The Modern Interior

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broadcast from 1996 to 2004, was Changing Rooms, which worked on the
assumption that everybody’s taste is equally valid as long as it is adequately
expressed. It endorsed a pluralistic ‘stage set’ approach to inter -
ior decoration in which an eclectic range of fantasy environments are
created as expressive backcloths in front of which the ‘inner’ lives of their
inhabitants can be lived out. The strength of the feelings that individuals
have for their interiors (linked undoubtedly to their fragile self-identities)
was demonstrated by the number of tears shed when the ‘make-over’
proved to be a huge disappointment.
While the domestic interior was increasingly drawn into the public
sphere through the second half of the nineteenth century, by the early
years of the twentieth a pull in the opposite direction had also begun to
be felt, which drew modern public sphere interiors into the home. That
movement was effected by the group of architects and designers who
aligned themselves with Modernism and who were deeply committed to
eroding the boundaries between the spheres. Their efforts were partly
driven by a shared distaste for bourgeois domesticity and partly by a
desire to create a classless architecture that, they believed, would replace
the values of middle-class Victorian domesticity (and indeed the interior
itself) with the more democratic ones of efficiency and utility. They
found those latter values in the modern, public interiors dedicated to
commerce, industrial production and work.
At the heart of this book lies the proposal, therefore, that the
modern interior was the result of the two-way movement between
the private and the public spheres. Within that movement individual
and group identities were formed, contested and re-formed. While the
ideo logy of the separate spheres was enormously powerful, so too were
the forces that determined to break down the divide between them.
The dynamic tension created by that level of determination lay at the
very heart of the modern interior and gave it its momentum. Visually,
materially and spatially, the modern interior embraced a spectrum of
possibilities. While its idealized manifestations often inhabited the
two extremes of that spectrum, its lived-in expressions were usually
hybrids. The levels of aesthetic purity or otherwise that were achieved,
and the negotiation of the tensions that underpinned the creation of
the modern interior, required a controlling hand, however. It was the
role of ‘design’, implemented by the occupants of interiors themselves,
by engineers, architects, space planners, upholsterers, interior decorators,
or interior designers, among others, to play that determining role. In