The Modern Interior

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ceilings to add a level of restfulness when patients were lying down. 25 The
cupboards in Aalto’s sanatorium were all wall-mounted to allow for cleaning
to take place beneath them.
Another of the items of furniture equipment introduced by Le
Corbusier into several of his interiors was not designed by him but fell,
rather, into the category of the ‘ready-made’. The leather ‘club’ armchair,
which first made an appearance in his 1925 pavilion, had its origins in the
elite male club and provided a very particular alternative to feminine
domesticity. From the early eighteenth century onwards the male inhabitants
of London, from a range of social groups, had socialized in coffee
houses to discuss politics and other affairs of public life and to conduct
business. Although they were open access spaces, the coffee houses had
served as a means of privatizing public space. They supported a wide range
of activities, from business negotiations to literary discussions. Newspapers
and magazines could be read and some houses lent books out. They also
served as post offices. Gradually certain houses took on a particular political
flavour. Whigs visited St James’s House, for example, while The Cocoa
Tree was frequented by Tories. 26 The interiors of the coffee houses were
dark and they were fairly sparsely decorated and furnished. Very commonly,
‘two or three trestle tables ran the length of a large room, with bench
seating and lit by candles. Several pots of coffee warmed on the hob of
a large hearth while the hostess dispensed refreshments from the front
booth.’ 27 Those essentially functional interiors had few of the refinements
of the domestic arena. However they neither negated domesticity nor
embraced it. They merely sought to supplement it.
The private gentlemen’s clubs that emerged from the ruins of the
earlier coffee houses were much more refined environments, however,
and catered for a more exclusive clientele. They emerged in response to the
need for enhanced privacy in which to hold discussions of a business or
political nature, and to gamble without fear of engaging with suspect characters
from the lower classes. They were essentially anti-modern spaces
which reinforced social elitism and cultural traditions. From another perspective,
however, they were also responding to the effects of modernity, to
the increasing accessibility of the city to sections of the population from
which ‘gentlemen’ wished to retain a distance. The clubs were havens both
from lower-class men and from the domestic arena that was increasingly
being seen as ‘belonging’ to middle- and upper-class women. They were,
therefore, both extensions of, and alternative sites to, domesticity in which
political and business matters could be discussed in confidence and like-