There’s a tremendous amount we can learn about people when we walk through their homes. This is perhaps most evident in the living spaces of the super elite and powerful, which frequently project a thorny mix of their authentic and aspirational selves. The homes of the most privileged are fascinating sites of conscious self-fashioning, replete with social and aesthetic complexity.
Disorienting the Orient: Reinvention and Retribution in Lockwood de Forest’s Teak Room
Siddhartha V. Shah
The Carnegie Family Library (Teak Room), 1938; Collection of the Museum of the City of New York; Collection of the Museum of the City of New York
For example, the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion’s Family Library—conversationally referred to as the Teak Room—is a modestly sized room designed by the American adventurer, artist, and aesthete Lockwood de Forest in 1902. De Forest began working with Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1879 and, in the same year, traveled to British India for his honeymoon. British artists and designers had already pulled inspiration from Indian design for some time, but this was de Forest’s first direct encounter with it, which ultimately revolutionized his design practice. He amassed a number of objects in India to sell in the United States and, in partnership with the Indian philanthropist Mugganbhai Hutheesing, established the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in 1881, which employed Indian craftsmen to copy local architectural motifs and transform them into decorative items like folding screens, wall brackets, frames, and furniture. De Forest would go on to decorate and furnish some of the most spectacular American domestic and commercial interiors of the period, all marked with a distinctly Indian flair. Through a multitude of textures, colors, and materials, as well as a dizzying array of patterns, the de Forest “look” is perhaps best summarized in an expression coined by historian John Kasson: “Oriental orgasmic.” Indeed, some may find de Forest’s Orientalist interiors to be visually explosive and exhausting in equal measure.
The Teak Room is the only expressly designed and commissioned space in the Carnegie Mansion, which makes it a surprising exotic counterpoint to the rest of the building that otherwise conveys the family’s Scottish origins. It was designed as a well-appointed and inviting reading room outfitted with an impressive carpet, carved and upholstered furniture, books, framed paintings and photographs, and a Tiffany chandelier. Most of the room’s original furnishings and objects are no longer present, yet one might still feel a sense of overwhelm upon examining the extravagant ornamentation and detail on virtually every surface.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Model for Contrast Form Gestalt, CFGNY, New York, NY, 2024. Photo: CFGNY
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Siddhartha V. Shah