The House of the Orchard I.9.5–7, also known as the House of the Floral Cubicles, is one of the most refined domus in Regio I and preserves one of the finest examples of garden painting in Pompeii. Located on the Via dell'Abbondanza, it takes its names from the exceptional vegetal decoration of two small cubicula. Fruit trees, ornamental plants, birds and Egyptianising motifs transformed their walls into imaginary gardens.
The importance of these paintings lies not only in the quality of their execution. In Pompeian houses, large garden views were normally reserved for peristyles, triclinia and other rooms intended for guests. Here, by contrast, they decorate rooms in the private part of the house, used chiefly for rest. The owner therefore chose to concentrate some of the residence's most spectacular imagery within relatively small and intimate spaces.
A house with ancient origins
Like other houses in Insula 9, the original domus dates to the third or second century BC. Masonry in opus incertum and traces of First Style decoration bear witness to the building's earliest phases.
The house nevertheless continued to be occupied and altered for centuries. In the Julio-Claudian period, during the first century AD, many rooms were redecorated with Third Style paintings, including the celebrated decoration of the cubicula.
The building buried in AD 79 thus preserved earlier structures and pavements alongside decoration created in the Imperial period, providing a particularly clear example of the long development of Pompeian houses.
The entrance from the Via dell'Abbondanza
The main entrance opened onto the Via dell'Abbondanza, one of the city's principal thoroughfares. From it, visitors entered the atrium, around which several rooms in the front part of the house were arranged.
The atrium pavement was relatively restrained, consisting of pale cement-based flooring with inserts and geometric motifs. At its centre stood the impluvium, the basin that collected rainwater falling through the opening in the roof. Its floor was lined with a rough mosaic of travertine chips.
The front of the house therefore retained the traditional organisation of an atrium domus, while the decoration became progressively richer towards the inner rooms.
The tablinum and reception rooms
At the rear of the atrium stood the tablinum, one of the spaces traditionally associated with the master of the house. Its cement-based pavement incorporated a central panel of black-and-white chequerboard mosaic.
Other rooms preserved increasingly elaborate geometric floors with crosses, octagons, stars and marble inserts. A large oecus also had polychrome marble paving, reflecting the wealth attained by the house's occupants.
The richness of the domus therefore extended well beyond its famous garden paintings: floors and wall coverings formed a complex decorative programme that embraced several parts of the building.
The peristyle and the real garden
At the rear lay a green space surrounded by a portico, the house's real garden. The peristyle pavement bore different geometric motifs along its various sides and between the columns.
This space is important for understanding the paintings in the cubicula. The house's occupants lived in the presence of both a real garden and several painted gardens: the cultivated outdoor landscape was imaginatively continued across the walls of the interior rooms.
The relationship between painting and vegetation is one of the most characteristic themes of Pompeian domestic decoration.
The summer triclinium
The rear garden also contained a summer triclinium, used during the warmer months instead of the indoor dining room.
Dining outside amid the vegetation was one of the most enjoyable features of life in houses with gardens. Banquets could be adapted to the seasons and held in surroundings that were cooler and more open than the interior rooms.
Although this house was not comparable in size to the grandest aristocratic domus, its owner had nevertheless created distinct spaces for relaxation, rest and conviviality.
The two floral cubicula
The house is famous above all for two small cubicula, rooms used chiefly for rest. Their walls were wholly transformed by garden paintings of exceptional refinement.
The Archaeological Park specifically emphasises the unusual location of these scenes. Such imagery normally created the illusion of expanded space in peristyles and large reception rooms; in the House of the Orchard it was instead reserved for private spaces used mainly by the household.
The two rooms create different, almost complementary atmospheres: one evokes a bright and luxuriant garden, while the other presents a garden immersed in a darker, nocturnal setting.
The bright garden
In the first cubiculum, the walls depict lush vegetation populated by fruit trees, ornamental plants and birds. The execution is so meticulous that scholars have been able to identify some of the species represented.
The Park draws particular attention to lemon trees and strawberry trees, portrayed with remarkable care in the rendering of leaves, branches and fruit. This is not, however, a simple botanical catalogue: the plants form part of an ideal landscape in which realistic elements are combined to serve the decorative design.
The paintings made the small room appear far larger, suggesting that a garden extended beyond the real confines of the architecture.
Real and painted nature
The effect must have been very different from the impression created today by an isolated wall. In antiquity, furniture, fabrics, lighting and the presence of people completed the room, while the vegetation painted on its walls almost entirely surrounded its occupants.
The painting acted as an extension of the real garden at the rear of the house. Painted trees and plants symbolically brought the garden into even the most private rooms.
This is one of the finest examples at Pompeii of Roman painting being used not merely to decorate a wall, but to alter the perception of space itself.
The cubiculum with a dark ground
The second cubiculum creates a very different atmosphere. Its garden is painted against a dark ground, which the Park describes as a setting enveloped in the darkness of night.
Three trees of different sizes dominate the scene. The larger central tree is a fig tree, around which a snake is shown.
The contrast between the dark ground and the vegetation makes the image especially evocative and clearly distinguishes this room from the bright garden of the other cubiculum. The two rooms thus appear to offer different pictorial interpretations of nature.
The fig tree and the snake
The snake coiled around the fig tree is one of the decoration's most distinctive elements. The Park's official guide interprets it as a symbol of prosperity.
