Making It Home: Mrs. Manson Mingott's Decadent Flat

for brocade, deep fringes, huge chandeliers, or massive gilt tables, the public spaces are the place to indulge it.

Similarly, private and service spaces often look best with smaller, plainer furniture, cotton fabrics, and simpler accessories. Even the Victorians often advocated simplicity for bedrooms, primarily for health reasons. The Mingott look, with the bedroom in the back parlor, gives a wonderful excuse to drape the bed in brocades and cover it with fringed pillows. In a normally sized back bedroom, this look will quickly become oppressive.

Reconsider where the heart of the house lies.

Only in farm country was the kitchen the heart of the Victorian home. Mrs. Manson Mingott had a whole basement level where the servants managed the cooking and laundry, but your Victorian flat probably has a tiny kitchen carved out of a hallway. Even buildings that were designed for apartments rarely had generous kitchens convenient to the dining room -- apartment dwellers were expected to eat out, unless they had a staff of servants slaving away in a kitchen remote from the dining room.

Hostesses of the 1920s had a solution to the problem of how to cook among friends with a tiny kitchen: they specialized in dishes that could be prepared in a chafing dish or other electric appliance at the dining table. Given how much cooking is done with specialized appliances today (the wok, the skillet, the espresso machine), it may be both wise and practical to do some cooking in the dining room, where there's probably also more room to store gadgets. A few pretty trays solve the problem of conveying ingredients back and forth.

Final thoughts

Mrs. Manson Mingott recognized one basic truth about Victorian flats: if you think about the function of the space, rather than the convention for what room goes where, you can solve most problems and create a unique and livable home.

Mrs. Mingott's house in the movie belongs to the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity in Troy, New York, and is open to the public during the annual Victorian Stroll. An interesting look at how a Victorian mansion was converted to studio apartments and then back to its original state can be obtained by visiting the McHenry Mansion Museum in Modesto, California.

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