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• 1 media/Corliss-Carrington_House,_Providence_RI_2012.jpg 2016-05-04T15:30:50-07:00 The Carrington House 9 plain 2019-08-11T10:46:44-07:00 Edward Carrington’s house is one example among many early republic homes exhibiting a seamless aesthetic blend of republican simplicity and global ambition—the “global” being typically manifest in specific design elements associated with a newly encountered tropical world. In the parlor visitors saw an assortment of East Asian furnishings amidst Grecian urns and the heavy broken-scroll pediments of the fireplace mantle. . Hand-painted Chinese wallpaper covers the walls with peacocks, a traditional Chinese motif as well as an element of the Carrington family’s European coat of arms. Stepping outside, we see how the very façade of the house interweaves these seemingly contradictory elements. Carrington’s custom two-story front porch exhibits the Ionic and Corinthian columns of the neoclassical fashion, yet the porch itself is totally unusual in New England, “exotic” even, mimicking French colonial homes in the West Indies or, more likely, the double balconies of the hong factories in Canton where Carrington had worked—the architecture of hot and humid places. Early republic Americans habitually conflated the Caribbean, South Seas, and Asian exotic into one sphere that included a so-called “East Indies.”