Gothic Architecture, Sexuality, and License at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill

The New York interior designer's famous proclamation might serve as a warning to all patrons of domestic architecture and interiors. Its admonitory message applies particularly to "eccentric" men of taste, such as Horace Walpole (1717-1797), whose life and home, the neo-Gothic villa called Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, near London, have been subject to sustained critical attention from his own day to the present. The house's design and decoration emerged from close collaboration within his coterie of male friends between about 1747 and 1777, particularly the designers John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1708-1772), and a number of prominent architects, including Robert Adam (Fig. 1). Adopting the cheeky schoolboy moniker the "Strawberry Committee" or, latterly, the "Committee of Taste," Walpole, Chute, and Bentley built a house that offered a profoundly new vision of the Gothic as an architectural style and a historical idiom. 2 Encasing a small seventeenth- century house within several additions, Strawberry Hill's fabric seems imprinted with an ancient architectural history, modeled on England's heritage of late Gothic religious and seignorial architecture (Fig. 2).3 Emulating the stone construction of medieval Gothic architecture in plaster, wood, and papier-mache and incorporating medieval spolia in stained glass and other media, the interiors and their furnishings perform a series of formal and material transpositions. In Walpole's words, they "pretend ⋯ to be an observance of the costume [of the Middle Ages], even in the furniture," thus underlying his overtly ornamental and sensory interpretation of the Gothic (Figs. 3, 4) 4.