’t notice.” In Pogue’s experience about half the visitors don’t. It has to be said that the absence of symmetry is not particularly jarring, though for anyone who values balance it is hard not to notice that the cupola and pediment are a good foot and a half out of alignment.

Lacking building stone of any kind, Washington faced his house with planks of wood, carefully chamfered at the edges to look like blocks of cut stone and painted to disguise knots and grain. While the paint was still drying, sand was gently blown onto the planks to give them a gritty, stonelike texture. The deception was so successful that even now guides point out the real nature of the building to visitors by rapping on it with their knuckles.

Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night.

Washington died in 1799, just two years after retiring, and Mount Vernon began a long decline. By the middle of the following century, it was virtually derelict. Washington’s heirs offered it to the nation at a reasonable price, but Congress didn’t believe that its role included managing the homes of ex-presidents and declined to provide funds. In 1853, a woman named Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham, while cruising up the Potomac on a passenger steamer, was so appalled by its condition that she started a foundation, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which bought the place and began its long and heroic restoration. The association still looks after the house with intelligence and affection. Even more miraculous in its way is the survival of the peerless view across the Potomac. In the 1950s, a plan was unveiled to build a massive oil refinery on the opposite shore. A congresswoman from Ohio, Frances Payne Bolton, successfully intervened and managed to save eighty square miles of Maryland foreshore for posterity, so that today the view remains as agreeable and satisfying as it was in Washington’s day.

Monticello suffered similarly after Jefferson’s death, though in fact it was already in a pretty decrepit state. A shocked visitor in 1815 recorded that nearly all the chairs were worn through and had pieces of stuffing sticking out of them. When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day after the issuing of the Declaration of Independence—he had debts of more than $100,000, a colossal sum, and Monticello was looking threadbare.

Unable to afford the considerable upkeep on the house, Jefferson’s daughter put it on the market for $70,000, but there were no takers. In the end it was sold for just $7,000 to a man named James Barclay, who tried to make it into a silk farm. The enterprise failed miserably. Barclay ran off to the Holy Land to do missionary work, and the house became derelict. Weeds grew through the floorboards. Doors fell off. Cows wandered through empty rooms. Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famous bust of Voltaire was found lying in a field. In 1836, just ten years after Jefferson died, Monticello was bought for $2,500—a paltry sum for such a house even then—by an improbable figure named Uriah Phillips Levy. Nearly everything about Levy made him an unusual owner of a Virginian estate, but then nearly everything about him was unusual anyway. To begin with, he was a Jewish naval officer—the only one in the U.S. Navy. He was also difficult and obstreperous—qualities that his superiors didn’t like to see in any naval officer but ones that neatly fed any anti-Semitic prejudices they were inclined to hold already. Five times in his career Levy was court-martialed, and five times exonerated. Of equal consideration to his new neighbors was that he was from New York. A Jewish Yankee didn’t have many friends in Virginia. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Monticello was seized by the Confederate government and Levy fled to Washington, the nearest safe refuge. He appealed to President Lincoln for help, and Lincoln, with a neat appreciation of aptness, appointed him to a seat on the federal court-martial board.

The Levy family owned Monticello for ninety years—far longer than Jefferson himself did. Without them, the house would never have survived. In 1923, they sold Monticello for $500,000 to the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which embarked on a long program of renovation. Not until 1954 was the work complete. Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.

Had Thomas Jefferson and George Washington merely been plantation owners who built interesting houses, that would have been accomplishment enough, but in fact of course between them they also instituted a political revolution, conducted a long war, created and tirelessly served a new nation, and spent years away from home. Despite these distractions, and without proper training or materials, they managed to build two of the most satisfying houses ever built. That really is quite an achievement.

Monticello’s celebrated contraptions—its silent dumbwaiters, dual-action doors, and the like—are sometimes dismissed as gimmicks, but in fact they anticipated by 150 years or so the American love for labor-saving devices, and helped make Monticello not just the most stylish house ever built in America but also the first modern one. But it is Mount Vernon that has been the more influential of the two. It became the ideal from which countless other houses, as well as drive-through banks, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions, derive. Probably no other single building in America has been more widely copied—almost always, alas, with a certain robust kitschiness, but that is hardly Washington’s fault and decidedly unfair to his reputation. Not incidentally, Washington also introduced the first ha-ha into America and can reasonably claim to be the father of the American lawn; among all else he did, he devoted years of meticulous effort to trying to create the perfect bowling green, and in so doing became a leading authority in the New World on grass seed and grass.

It is remarkable to think that much less than a century separated Jefferson and Washington living in a wilderness without infrastructure from a Gilded Age America that dominated the world. At probably no time in history has daily life changed more radically and comprehensively than in the seventy-four years between the death of Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and the beginning of the following century—very nearly the same years, as it coincidentally happens, that marked the boundaries of our own Mr. Marsham’s quietly uneventful life in England.

There is a small postscript to all this. In the summer of 1814, the British burned down America’s Capitol (an act of vandalism so infuriating to Jefferson that he wanted to send American agents to London to set fire to landmarks there), and with it went the Congressional Library. Jefferson immediately, and generously, offered his own library to the nation “on whatever terms the Congress might think proper.” Jefferson thought he had about 10,000 books, but when a delegation from the federal government came to survey the collection, they found that the number was in fact 6,487. Worse, when they had a look at the books, they weren’t at all sure they wanted them. Many, they felt, were of no use to Congress, as they covered topics like architecture, wine making, cooking, philosophy, and art. About a quarter were in foreign languages, “which cannot be read,” the delegation noted grimly, while a good many more were of an “immoral and irreligious nature.” In the end, the congressmen allotted Jefferson $23,900 for the library—considerably less than half its value—and rather grudgingly took it away. Jefferson, as might have been expected, immediately embarked on building a new library, and had accumulated about a thousand new books by the time of his death the following decade.

Congress may not have been especially grateful for this windfall, but the purchase gave the infant United States the most sophisticated governmental library in the world and completely redefined such a library’s role. Government libraries previously had been mere reference rooms, designed for strictly utilitarian purposes, but this was to be a comprehensive, universal collection—an entirely different concept.

Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last long. Thirty-six years after the Jefferson library was purchased, early on a Christmas Eve morning, one of the chimneys in the Capitol library caught fire. Because it was early and a holiday, no one was around to notice the fire or check its spread. By the time the blaze was discovered and brought under control, most of the collection was destroyed, including Jefferson’s precious copy of I quattro libri.

The year of the fire, it almost goes without saying, was 1851.