Tea Room, Monticello

Charlottesville, Virginia

Thomas Jefferson's tea room at Monticello is a decorative scheme in the true sense of the word. Here in his "most honorable suite," where he displayed on brackets busts of the worthies Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette, and George Washington, he achieved a formal and balanced composition of enduring personality through a play of architecture and decoration. His design continues to resonate with modern taste and to delight more than two hundred years later.