The Modern Interior

White, working on the interiors of their buildings, while, for the very
wealthy, European firms, such as Allard and Sons of Paris and Allom,
White of London, were brought in by architects and clients to create
interiors which combined antique furniture pieces with new furnishings
in the eighteenth-century French style.
The vogue for antiques, which had become widespread by the 1890s,
increasingly brought art and antique dealers into the frame of interior
decor ation. In the us, during the era of the aesthetic home, artistic teams
such as Associated Artists, led by Candace Wheeler, Augustus Saint-Gaudens
and John La Farge, supplied work for interiors. In 1895 Wheeler, a textile
designer who had worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany, published two
influential articles entitled ‘Interior Decoration as a Profession for
Women’. 38 She advocated a solid training in the field and discouraged
amateurs. A number of women heeded her advice, among them Mary
Jane Colter, who designed the interior of the Hopi House in the Grand
Canyon as well as interiors for dining cars for the Santa Fe Railroad. 39
Others did not and plunged into the profession with only a ‘good eye’ and
lots of entrepreneurial zeal to draw upon. Elsie de Wolfe was among the
first of the latter group, having, as we have seen, moved from a career in
acting to decorating her own home in New York, to being asked to design
the interiors of the Colony Club, to creating, with the staff members of
her design studio, interiors for hundreds of nouveau-riche clients over
the next forty or so years. 40
Female professionals sought to align the taste of their clients with
their interiors through the selection of appropriate decoration. Wharton
and Codman’s 1897 book, The Decoration of Houses, led the way with its
depictions of decorative interiors from the eighteenth century, French,
English and Italian for the most part. 41 The styles of the eighteenth
century, those of France in particular, were fully embraced by the lady
decor ators and their clients. Not only did they provide a route out of
Victorian gloom and the possibility of injecting lightness and air back
into interiors, they also offered a direct link with the history of feminine
interventions in the interior, from that of Madame de Pompadour
onwards. The lady decorators’ use of period styles reflected a new age in
which women embraced modernity. Theirs was no less ‘modern’ a strategy
than that of the Modernists, who turned to the ‘rationality’ of the
machine for their inspiration. While the formulation of the machine aesthetic
offered a ‘masculine’ solution to the modern interior, the return to
the styles of eighteenth-century France arguably represented its ‘feminine’ 107