The Modern Interior

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styles available at that time. 35 Gradually the distinctions between those
overtly decorative modern styles and the minimal, machine aesthetic of
the Modernist interior were eroded and numerous hybrid modern interiors
were engendered. In addition, the national distinctions that had
characterized the new styles that had emerged in the 1920s were also
replaced by a new internationalism, driven by the increasing globalization
of the mass media. However stylistically hybrid it became, however,
the modern decorative interior never lost its promise of modernity and
of the opportunity for occupants to express themselves through their
engagement with a modern lifestyle. As Todd and Mortimer perceptively
observed in their 1929 study, echoing the earlier words of Elsie de Wolfe,
‘The extraordinary recent increase of interest in interior decoration has
largely resulted from a more acute need for self-expression.’ 36
Although the concept of ‘interior decoration’ was well understood
by the early twentieth century, the debate about whose professional role it
was to decorate interiors remained unresolved for many years to come. In
the previous century the tension had been mainly between architects and
upholsterers, but with the emergence of professional interior decorators,
the situation had become more complicated by the end of the century. One
of the last group’s selling points was its awareness of the need to be sensitive
to their clients’ requirements for individual self-expression. Not surprisingly,
given women’s enhanced role in the household in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, many members of the new profession were
female, as indeed were their clients. At the turn of the century increasing
numbers of middle-class women moved into the workplace, taking up jobs
that reflected their domestic and nurturing skills. The role of decorating
other people’s homes was an obvious one for them to take on board. In
England the Garrett sisters, Agnes and Rhoda, were among the first women
to make a living by providing complete decorative schemes for interiors.
Up until that point, at least for members of the social elite, such schemes
had frequently been created by architects. Men such as R. Norman Shaw
had worked on both the exteriors and interiors of houses. In his Old Swan
House in Chelsea of 1877, for example, Shaw had created an ‘aesthetic’ sitting
room complete with a decorated cornice, a fancy over-mantel and
eighteenth-century chairs. Less wealthy householders had relied on the
combined efforts of upholsterers, cabinet-makers, and painters and decor -
ators. In Liverpool, a wealthy English city at that time, the decorator S. J.
Waring employed 500 staff in his St Anne Street workshop. 37 In the us the
1880s and ’90s saw architects, including Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford