The Modern Interior

The living room of a San Francisco apartment designed for J. Templeton Crocker by
Jean-Michel Frank, 1927, illustrated in Katherine Kahle’s Modern French Decoration, 1930.
with its ‘fusuma’ – sliding doors covered with opaque paper; its ‘shoji’ –
wooden lattice sliding doors covered with paper; its ‘tokonama’ – a small
alcove; and its tatami mats.
Texture, used in combination with transparency, became increasingly
important to the abstract interior as it developed through the 1930s.
It eventually entered the world of the interior decorator, in particular
through the work of the French designer Jean-Michel Frank, who introduced
a wide variety of textures and materials – vellum, varnished straw
marquetry, terracotta and leather among others – into the highly minimal,
sensuous interiors he created for wealthy clients in the 1920s and
1930s. 18 The interior spaces he created for Templeton Crocker in San
Francisco were among the most dramatic of his creations. By that time 183