Images via Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum
First Image, A Regency Egyptian revival settee designed by Thomas Hope (1769-1831) for the Egyptian Room at his Duchess Street residence in London, c. 1802, and Second Image, a drawing of the Egyptian Room.
A wealthy (the Hope Diamond was in his family, hence its name) art collector and architecture enthusiast from a family of bankers, Hope was particularly interested in arts from the Ottoman Empire. He designed many classicist pieces in addition to the rooms he fashioned for his residence at Duchess Street, and notably published a book of his own designs, called Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, in 1807.
Less notably, there's a lot of bizarre Hope-related ephemera floating around the internet. Wikipedia, for instance, dubiously cites him as the inventor of the Battenberg cake. While I would like for this to be true (it is, after all, a square pink and yellow checkered cake covered in marzipan), I very much doubt it.
There's also this little interactive site hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where you can design your own Hope-inspired room by placing his sketches of furniture, ornaments, ceilings, and other items, in one of the four Duchess Street room backdrops, and then digitally coloring them. All I can say is: embarrassingly time consuming.
Less notably, there's a lot of bizarre Hope-related ephemera floating around the internet. Wikipedia, for instance, dubiously cites him as the inventor of the Battenberg cake. While I would like for this to be true (it is, after all, a square pink and yellow checkered cake covered in marzipan), I very much doubt it.
There's also this little interactive site hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where you can design your own Hope-inspired room by placing his sketches of furniture, ornaments, ceilings, and other items, in one of the four Duchess Street room backdrops, and then digitally coloring them. All I can say is: embarrassingly time consuming.
