05/06/2026
BEAUTY BY DESIGN
Are ornamental decorations in your life unnecessary? Maybe. In today’s world we look at things like these and think how quaint. We say it’s trivial. Why? Because we don’t associate high end decoration with modernization anymore. We say it’s old fashioned.
That’s the fundamental difference between then and now. The Gilded Age saw no contradiction between 19th century modernity and their startling use of ornamentation. And yet for decades now we’ve been told that we can no longer afford beauty in design. In things like the 1890 Art Nouveau bas-relief on internal structural beams, the 1905 glass handle on a coloured stained glass door, a relief carving on an 1925 armoire and even a gilded Rococo design on a 1930s oil lamp.
Even cursive handwriting has disappeared!
Luxury is a thing of the past. But that’s a lie. They had a secret. We forget that their ornamentation was not always handmade. It too was often industrial, molded and repetitive on objects made in factories like ours, sold through big mail out catalogues instead of online. It too was mass produced.
Let’s take Rosedale Manor as an example. It has been standing for over 130 years. Will the average 21 century home last this long? Will it showcase as well? Probably not.
The real shift here is not economics. We stopped measuring beauty’s value and started prioritizing convenience, speed, cost-cutting and simple function ahead of aesthetics, with less options out there from which to choose. This is the new pattern. Efficiency becomes the main measure in design. And when you measure the bottom line only, everything else disappears.
Here’s what we don’t talk about enough - visual quality signals and social investment. When a home looks beautiful with a groomed garden to showcase it, we feel welcomed. When it has detail, texture and visual interest, it radiates “someone cares about this place”. That perception changes behaviour. It’s measurable civic quality. We don’t just lose beauty when we choose convenience, we also lose the belief that we deserve that beauty. We didn’t eliminate care to save money, we eliminated it because our society stopped measuring its value, because we chose cost-savings over love.
The one big difference from their work is that our modern designs are often disposable. Yet all that pride of design and ornamental production is surprisingly cheaper in the long run as we have less of a will to dispose of things that please the eye.
Beauty is everywhere inside Rosedale Manor and throughout our English sitting garden. And in the next few entries we’re going to show you some simple examples, from the swinging gate inwards. Stay tuned!
When I'm working on a problem,
I never think about beauty.
But when I've finished,
if the solution is not beautiful...
I know it's wrong.
— Buckminster Fuller
https://www.rosedalemanor.ca
