Ogden Codman, Jr.

Ogden Codman Jr. (January 19, 1863 – January 8, 1951) was an American architect and interior decorator in the Beaux-Arts styles, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design.

Codman was born to Ogden Codman Sr. (of Boston and the Codman House) and the former Sarah Bradlee in Boston, Massachusetts. He spent his youth from 1875 to 1884 at Dinard, an American resort colony in France, and on returning to America in 1884, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He was influenced in his career by two uncles, John Hubbard Sturgis (architect) and Richard Ogden (a decorator), and admired Italian and French architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as well as English Georgian architecture and the colonial architecture of Boston.

After brief apprenticeships with Boston architectural firms, Codman started his own practice in Boston, where he kept offices from 1891 to 1893, after which time he relocated his main practice from Boston to New York City. Codman also opened offices in Newport, Rhode Island as early as 1891, and it was in Newport that he first met novelist Edith Wharton. She became one of his first Newport clients for her home there, Land's End. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote:

We asked him to alter and decorate the house—a somewhat new departure, since the architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field up to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables.

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