The Modern Interior

An interior in Philip Goodwin’s New York apartment containing chairs designed by
Bruno Mathsson, late 1930s, illustrated in Dan Cooper’s Inside Your Home, 1946.
ing ‘a large rubber plant . . . , a couple of Aalto stools and armchairs, a
modern coffee table, and a few pieces of prehistoric-looking pottery’. 18
The inter-war work of the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, which, like that
of Frank Lloyd Wright, had embraced an ‘organic’ aesthetic, was also
widely reproduced and admired in the us in the years after 1945. His bent
ply birchwood furniture featured in a living room illustrated by Nelson
and Wright in their 1945 book. 19 A more popular book, All About Modern
Decorating, written by the editor of Interior Decorating magazine, Mary 195