Heat and Style: Eighteenth-Century House Warming by Stoves

Abstract

SELDOM considered in the restoration of eighteenthcentury period furnishings is the role of heating.1 Most restorers do not realize that fireplaces alone were frequently inadequate in the northern climates and that stoves were in very common use, even in elegant parlors. American stoves were of decorated cast-iron plates; our knowledge of them is meager owing to their disappearance with the development of central heating in the nineteenth century. Actually, the heating of buildings was little understood until the eighteenth century. Draft chimneys did not even appear in Europe until the late middle ages. But from mediaeval times, at least in Germany and Scandinavia, simple heating stoves of tile or later iron plates were well known. By the Rococo period the big tile Ofen in German and Austrian interiors was a familiar piece of decorative furniture, its shape even enhancing the ornate architecture.