At Home: Part Two

Bill Bryson on Robert Adam: "By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adams was the greatest.

"Adam's designs were intense -- sometimes overwhelming -- and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for over-decoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him 'a Pastry cook.' By the late 1780's, Adam was being denounced as 'sugary and effeminate' and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn't mention him at all. The banishment didn't last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture."