Tasteful Friends

We think they're in Texas, which is a dealbreaker.

What lovely houses! I wish I could pick them up and move then to San Francisco!

Such a pity they're in Texas, you couldn't pay me enough to live there, even out of the hurricaine tracks.

I appreciate their beauty, and I'm thrilled they've been lovingly preserved.

I wouldn't live in one if you gave it to me. It would be like living in a funeral parlor.

They could do with some modern furnishings mixed in with the old R3 to give them less of a "funeral parlor" look.

One of the reasons it's a natural human impulse to want to pick up these houses and move them to San Francisco, is that the residents of SF have perfected the knack of turning Victorian houses that were designed to be dark and stuffy into light-filled, comfortable, modern residences.

Yes, some of the furnishings in the linked article are very authentic, but I'd still get rid of them.

I love the look of old Victorians with a mix of new and old inside.

Stunning.

It looks like a former funeral home, honestly.

The photos seem to have been taken in 1964, to judge by the fugitive colors and degradation of focus and color.

Galveston has long been famous as a having one of the best enclaves of Victorian architecture in the U.S., with some really exuberant exteriors.

The houses in this slideshow fall at the lesser end of the scale. Victorian as a period covered 63+ years of enormous variety in architectural styles. Unfortunately that hideous Belter associated Rococo Revival style with the balloon back chairs and sofas and settees all curves and grapes and roses, with even worse wallpaper of big cabbage roses against a filed of monkey puke or teal ruled the day for restorers from the 1970s to the early1990s, usually entirely out of synch with the style of the architecture. And if it's not that, it's mail-order low grade factory Eastlake made about 25 years after it's prime. There's a lot of that sort of thing going on here: furniture of the wrong time and style, and often the poorest examples meant for the little two story houses down by the railroad tracks. In every photo, the furniture has no scale. It's too small, too timid, the wrong style and quality bracket, and upholstered badly. The rooms do look like middle brow funeral parlors in small southern towns, only worse.

Paint or paper the rooms to emphasize the architecture, select the right period furniture of the right style and larger scale, eliminate the kitsch and bad repros and the rooms would have more force and interaction. As it is now, the owner may as well have replaced each piece of furniture with a large dead fish. The effect would be not much worse.

Big comfortable modern sofas with straight lines and monochrome fabric would be a great foil for some antique pieces appropriate to the architecture. You can buy the stuff, of quality more than equal to the architecture, for the price of melamine shit from Ikea, or less. Most of the stuff in these houses isn't really worth buying, it would cost more to haul it than to buy it.

Victorian architecture displayed with the right period furnishings is a great thing. And works equally well mixed up with modern as others have suggested. Bad Victorian furniture in the wrong places always looks fucking miserable.