The Modern Interior

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and above all equal to, architects. A few years later an English writer
defined the interior design profession’s preoccupations as being with
planning, scale, heating, lighting, surfaces, furniture, pattern and colour,
thereby complementing those of the architect. 5 Importantly, also, the
interior designer was seen to play a more significant role in public interiors
as well as in domestic spaces. The same English writer explained that,
‘This distinction between public and private is not always understood . . .
There is no point in dressing up the hall of an Insurance building to look
like the entrance to a stately home. No-one will be deceived. The great
bowl of florist’s flowers will smell of money rather than of earth. Such
nostalgic gestures, indeed any attempt to introduce a bogus personal touch
into a public place, are mistaken.’ 6
Interior designers largely displaced interior decorators and took
on the mantle of architectural Modernism. Their remit was to integrate
interiors with their architectural frames and to create interior spaces
that were conceived as integrated wholes. 7 As the post-war years progressed,
and the concept of the interior decorator became increasingly
linked with antiquated upper-class interiors and feminine amateurism
in the domestic sphere and the designer with masculine professionalism
in the public arena, the difference between decorators and designers
came to be seen as a gendered one. In spite of the fact that they con -
tinued to work with wealthy, upper-class clients for the most part, and
mostly, but not exclusively, in the domestic arena, professional interior
decorators were significantly marginalized. Latter-day Modernists saw
the work of the decorators as feminized, trivial and superficial and
believed that it overemphasized the role of textiles and ignored that of
architectural structure. Furthermore they associated interior decoration
with social aspiration and an excessive proximity to the media. Interior
designers increasingly distanced themselves from what was, by the
turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, being relabelled, in
both higher educational and professional circles, as ‘interior architecture’
or ‘spatial design’. The gendered and sexual implications of that
hierarchy have remained largely unchanged since then and, although the
interior’s capacity for self-expression and identity formation have become
widely acknowledged, the concept of ‘interior decoration’ has still to be
recuperated.
Much attention was directed at the domestic sphere in the years after
1945 but the post-war us also devoted most of its energies to the reworking
of Modernism in the context of corporate interiors. That the same