Where vanity meets art: Before the selfie, there was the mirror

Who would have thought that a mirror could have sex appeal? Historic paint expert and interior designer Edward Bulmer does — at least when it comes to the Drawing Room at Northumberland House, which he calls a ‘sexy mix of mirror, gilt and sparkling coloured glass’. What survives today is only a fragment of the Percy family’s opulent London residence, saved from ‘the wrecking ball’, as he puts it, that destroyed the rest and now preserved at the V&A Museum, London SW7.

Even in partial form, these mirrors retain a powerful charge. It is easy to imagine the social choreography that once unfolded within the room. Under candlelight, a glance could be caught, angled and returned in many ways; a fan flickered; an eyebrow raised. Mirrors create, as historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet puts it, a ‘fictive space in which an imaginary scenario is played out’, a setting for a game of love and ‘seduction’, or war and peace, as the case may be.

Elsewhere, the looking-glass was employed as a tool of restraint. In her memoir Wait for Me!, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire recalled the hours spent training to be a debutante, learning how ‘to stand still, to sit still, and not to fidget — which was far harder than it sounds’. Here, the mirror was less an object of admiration than a quiet instructor in composure. ‘Mirrors have always shaped social behaviour,’ concurs Rupert Bevan, a leading specialist in antique mirrors and glass. ‘Today, they still subtly choreograph how people gather, pause or orient themselves, especially in transition spaces such as halls, staircases and drawing rooms.’

That choreography, however, was once reserved for the few. In the 18th century, long before electricity, a large piece of glass was a feat of engineering and a declaration of wealth: sheets of Venetian and, later, French glass were carried across Europe at vast expense. Consequently, as Bulmer explains, ‘the amount of mirrored glass you owned was a very obvious status signal, just as with the number and quality of candles you burnt’. In the ‘Mirror Room’ at Kensington Palace in London — the colloquial name for The King’s Gallery and adjoining Cupola Room, used for receptions, audiences and courtly display — mirrors became instruments of power, rather than decoration. They were designed to extend space, broadcast wealth and double the presence of courtiers, uniforms and jewellery. Visitors saw not only themselves, but their place within society, reinforced by the deliberate placing of a mirror.

Mirrors were positioned not for private vanity, but to amplify light and sociability. Most commonly, they appeared as pier glasses, set between windows to catch and return daylight or candlelight, doubling brightness and extending space. Others rose magnificently as overmantels, integrated above chimneypieces and treated as part of the wall architecture itself, or on the back of shutters to create one long, extended sparkling scheme. As furniture dealer and interior designer Jermaine Gallacher wrote tellingly in Vogue: ‘A mirror should be more than the surface we pass by.’ In short, they remain one of the most powerful ways to shape a space.

How they were framed also mattered. According to furniture historian Adam Bowett, by the early 18th century, the grand frames of looking-glasses had become architectural constructions in their own right, designed to organise rooms and animate social life, rather than simply surround glass.

Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire provides a classic example. Here, the effect of the magnificent Baroque pier-glass mirrors in the State Rooms was not about intimacy, but command. The visitor is made acutely aware of space, symmetry and order — the visual language of governance — thanks in large part to the ornate frames designed by the Duchess of Marlborough’s ‘oracle’, as she called him, the royal cabinetmaker James Moore. His authority lay not in signatures, which were rare, but in scale, patronage and recognition. Even Thomas Chippendale did not routinely sign his work, despite regarding mirror frames as among his most prestigious and costly commissions. Nevertheless, as Bulmer points out, ‘account books of the period frequently show glass having cost well in excess of the fancy carved frames it was set in’.

Sir Alastair Pilkington, who invented the float-glass process in the 1950s, effectively democratised what was once a rare luxury. Bulmer reveals that he tends to allow for a mirror in most rooms, because ‘they are cost-efficient in terms of providing incident at scale compared with large pictures — and, of course, they suit most tastes’.

