Americans Obsessed with their house

Thomas Jefferson, who often used his home, Monticello to impress others with his social and economic status was quoted as saying “I am happy nowhere else and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.” Jefferson never saw his home as complete and continued renovating it throughout his life, once writing, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.”

A previous tenant to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge was George Washington. To present himself and his status to others, Longfellow filled his dining room with fine furniture, a selection of his four thousand books, busts of Euripides and Raphael, and in particular, fine paintings.

The famous writer Edith Wharton who chronicled the Gilded Age, also co-authored the nonfiction book The Decoration of Houses, where she confided to readers that she was a better landscape gardener than novelist. Wharton owned a forty-two room summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her bedroom suite, where she did most of her writing was inspired by the great homes of France and spaned the entire north side of the house’s third floor.