The Modern Interior

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Davis Gillies, also included an interior containing Aalto furniture. The
caption explained that ‘its comfortable but svelte lines point a finger to
the future’. 20 The interior contained bent plywood armchairs, a drinks
trolley, a number of three-legged stackable stools, and a round coffee
table, all designed by Aalto and arranged to create an overtly modern, yet
comfortable, setting (p. 194). Gillies emphasized the importance to her
readers of acquiring a modern interior as a means of raising their social
profile through the creation of a fictional consumer. ‘Mrs. Smart Set’, she
explained, ‘didn’t need a separate dining-room’. 21 She also referred to a
number of contemporary American architects and interior designers
who were fast becoming household names, among them Gilbert Rhode,
Ed Wormley, William Pahlmann, George Kosmak and Russel Wright.
Frequent references in popular interior-related publications were also
made to other Scandinavian achievements, especially those of Sweden.
The author of Inside Your Home (1946), exhorting his readers to appreciate
the changes that could be made to the small home, remarked that
‘Sweden, a country wise in the humanities, understands these simple
things better than we do’. 22 Many iconic Swedish designs were introduced
into American interiors at that time, among them Bruno Mathsson’s
iconic bentwood armchair with a webbed seat, which was introduced
into the living space in Philip Goodwin’s New York apartment, illustrated
in Inside Your Home. The austerity of that small space with its plain
walls and carpets was humanized by the inclusion of striped curtain
fabric, pictures on the wall, and vase of flowers, as well as by the organic
forms of Mathsson’s chairs.
Through the 1940s and ’50s developments in Sweden focused on
the continuation of the democratic, rational programme of inter-war
Modernism that had played such an important role in that country, and
on the importance of treating the environments of the home, leisure,
work and commerce in similar ways. An article published in the Swedish
magazine Kontur in 1958 titled ‘Meet a Swedish Family’, demonstrated
that although family members might be involved in a variety of different
activities – resting at home, filling the car with petrol, working in the
office, being educated at school, having a manicure and swimming at the
local pool – they could all be undertaken in equally modern-looking
spaces. The message was clear. There was no longer, as there had been in
the Victorian era, one interior aesthetic for the home and another for
public interiors. Through the transfer, in the hands of the inter-war
Modernists, of the language of the public sphere into the home, and the