Hope’s taste was shaped by the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with origins and, inevitably, his taste inclined towards authentic antique sources. One can sense that in the severe black and gold contours of an Egyptian couch, which was produced as part of a suite Hope designed for his Egyptian Room, and also in the side table that he produced for the Aurora Room, a glittering, slender thing supported by caryatids. For Hope, Greek was unsurpassed: He likened the Greek Doric order to "a body in its youth and vigor, full of sap and substance." The Roman Doric, he said, was like "a body in deep decline."

Yet Hope’s taste could also be eclectic and picturesque, and by no means confined to the Greek. He was a magpie enthusiast whose taste was diversified by the gathering strength of the Romantic movement, and ultimately his example would prove to herald the very various tastes of the Victorian age. He was caused no discomfort by curiously modern confections like the Isis clock, a timepiece dedicated to the goddess of the moon, and produced from a design he originally devised for the Aurora Room. Nor was he bothered by a tea urn that fused French Empire and Egyptian styles; it is actually by the hand of another designer, yet it fully reflects Hope’s taste for eclecticism.

Hope only wished that decoration should blend into a scheme that might encompass a whole room or a whole house, and for inspiration he was happy to rifle the past. "No one seems yet to have conceived," he once wrote, "the smallest wish of only borrowing of every former style of architecture whatever it might present of useful or ornamental, of scientific or tasteful." He took a little from Greece, a little from Syria, a little from Italy, and fashioned it into a style that, "born in our country, grown on our soil, and in harmony with our climate, institutions, and habits, at once elegant, appropriate and original, should truly deserve the appellation of ‘Our Own.’"

Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic based in New York. His writing appears regularly in publications such as The Times, London.

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