As furniture-maker Jonathan Sainsbury observes, an 18th-century country house was designed from the outset to accept the furniture, mirrors and objects fashionable at the time. ‘What’s interesting is that the same thinking has returned,’ he reflects. Those tastes now seem ever-more oriented towards mirrors, thanks to a new wave of post-covid, post-crypto country-house buyers faced with acres of spare wall space. ‘Mirrors have become very important items,’ believes Charlie Thomas, UK group director at Bonhams. ‘They are seen to work as functional art and add to the atmosphere.’ This is particularly the case if the glass is foxed.

This type of glass, which mists over time and was once dismissed as flawed, is now prized as a trophy: it is seen as proof of age, lineage and survival, with a frisson of ghost-story glamour. ‘An antiqued mirror gives a much more subtle and soft look, with character and a feeling of warmth,’ explains Bevan. ‘The effect is more organic, with not one panel the same.’ In effect, it re-creates the softness of candle-light on glass, a quality that remains flattering in an age of mobile-phone selfies. Where once a raised eyebrow caught in a mirror might convey a message across a room, today, that image can travel far beyond it via social media. ‘The rise of the selfie has perhaps heightened self-awareness, but, in refined interiors, mirrors tend to soften rather than sharpen self- consciousness, offering atmosphere rather than confrontation,’ Bevan believes.

A renewed appetite for mirrors sits alongside a broader shift in thinking: a growing determination to preserve great country houses in their entirety, rather than carving them up. This inevitably brings fresh attention to how their walls, rooms and sequences once worked together.

When Nick Ashley-Cooper, 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, unexpectedly inherited both his title and St Giles House, his ancestral home in Dorset, he was DJing in New York. The house had been left derelict for decades. Working with his neighbour Sainsbury, a specialist in historically accurate mirrors, he came to regard them not as decorative afterthoughts, but as integral to the identity of the house and the way its rooms functioned. The originals had long since been sold and were ‘arguably the finest English mirrors of their type ever made,’ believes Sainsbury. ‘It became clear that, for the rooms to function properly again, the mirrors would need to be made identically for their original locations,’ he adds. This marks another shift in the social life of mirrors. ‘Replica’, once a pejorative, is no longer a dirty word.

If mirrors affect the behaviour of a room and its contents, so, too, do they influence the behaviour of those within it. In the 18th century, to be polished was not merely to be well dressed, but to be socially refined, a word that draws directly on the physical act of polishing surfaces, glass among them. Think of a glance adjusted, a posture corrected, a gesture softened. For servants, however, mirrors were among the most difficult household objects to clean. The 19th-century servant diarist Hannah Cullwick repeatedly recorded having to wipe away soot after evenings of company, together with the pride taken in producing a shine.

Mirrors also have a habit of misbehaving. By candlelight, reflections could waver or double; a face might appear where none was expected. It is hardly surprising that they slipped easily into ghost stories. In many houses, mirrors were traditionally covered with sheets during periods of mourning and were rarely placed opposite beds, lest they weaken the spirit or invite restless dreams. At Blickling Hall, Norfolk, where Anne Boleyn’s ghost is said to return, sightings are often described as fleeting and indirect: figures glimpsed in mirrors or glass, rather than confronted face to face. At Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland, the Earl of Strathmore once ordered a mirror be boarded over altogether after a spirit was said to be trapped within it.

If such unease clung to mirrors in some places, Sir John Soane positively revelled in it. At his home, now Sir John Soane’s Museum, London WC2, he played with reflection and visual illusion impishly, placing mirrors above bookshelves and within arches so that rooms appear to open where none exist. Visitors still ask guides how to reach these phantom spaces. Here, the mirror’s ghostly tricks are used for wit, creating a deliciously labyrinthine sense of depth in a remarkably small house. In doing so, Soane neatly demonstrated the late Duchess of Devonshire’s belief that ‘a house must be full of light, movement and people if it is to feel alive’.

Mirrors, after all, keep rooms animated even after their occupants have left — whether the legacy they leave behind is ghostly, theatrical or, indeed, a rather provocative one

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.