The Modern Interior

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remained the enhancement of the bed’s desirability. Drawing on his
earlier experiences in theatre design and shop window dressing he created
a complete and enclosed bedroom ‘set’ featuring streamlined, curved
panelled walls, subtle concealed lighting and sufficient simple props to
give a sense of realism to the ensemble, but not to outshine the bed,
which had to remain the focus of attention.
The interior that Bel Geddes created for the Simmons Company
was both an extension and a dramatization of the bed, as well as a form of
brand reinforcement. Interestingly, for the design of his private residence
Zalmon G. Simmons and his wife Frances adopted a quite different
approach, asking the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe to provide them
with a reproduction eighteenth-century French ‘Chinoiserie’ setting. While
the redecoration of their home was probably led by Frances Simmons,
her husband’s commercial interior was targeted at a mass audience that
sought to embrace signs of modernity in their homes. The Simmons’s
home interior, which subtly combined modernity with tradition, was
an appropriate expression of the couple’s significant financial and social
achievements and their (acquired) position in society. Bel Geddes also
worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, which commissioned
him to create a combined conference room and auditorium. He
approached that project in two ways, firstly as the creation of an efficient
machine, ensuring the inclusion of a screen for projection and an advanced
ventilation system, and secondly as a space in which ambiance was all
important. To that latter end he included concealed lighting operated by
twenty-two dimmer switches. 19 The room was described as being made
up of ‘impressive plain surfaces, restfully colored, supremely comfortable
and completely modern’. 20
The American industrial designers created a wide range of inter -
iors for offices, showrooms, shops and exhibitions, as well as for objects
of transportation. They understood offices, first and foremost, as appropriate
spaces for their modern machines. In his book Horizons (1934) Bel
Geddes described the office as the sum of the artefacts and machines it
contained – from the telephone, to the fountain pen, to the calendar pad,
to the lamps, to the clock, to the receptacles for cigarettes, to the adding
machine, to the calculating machine, to the dictating machine, to the
filing cabinet. His was a strongly ‘object-centric’ view of interiors which
were defined by their material contents. In the mock-up corner of An
Industrial Designer’s Office (already described in chapter Five), created by
Raymond Loewy and Lee Simonson for the 1934 exhibition at New York’s