Originally published March 2017
A fun aspect to living in an older home is seeing how spaces and rooms have changed over the years. And the foyers so often found in Victorian houses are a perfect example of that. Rarely in modern homes do you find a formal foyer. And if there is a foyer, it is most likely small and utilitarian, meant as nothing more than a transition are from the front door to the rest of the house.
But in houses built prior to the start of the 20th century and especially in the homes of wealthy people, the foyer served a much different purpose. The purpose and point of a foyer was to impress and intimidate.
In the era before you could impress your friends and neighbors with the kind of car you parked in your driveway, you would use your foyer to do so. Foyers in wealthier homes were large and lavish. In the Lamson House, the foyer is the most impressive room in the house. The stairs are grand with intricate woodwork, there are multiple stained glass windows and the wood floor in the foyer has more inlay that most of the other rooms. It is an imposing room and is the one that gets the most comments when we have visitors. There is no doubt that when the house was built, the foyer was specifically designed to make people understand that Fred Lamson had a significant amount of money.
The lesser known reason for Victorian foyers was to intimidate. During the Victorian era, many people relied on delivery and service people for all their goods. The foyer was also meant to intimidate these people. Many Victorian foyers also have hard and uncomfortable benches and doors that closed them off from the rest of the house. Service people who had business with the house would be asked to wait for the lady of the house or the housekeeper in the foyer and would have little choice but to stand with their hat in hand and grubby clothes amid all that grandeur and they would not have been invited deeper into the home. The foyer was a room that was intended to pointedly remind these people of their lower social standing.
If this seems cruel to our modern social structure, it was not in that era. Society was still well entrenched in the upstairs/downstairs mentality of social structure. These kinds of things were to be expected and were rarely resented. The Lamsons were simply following the example of all of their friends.