In an episode of the first season of The Bridgertons, Colin Bridgerton, one of the children of the aristocratic family that stars in the series, announces that he is going to undertake the Grand Tour, a trip to the classical world through Greece and Italy with which many rich young people of that time (the plot starts in 1813) used to complete their education. Although the camera does not follow him on his journey, the Grand Tour is very present in the series, set in a time that would not have looked the same if many British architects and artists had not taken that trip. One of the most notable was Robert Adam, creator of several palaces on which it is engraved The Bridgertons, who in 1754 crossed the English Channel in search of a new type of design inspired by classical buildings.
To this end, the Scottish architect spent two years studying archaeological sites in Rome such as the Baths of Caracalla. The climax of his trip was his excursion to Diocletian’s Palace in Split (Croatia), whose ruins had a decisive influence on the style that would make him world famous. His return to England was one of the key moments of neoclassicism. Settled in London, Robert Adam transformed the classical style that Palladio’s followers had spread in his country into one with a more elegant and light air, in which the architectural and ornamental elements of Ancient Rome were combined and mixed with others with a freedom that is hard to imagine in his Palladian colleagues. The pastel colours in which he liked to paint his rooms and the elaborate plasterwork with classical ornamentation with which he filled them are other hallmarks of a decorative style that greatly influenced other great designers of the Georgian era: Thomas Chippendale, the most important of English cabinetmakers, or Josiah Wedgwood, who created his famous pale blue porcelains to match Adam’s pastel interiors.
In The Bridgertons These elements appear in sets such as the Featherington house, whose staircase is painted in pastel shades of yellow and green and decorated with palmettes and Roman plaster garlands; or in the Bridgertons’ own, in an ashy blue similar to that of Wedgwood. As for Adam’s authentic buildings that appear, Osterley Park stands out, in whose magnificent portico (inspired by Octavia’s Portico) the new season’s full moon ball is celebrated. Located in London, the palace contains some of the Scottish architect’s best interiors, such as the hall or the Etruscan room, decorated with drawings similar to those that can be seen in Anthony and Kate Bridgerton’s new chambers in the series.
“Robert Adam was an architect, but in addition to the buildings themselves he was in charge of designing everything else,” explains the interior designer and art historian Lorenzo Castillo by phone. “He had a global vision of architecture that encompassed the decoration: he reproduced the designs of the plaster ceilings on the carpets to create the illusion that they were reflected on the floor, and he took care of every detail of both the furniture and the silver or porcelain.”
Today Adam continues to be a reference author for interior designers such as Castillo himself or the Frenchman Jean-Louis Deniot, who is currently using his knowledge of the Adam style in a London hotel and has been inspired by his “exquisite sense of proportion.” and his “elegant references to antiquity” for many other projects. “The pastel colors that were introduced at that time are becoming fashionable again, and the sense of structure and symmetry produced by plaster decorations on ceilings and walls in those colors is still very elegant,” Deniot notes by email.
The Netflix series takes place two decades after the death of Robert Adam, during the years of the regency of the Prince of Wales (later George IV), a time when, although many wealthy families lived in Adam-style houses, a new type of decoration had been imposed. Thus, in 1799, a young designer moved into one of the houses that Adam had created in London and remodeled it in a different style. His name was Thomas Hope, he was of Dutch origin, and like Adam he had made the Grand Tour, although his journey in search of the classical spirit had taken him much further: for almost a decade, Hope had traveled to Italy, but also Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt.
The antiquities he had been drawing and buying in these countries (he even bought a mummy) inspired the designs he used in his famous London mansion, full of swans, griffins, sphinxes, urns and other decorative elements that he had come across during his tour. His London residence thus became one of the greatest exponents of the Regency style, the type of English neoclassicism (equivalent to the Empire style in France) that was at its peak at the time of The Bridgertons. Inaugurated in 1802 with a great party attended by the Prince Regent, and drawn by Hope himself in a book that many professionals still consult today for their neo-antique designs, the residence contained his impressive collection of antiques in themed rooms such as the Egyptian one, the jewel of the residence, decorated with ebonized furniture and adorned with figures of sphinxes and golden heads of pharaohs that have inspired some of those that the Featherington family has in the series.
“During the Bridgerton era, Robert Adam’s neoclassicism overflowed with the introduction of decorative motifs from other foreign countries,” explains Lorenzo Castillo. “From the colonies in China came the taste for bamboo furniture, and the campaigns in Egypt made designs with golden ornamental motifs fashionable. It was the great contribution of the Regency style: a mélange of exoticism that again had a great impact in the first half of the 20th century, especially in Los Angeles, where Regency Hollywood emerged.”
Indeed, Hope’s designs came back into fashion after a few decades in which, as happened with Adam, interest in her work was waning. There was also a revival Adam style, revived in the Edwardian era to decorate elegant places such as the Savoy Hotel in London (in the 1903 renovation) or some of the rooms of the Titanic. In Hope’s case, it was the auction of his collection in 1917 that revived interest in his furniture, which influenced many designers of the 1920s and 1930s and attracted collectors such as Mario Praz. Now in The Bridgertons has captivated an audience that is also interested in the past, and quite hungry for ornament. “In recent years there has been a return to high-end decoration, perhaps in response to the legacy of minimalism,” says Castillo. “There is no longer so much of that unadorned style of the nineties, in which only four or five pieces were used so as not to obstruct the view of the architecture of a space, but, as happened with Adam or the Regency style, decoration once again plays a very important role.”
