He was influenced in his career by two uncles,
John Hubbard Sturgis, an architect, and Richard Ogden, a decorator. He greatly admired Italian and French architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as well as English
Georgian architecture and the colonial architecture of Boston. Codman also opened offices in
Newport, Rhode Island as early as 1891, and it was in Newport that he first met novelist
Edith Wharton. She became one of his first Newport clients for her home there, Land's End. In her autobiography,
A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote: We asked him to alter and decorate the house—a somewhat new departure, since the architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field up to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables.
Architectural works at 15
East 96th Street, New York Wharton subsequently introduced Codman to
Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who hired Codman in 1894 to design the second and third floor rooms of his Newport summer home,
The Breakers, which he did in a clean eighteenth-century French and Italian classical style. Codman was not a draftsman, and it is said that in Paris he hired a talented group of students from the
École des Beaux-Arts to draw up the sketches for Vanderbilt. In 1907, Codman built what was later to be known at the
Codman–Davis House in
Washington, D.C. for his cousin
Martha Codman Karolik. It is currently the official residence of the Ambassador of
Thailand, and one of the few intact homes that he designed. He also designed the
Codman Carriage House and Stable, located a few blocks south. Codman's New York clients included
John D. Rockefeller Jr., for whom he designed the interiors of the
Rockefeller family mansion of
Kykuit in 1913, and
Frederick William Vanderbilt, for whom he designed the interiors for his
mansion in
Hyde Park, New York, and his house on
Fifth Avenue. He also collaborated with Wharton on the redesign of her
townhouse at 882–884
Park Avenue as well as on the design of
The Mount, her house in Lenox, Massachusetts. His suave and idiomatic suite of Régence and Georgian parade rooms for entertaining are preserved in the townhouse at 991
Fifth Avenue, now occupied by the
American Irish Historical Society. His French townhouse in the manner of
Gabriel at 18 East 79th Street, for J. Woodward Haven (1908–09) is now occupied by
Acquavella Galleries. All told, Codman designed 22 houses to completion, as well as the East Wing of the
Metropolitan Club in New York. He also began the trend of lowering the townhouse entrance door from elevated stairways to the basement level. He designed a series of three houses in
Louis XIV style at
7 (his own residence), 12, and
15 East 96th Street from 1912 to 1916. The
New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission later described the facade of number 7 as being "full of gaiety and frivolous vitality" and further, "on approaching the house, Paris and the
Champs-Élysées immediately come to mind." ...... In 1920, Codman left New York to return to France, where he spent the last thirty-one years of his life at the
Château de Grégy, wintering at
Villa Leopolda in
Villefranche-sur-Mer, which he created by assembling a number of vernacular structures and their sites: it is his masterpiece, the fullest surviving expression of his esthetic. ==Personal life==