Snakes also appear frequently in Roman domestic religion in association with the Lares and the protection of the household. This does not, however, justify automatically assigning a precise ritual meaning to the scene when the evidence cannot demonstrate one.
What can be said with confidence is that the animal had a positive value within the composition and contributed to the painted garden's rich symbolism.
Birds among the trees
The paintings are also enlivened by birds shown among the branches and foliage. These small details play a decisive part in creating the sensation of a living garden rather than a mere sequence of plants.
Pompeian painters often included animals and birds in garden scenes precisely to suggest movement and vitality. The real birds that visited the house's green spaces thus had their counterparts on its walls.
The result was a continual overlap between real and imagined nature.
Egyptianising motifs
The decoration of the cubicula also includes Egyptianising motifs and references to Isis. Interest in Egypt was widespread in first-century AD Pompeii, and Nilotic scenes or elements associated with Egyptian deities appeared in many houses.
The Park's guide suggests that these motifs may allude to the owner's devotion to Isis, while correctly presenting the interpretation only as a possibility.
It is therefore preferable not to state with certainty that the occupant was a devotee or initiate of the Isiac cult. The imagery unquestionably records an interest in Egyptian culture, but its personal religious significance remains hypothetical.
Isis and Pompeii
A possible reference to Isis would in any case be unsurprising in the urban context. Pompeii possessed one of the most important Isiac sanctuaries in Roman Italy, the Temple of Isis VIII.7.28, rebuilt after the earthquake of AD 62.
The cult had become widely established, and imagery associated with Egypt was fully integrated into Roman artistic culture.
In the House of the Orchard, these elements coexist with an exceptionally accurate representation of nature, creating a visual language in which observation, decoration and possible religious meanings overlap.
The pavements of the cubicula
The floors of these small rooms were also carefully designed. TESS records that the cubiculum opening off the atrium was divided into an anteroom and alcove, the latter being the area occupied by the bed.
The anteroom had a black-and-white mosaic with a centred design of circles, hexagons, a six-pointed star and a small rosette. A different pavement distinguished the alcove.
The flooring still reveals the original position of the furnishings and shows how painting and mosaic were designed together to articulate the private room.
A house decorated across generations
The House of the Orchard preserves many pavements that predate its celebrated paintings. Some belong to the building's Republican phases and were retained even when the walls were completely redecorated in the Julio-Claudian period.
This was common in Pompeian houses: an owner might continue to regard a floor made many decades earlier as prestigious and update only the wall paintings in keeping with contemporary taste.
In AD 79 the house therefore displayed a visible layering of different periods, created by the building's continual maintenance and alteration.
The earthquake of AD 62
One interesting point concerns the earthquake of AD 62. Unlike many other large Pompeian houses, TESS records no particularly significant damage attributable to the tremor in the House of the Orchard.
This does not mean that the house remained entirely unchanged. When the eruption occurred, some rooms still had walls awaiting redecoration, but these works cannot automatically be attributed to the earthquake's aftermath.
This evidence counters a common oversimplification: not every alteration visible in the Pompeii of AD 79 must necessarily be explained as post-earthquake restoration.
Rooms still awaiting repainting
In AD 79, one of the house's large triclinia had walls covered only with rough plaster, showing that a new decorative scheme had been planned but not yet executed.
This detail reveals a lived-in house that was continually being updated. Some rooms possessed highly refined paintings, others retained earlier decoration, and still others were waiting to receive new wall coverings.
Here too, the eruption interrupted an ordinary process of domestic maintenance and renewal.
The discovery of the house
The domus was explored in two principal campaigns. One part was excavated in 1913, and further investigations followed in 1951.
Its relatively late discovery, compared with the great houses unearthed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allowed archaeologists to document the relationships between rooms, floors and decoration more carefully.
The exceptional garden paintings quickly became the house's defining feature and gave rise to the modern names House of the Orchard and House of the Floral Cubicles.
Conservation of the paintings
Garden paintings are particularly delicate. Once uncovered, ancient plaster is exposed to humidity, temperature changes, water and other processes that can rapidly alter pigments and surfaces.
The House of the Orchard has therefore undergone major work to secure and restore its decorative schemes. Particular attention was devoted to the floral cubicula, where plaster was consolidated and the legibility of colours and details recovered.
Modern conservation is essential for a form of decoration whose value depends so greatly on the delicate rendering of branches, leaves, fruit and small animals.
An exception in Pompeian domestic painting
The House of the Orchard I.9.5–7 holds a special place in the history of Pompeian painting. It is not as large as the House of the Faun or the House of Menander, nor does its fame rest on a monumental mythological scene. Its originality lies chiefly in the decision to transform two small private cubicula into painted gardens.
In the first room, the brightness and luxuriance of the vegetation evoke a daytime garden populated by plants and birds. In the second, the dark ground creates a different atmosphere dominated by the large fig tree and snake. In both cases, painting seems to dissolve the walls and gives anyone resting in the room the impression of being surrounded by nature.
The real garden at the rear, the summer triclinium, the refined pavements and the Egyptianising motifs complete the picture of a residence in which real and painted nature formed part of a single domestic design. The use of painting to transform small, private rooms is precisely what makes the House of the Orchard one of the most original and poetic survivals from Roman Pompeii.
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