The Colonial Bedroom, History

With its four-poster canopy bed, highboy dresser, and floral upholstered chair, the room blends focuses of practicality and modest wealth. Textiles such as lace, alongside the wood grain creates a cozy, lived-in feeling to mirror how families in the colonial era were blending the utility previously required with burgoning comfort. 

These aspects lean toward a revival period movement, with specific choices that call to the Colonial Revival period of the 19th and 20th centuries, with Queen Anne influences. 

The Queen Anne and Colonial Revival were coexisiting interior design movements that worked off and shaped each other. Emerging in 1870s Philadelphia, the Colonial Revival celebrated early American architecture and design---like that we saw in the Pennsylvania Dutch Kitchen. Nearly at the same time, around the 1880s, the Queen Anne style introduced to this symbol of national heritage and identity, a flair for asymmetry, ornamentation, and romanticism. The choices often drew more from English roots than colonial ones. 

The Colonial Revival

The Queen Anne Revival Style

We see in Mrs. Fisher's room, the beautiful overlap of the two asethetics, where the clean and symmetrical lines of colonial architecture would be embellished by the Queen Anne's attention to the Victorian era details: ornate spindle work and decorative gables, as well as four poster beds and highboy dressers. 

It is more plainly to percieve in the exterior of the architecture:

These revival periods brought about a resurgence of recognized American design, ladder-back and Windsor chairs or canopy beds. However, they were made modern by embellishments of floral wallpaper and braided rugs that evoked comfort alongside practicality.