The Modern Interior

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of Vassar graduates living in inter-war New York, Kay, one of the main
characters, was among those for whom the new, compact furnishing style
was enormously appealing. Her apartment consisted of
Two rooms, plus dinette and kitchen, plus a foyer, plus, Kay’s pride
and joy, a darling little dressing room. Every stick of furniture was
the latest thing; blond Swedish chairs and folding table . . . in the
dinette . . . in the living room a bright-red modern couch and armchairs
to match, a love-seat covered in striped grey-and-white
mattress ticking, steel standing lamps, and a coffee table that was
just a sheet of glass that Harald had had cut at the glazier’s and
mounted on steel legs, built-in bookcases that Harald had painted
canary yellow. There were no rugs yet and, instead of curtains, only
white Venetian blinds at the windows. Instead of flowers, they had
ivy growing in white pots. 23
Those designers positioned themselves somewhere between European
Modernism on the one hand and American commercial product design
on the other. Above all they sought to exploit the possibility of modularity
and standardization in furniture manufacture. Their contribution
was defined by their ‘willingness to make use of the language of the
marketplace to reach potential users’. 24
With the exception of their emphasis on the curved forms of
streamlining, the interior designs developed by the American designers
of the inter-war years were not especially visually innovative as they
tended to combine the strategies of the European Modernists with those
of the exponents of the Art Deco style in a fairly straightforward way.
The impact of their strongly commercial approach to interior design
was more significant, however, especially in the years after the Second
World War when their influence provided a counterbalance to that of
the Modernists. The approach to the modern interior adopted by the
American industrial designers was much more pragmatic and less idealistic
than that of their European counterparts and they anticipated a
world in which, increasingly, objects were to take centre stage and define
the interiors that contained them.