In a piece published in the Speaker, 26 August 1899, an undergraduate recollected a meeting ‘In Pater's Rooms’, Old Lodge 4 and 5, Brasenose College, Oxford, dating to sometime between 1892 and Pater's death in 1894. ‘F’ recalls the interior being decked out in the trappings of an aesthete, with stencilled walls, cushions, table covers and curtains all shades of blue, accented by white books, natural woods and polished brass. This interior space compared with the view from Pater's window:

Whereas Ruskin argues in Modern Painters that window frames are extrinsic to aesthetic contemplation, ‘a vague, flitting, obscure interruption to whatever is perceived beyond it’ (CW 3: 320), for ‘F’, the focus of Pater's room was the window, which ‘frames’ Oxford outside. Pater's fictional writings are replete with examples of windows that allow communion between spaces, so that the relations of inside and outside become permeable, as well as examples of how architecture can frame the world as art. His own rooms thus played out the architectonics so memorably sketched in the infamous ‘Conclusion’ to his Renaissance, in which the exterior and interior worlds reflect one another as two modes of flux (SHR 186–8). But what is perhaps most striking for our purposes is the immediate presence of Oxford: framed by a Gothic window, the first view is of the Radcliffe Camera, designed by James Gibbs (1682–1754) and built in 1737–49 in English Palladian style; east across Radcliffe Square, All Souls College and the crockets of the Codrington Library, designed by Hawksmoor and built in 1716–51 in his idiosyncratic Gothic style; south of Radcliffe Square, St Mary’s, with its famous Gothic spire, dating to the 1320s, a ‘fair dream’ to the undergraduate spectator, recalling Arnold's description of Oxford's ‘dreaming spires’ (l. 21) in ‘Thyrsis’ (1865).