A Guide to Edwardian Home Basics (2024)

FAQs

What did Edwardian bathrooms look like? ›

The Edwardian era was a pivotal time in design history and while taking inspiration from the Victoria period, Edwardian's favoured simpler styling. Classic bathroom designs of the time (1901-1910) valued light and open spaces, simple patterns and colours, as well as the necessary luxury finishing touches.

Edwardian interiors favour bright pastel colours, floral designs and are very spacious – escaping from the darker colours and cluttered-look from the Victorian era. Enhance the natural light coming into your home with bright, reflective surfaces and plenty of glass and mirrors.

To capture the essence of an Edwardian interior, consider using colours like soft pastels, pale blues, delicate pinks, and muted greens. These colours evoke a sense of tranquillity and sophistication that was synonymous with the Edwardian era.

While terraces of tall, narrow Victorian houses are an extremely common sight in urban areas, the suburbs allowed more space, and Edwardian houses therefore tend to have a broader footprint, with more spacious rooms, generous hallways, wider staircases, and larger windows (now that glass was becoming cheaper), often ...

Flooring. Ceramic tiled floors were very popular in Edwardian hallways as it was decorative, hygienic and easy to clean. Mosaic tiled floors were often seen in expensive houses, but tessellated floors were more common in middle class homes.

Edwardian-style homes are associated with the first two decades of the 20th century, reaching the height of popularity during King Edward VII's reign. They are known for being spacious and well-suited to families.

Edwardian houses are 1-1/2 storey with a very steep-pitched front-gabled roof above an integral porch and (typically) saddle-bag dormers. The roof skirt gives a strongly triangular look to the gable and usually frames a sleeping porch.

While the pipework in the Victorian bathroom was kept on display to provide some ornamentation in their shower enclosure, exposed pipework in the Edwardian era allowed homeowners to maintain their showers, keeping them pristine and rust free.

As bathrooms weren't installed in all Edwardian homes, the usual method to cleanse the body was to dip a washcloth in a basin of water which was resting in a washstand. And even though the Edwardians couldn't shower every day, they still washed the entire body at least once a day.

The Edwardian bathroom

Saying that, the toilet and bathroom weren't always found in the same space, with many homes possessing 2 distinct spaces—a small water closet for the toilet and separate room for a bath and washing facilities.

What are the principles of Edwardian design? ›

The Edwardians built big, solid country homes with light, airy rooms and the detailing was a cut above what anyone was used to at that time.” Suburban houses were built on wide plots with fewer, larger rooms, double-aspect living spaces and large hallways. Privacy was also important.

The interiors of Edwardian properties typically feature high ceilings that create a sense of spaciousness. This design element contrasted with the lower ceilings often found in Victorian houses. Edwardian houses aimed to create brighter and more open interior spaces.

Edwardian homes tend to be shorter than equivalent Victorian residences, partly because the middle classes who lived in these homes had less of a need for servants, unlike the Georgian the Victorian generations before them. Gone were the cellars and the second floors, but in came larger halls and spacious gardens.

The Edwardian period was known for elegance and luxury among the rich and powerful in Britain but also for moral looseness and for a general failure to prepare for some of the challenges of the twentieth century — particularly World War I , which broke out four years after the death of King Edward.