Famous Interior Designers Series - Ogden Codman Jr

Ogden Codman Jr was a famous American architect and interior designer. Codman was born in the year 1863 in Boston, Massachusetts to Ogden Codman Sr. He was sent to Dinard during the period of 1875 to 1884, which was a colony of America in France. Once he returned from Dinar, Codman joined MIT, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his future studies.

Codman was influenced by two of his uncles to take up interior design as a career. One of his uncles, John Hubbard Sturgis was an architect and the other one, Richard Ogden was an interior decorator. Codman was attracted to sixteenth to eighteenth century Italian architecture, as well as to French and Boston architecture.

At the start of his career Codman worked as apprentice in many Boston architectural firms. In 1891, he started his office in Boston and practised on his own until 1893 after which he relocated to New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. In Newport he happened to meet the novelist Edith Wharton, who became one of the first clients. Codman and Edith Wharton together published ‘The Decoration of Houses’, a famous book on interior design.

Codman was introduced to Cornelius Vanderbilt II by Wharton. Vanderbilt employed Codman to design the second and third floor rooms of his Newport summer home, called ‘The Breakers’ where he designed the rooms in eighteenth century Italian classical and French style.

he built a home called Codman-Davis House in Washington DC in 1907, for his cousin Martha Codman. Presently this building is the official residence of the Ambassador of Thailand. Codman-Davis house is one of the few homes he designed which is still intact.

Among his many esteemed clients in New York, is John D Rockefeller Jr, for whom he designed the famous Rockefeller family mansion in 1913. Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site in New York for Frederick Vanderbilt and the townhouse for Edith Wharton in Park Avenue figure prominently among Codman’s creations. Codman designed and completed 22 houses. He also designed the East wing of the Metropolitan club at 1 East 60th Street. He introduced the trend of lowering the entrance doors of townhouses from elevated stairways to the basement level. Among Codman’s Newport commissions, a prominent one is the garden trellis for Wakehurst, the summer home of James J Van Alen.

In 1920 Ogden Codman Jr left for France and spent the last thirty one years of his life in a French City called Chateau de Gregy. He died at the age of 87 in 1951.