The Modern Interior

10
Mrs Sarah Du Prau and Mrs T. Sebelin in the parlour of the Beaumont Hotel, Ouray,
Colorado, c. 1905.
the mass-produced goods that emerged from those factories could be consumed.
Both were essential components, therefore, of industrial capitalism
and of the modern world. However, the dramatic contrast of meanings and
values conveyed by their sharp juxtaposition, and the fact that the ‘parlour’
had been wrenched from its original setting and absorbed within the
larger, enveloping space of the mall, caused me to reflect on the relationship
between the worlds of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ in the insides of
our modern era buildings. This book is the product of that reflection.
The chapters that follow will expose the tensions, the ambiguities,
the contradictions and the paradoxes that defined the relationship
between the private and the public spheres in the period in question. That
relationship was, I will suggest, central to the formation of the modern
interior. Modern interiors could be clothed in period styles as well as in
contemporary ones. They could also facilitate both private interiority
and public mass behaviour. Nineteenth-century domestic parlours could
be found in department stores, railway carriages and hotels, while, in the
early twentieth century, the layouts of domestic kitchens were influenced
by the interior spaces of factories. Ensconced as they are in a room which
boasts a patterned carpet, heavy curtains, and floral upholstered furniture,
the two women playing cards in the parlour of the Beaumont Hotel
in Ouray County, Colorado in 1905 could have been sitting in their front