Victorian decorating was the polar opposite of today’s modern styles. It was a time of heavy, ornate furnishings, oversized everything, and a penchant for knickknacks. The resulting style is romantic, complex, warm, and dramatic, dripping with opulence and excess; basically, enough to make any minimalist shudder.
Victorian furniture is often revivalist in style, in that it adopts stylistic motifs from other periods, creating huge waves of revivals with nostalgic nods to the past. Victorian furniture pieces are valued for their opulence and elegance.
There is a rich variety within Victorian furniture designs, each piece having been influenced by its individual revival. Pieces can be identified by their iconic features which make them authentic to their time.
These found photos from Winterthur Library that captured people at home from between the 1870s and 1890s.
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