To have a room like this was to stay put. To “withdraw,” as the term “drawing room” refers, for socializing—games, conversation, refreshment—without leaving home. To be a homebody, albeit in a light-filled, comfortable setting like this one, originally part of a country estate in a park-like landscape.
And yet the room is full of references to distant times and places: fluted columns with Ionic capitals, carved garlands and drapery, Greek key molding. All modeled after the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome (c. 800 BCE–400 CE). To British men and women in the 1700s, creating such interiors allowed them to claim status by association, to surround themselves in an era they considered the pinnacle of intellectual and artistic achievement.