Whoever coined the term “nothing succeeds like excess,” probably needed their decorator to rein them in. Excess as a design principle rarely works—whether something is too large, there are too many, or something is too bright. But what constitutes excess? It’s not easy to say because excess varies culturally, historically and by social class. When you cross a certain line, people will think you have gone too far. I don’t pretend to understand the psychology of those who crave excess, but I suspect it’s linked to insecurity. Each society, era or social group marks the boundary for itself, perhaps as a way of controlling levels of consumption.

My favorite example of excess is the house of the mad Roman emperor Nero.  His 300-room palace, the Golden House, was overlaid with gold covered in gemstones and mother of pearl. The dining rooms were fretted with ivory. The house was filled with treasure ransacked from around the empire. There was an immense vestibule with a 120 foot statue of the Emperor himself under a mile long triple portico.

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It was more difficult for an individual to be excessive in 17th-century France because the accepted gold and mirror quotient was so high. And yet the Sun King was up to the task. His palace at Versailles was lavish beyond belief. This example set off an orgy of competitive consumption among his courtiers, although none approached Louis’ level of excess, at least not if they valued their heads!  

But even this level of decorative excess was topped by the horror of Rococo that originated in France in the 18th century and then metastasized to other parts of Europe, reaching a particularly deadly form in Germany. In the Reichen Zimmer of the Residenz in Munich, the decoration of the walls literally flowed onto and engulfed the furniture.  Perhaps there should be a name for a psychological state that will tolerate no space empty of curving lines!

In the 16th century, the issue of excess in interior design became a major point of theological debate. The newly-formed Protestant sects judged Roman Catholic Churches to be excessively decorated. This was read as a sign of the worldliness and falseness  of Rome.  Apparently, both sides thought that God cares deeply about interior design!

Of course, we can’t speak of excess without mentioning the Victorians. Again during this period, the bar of what constituted excess was very high. There are two reasons why Victorian homes were filled to the rafters with things: the first being the industrial revolution and the second being the British Empire. The advent of machine-made furniture and decorative objects rapidly increased the supply while dramatically reducing the cost.  Added to this, the availability of inexpensive objects from around the world stimulated an unprecedented desire to collect things! The industrial revolution was key. It created a love of the newest industrially-produced objects for the home and, ironically, nostalgia for pre-industrial objects from Europe in the past and from parts of empire untouched by modernization. And so began the love affair with antiques. But that I’ll leave for another blog post.

Not to be outdone by their European counterparts, newly wealthy Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century took excess to new levels. For example, nouveau-riche capitalists like William Randolph Hearst imported container loads of European antiques to fill his ersatz castle in California. (See “Moving Rooms” by John Harris about the trade in architectural salvage.) 

Likewise, during the First World War, James Deering employed a tenth of the population of Miami to create his winter home, Vizcaya, a faux Italian renaissance villa filled with European antiques.

Hearst Castle was a monument to excess and a textbook example of the gilded age dictum “too much is not enough!”

At present, newly rich entrepreneurs, movie stars and athletes display their over-sized egos by buying mega mansions, although only seldom are they filled with valuable art and antiques.  Rarely being connoisseurs themselves, they tend to go for quantity or size.

Having said that, an appreciation of quality is no protection from the perils of excess.  For example, I thought that the late Yves St. Laurent’s apartment in Paris was a nightmare of excess.  The precious objects individually deserved the breathless praise they received in the press, but the superabundance of objects in the apartment approached madness.  Wonderful pieces were layered behind other equally beautiful objects, so that the overall effect was more of a compulsive shopper’s lust, than a connoisseur’s eye. 

Maybe the modernists were right, less is more!