The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home Lecture

Join Wheaton College professor R. Tripp Evans for an exploration of his latest book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, a portrait of four fascinating men who shaped American style from the Gilded to the Jazz Age yet whose lives have until now remained in shadow.

Pioneers in the fields of professional interior decoration and historic preservation, they include Charles L. Pendleton (1846-1904), a reclusive gambler who built one of his era’s collections of eighteenth-century furniture; renowned interior decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951), who inherited his ancestors’ vices along with their “Boston Brahmin” pedigree; writer Charles H. Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954), who transformed his Back Bay home into a personal literary shrine and monument to his own beauty; and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), who created his Eastern Point masterpiece, Beauport, for the love of the man next door. The stories of these “surprisingly domestic bachelors” (as the press dubbed them) reveal the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces, as well as their connections to fellow bachelor-preservationists like Joseph Everett Chandler, architect of Stevens-Coolidge House and Gardens.