How home interiors play a starring role in 'The Gilded Age'

American Victorian-inspired architecture and interior design take centre stage in this HBO/Sky Atlantic drama 

Vast rooms richly decorated with furniture imported from continental Europe define the decorating style of the Russell family home.

American Victorian architecture and design: Something I knew nothing about until three years ago, only its successor, the Prairie style of architecture with its clean modernist lines, and the work of its main proponent Frank Lloyd Wright.

But a chance visit to the American mid-west landed me a stay on Summit Avenue in St Paul, Minnesota, which, at a distance of over three miles, happens to have the longest stretch of Victorian domestic architecture in the country.

It’s a delight for those of us who love a stroll along a thoroughfare of beautiful, grand homes, slowing our step to try to catch a glimpse of the interiors and to see this uniquely American take on a theme so familiar to those of us living in Ireland and England, but with some distinct differences: Scale, as you’d expect in the United States, and the application of ornamentation showing distinctive continental European design and cultural influences, quite often from the ancestral country of origin of the owner or their architect.

Heavily layered drapes, mixed textures and patterns and ornate paintings and sculptures define the home interiors of the established 'old money' New York families.

It’s a mix, and a rich one at that, which had me wallowing in the discovery of details like brass door hinges with decorative carvings I had previously only seen in historic homes in Austria and Germany.

So, when The Gilded Age (HBO/Sky Atlantic) was advertised promising Julian Fellows’ magic touch with a script — this time set in 1880s Victorian New York — I was sold as I was with his Downton Abbey (2012) featuring its tribe of upstairs-downstairs characters.

Delightfully drawn and fleshed out, we could only develop a fondness for bumptious but kind-hearted Carson the butler (Jim Carter); derision for the haughty elder daughter of the house, Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) — while adoring the indignation of the dowager countess (Maggie Smith) and revelling in her acid wit.

It’s a dramatic device on which a drama succeeds or fails: To get us to love or loathe the characters enough to want to keep watching and see the good succeed and the bad get their comeuppance.

But cue my sinking heart at The Gilded Age and its band of characters who do little more than walk into a room, utter banal sentences and walk out again, and hurrah for set designer Bob Shaw saving this drama from my delete button.

Deeper colour tones in the decorating style of the established homes continue in the attire of society matriarch Agnes van Rijn (Christine Baranski).

He’s the man responsible for sets on Boardwalk Empire, The Irishman and Mad Men, and now on The Gilded Age, his sumptuous American Victorian houses take the starring role.

Shaw knows his historic interiors which manage to not only reflect the design tastes of the time, but in nuanced style reflect the social tug-of-war between Mrs Agnes van Rijn (Christine Baranski), stalwart of the old money brigade, and the rabidly social-climbing Mrs Bertha Russell (Carrie Coons).

The latter, despite her new and vast financial resources is being shut out of society’s top drawer, even though she brags of a whole set of her own drawers that once belonged to Louis XV.

Grand exteriors were specially constructed for The Gilded Age, drawing on the 5th Avenue mansions of families like the Vanderbilts and Astors.

Working from old black and white photos of the time, Shaw consulted with Scalamandré, a New York fabric and wallpaper company that specialises in historic design, to bring colour to the interiors.

Altogether the result gives a lived-in feel in the van Rijn house, aiming to show they’re the establishment, achieved with layers of textures and objects, pattern over pattern and rooms heavy with drapery to keep the light out and social undesirables. Colours are deep and muted, reserved and conservative. Meanwhile, across the road looms the newly built and monumental home of the Russell family, designed for inviting everyone in and showing off with vast, open interiors filled with saturated colours and rococo ornamentation set in a classical shell.

It’s ostentation at its most flamboyant, if not bling.

The Russell family's grand home cites rococo influences, including the design of matriarch Mrs Bertha Russell's bedroom.

For an added layer — and following a theme in so many historic and vintage dramas of the last two years, including the 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma and Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit — Shaw might have been in cahoots with The Gilded Age’s costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone.

His sets are a match — or at least complementary — to her frocks and bonnets creating an inviting and richly textured world.

Just waiting now for the drama to decamp to the cottages, the equally grand Newport summer homes of the characters for what promises to be another satisfying interiors fix.