A1: Massachusetts Living Room and Kitchen, 1675–1700

Narcissa Niblack Thorne, creator of the Thorne Rooms, combined a deep knowledge of design history with a vivid imaginative sensibility. In the 1930s, she assembled a team of skilled artisans in Chicago to construct a series of intricately detailed interiors at the scale of one inch to one foot (1:12).

Conceived as a visual history of interior design, the rooms are at once scholarly and inventive. Meticulously researched and carefully composed, they balance historical accuracy with artistic interpretation. Each atmospheric interior feels like a stage set awaiting its occupants—two parts fantasy, one part history, and entirely absorbing.

Entry from Fannia Weingartner, Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2nd ed. (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004):

1: Massachusetts Living Room and Kitchen, 1675–1700
This interior represents a domestic setting of some fifty years after the Pilgrims had established themselves at Plymouth. By this time, settlers in North America had constructed more substantial housing resembling those left behind in England, but made of native materials and adapted to local use. In this, as in the following interiors, the settlers’ attachment to the familiar is clear. English models would remain the dominant influence on architecture and furnishings for a long time to come.
In creating this interior, Mrs. Thorne turned to two models—a room from Parson Capen’s house built in 1683 in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and a period room displayed by the Concord (Massachusetts) Antiquarian Society. In this kind of combined kitchen and living room, the fireplace played a crucial role, serving as the sole means both of heating and cooking. The baking oven built into the thick brickwork and the iron cooking pot on the crane were supplemented by a variety of utensils of the sort grouped around the mantel and grate. Sturdy wooden bowls and trenchers and pewter plates and mugs tended to be used rather than pottery and glass, by now fairly common in England. Kitchen floors were usually covered with sand, which, when swept out, took the refuse with it. Though the first kinds of rugs recorded in the colony were braided ones like those used by Mrs. Thorne in this interior, they would have been unusual.
The walls of this room are sheathed in pine—a regional wood. Windows were few and small because of the high cost of glass. The low ceilings conserved heat. The furnishings of this room are more abundant than was common at the time. Some pieces might have been brought from England, but most of the benches, chests, stools, and settles were made locally. The settle’s high back, which extends all the way to the floor, was designed to protect the sitter from drafts. Stools like the ones grouped around the fireplace were more common than chairs, which were rare at the time. An armchair, or “great chair,” as it was called, was considered a seat of honor. The two in this room are models of types that in Mrs. Thorne’s day acquired the names of historical figures from the Colonial period. To the left stands a Governor Carver chair; to the right, fashioned of many spindles, is an Elder Brewster chair. The originals were made between 1640 and 1660. The miniature ship on the mantel is a model of the Mayflower. Mrs. Thorne placed an antique painted doll in the child’s chair to the right of the fireplace.
The typical seventeenth-century house plan featured two rooms, one on either side of a central chimney. Through the door can be glimpsed a room that would have been called a chamber, for bedrooms as we know them did not exist at this time. This room features a folding press bed and a trundle bed, both copies from Wallace Nutting’s Furniture Treasury (1928–33) and both from the eighteenth rather than the seventeenth century. Chambers of this period were, in fact, multifunctional, and although it seems strange by our standards, various items such as dining implements, furniture, foodstuffs, and staples, in addition to bedding and bedsteads, would have been found here.
The room measures 8 5/8 x 18 1/8 x 14 inches.