The Modern Interior

in the kitchen. Dark-coloured rectangles were painted around the handles
of the white cupboard doors to prevent dirty finger-marks being visible.
In the same room, the edges of the dark-coloured wooden shutters, stored
by day on the top of the wall-mounted cupboards but placed on the
windows at night, were painted white so that they wouldn’t stand out
when stored. The good-sized window sills in all the rooms were painted
different colours and, upstairs, a red area on the linoleum floor demarcated
the boundaries of the boys’ bedroom when the screens closed it
off at night. Rietveld’s second aim was the efficiency and flexibility of
the house’s limited interior space. To that end he borrowed a number
of strategies from the traditional Japanese interior, including the use of
movable, sliding screens (shojis) and the storage of items when not in use
(like futons in the Japanese interior). In the guest room, used by the
children as a private space, bedding could be stored in a cupboard hidden
above the window beneath the upstairs balcony. Two small tables, one
yellow and the other blue, folded out from the wall when needed. Indeed
folding wooden items could be found all over the house. In several of the
rooms folding flaps of wood covered slits in the window frames included
for ventilation purposes, while in the girls’ bedroom the folding flaps at
the ends of the beds transformed them into sofas for daytime use. In the
entrance to Mrs Schroeder’s own bedroom a small, blue, fold-down desk
could be created, topped by a small red shelf. A small washbasin was
concealed inside the room. 11
In line with the ambitions of the De Stijl movement, Rietveld’s
ultimate aim, however, was the creation of an immaterial environment
determined by a sophisticated handling of colour, light and space, and
the inter-relationships between them. The children’s sparse toys were
kept in grey boxes, while a yellow wooden cover concealed the gramophone.
The interior of the house was a completely controlled environment
with a high level of aesthetic harmony. Given the client’s high level
of commitment to the project, it was one that worked. The radicalism of
the Schroeder house marked it out as a beacon in the history of the
abstract interior and it proved hugely influential on the Modernists’ subsequent
formulation of the interior. It embodied De Stijl’s ideas about art
and architecture but went beyond them as well, suggesting that an inter ior
space could facilitate a completely new way of living. Idealism continued
to underpin the development of the Modernist interior through the 1920s,
combining ideas about function and rationality with that of spatial
abstraction. 177