The Modern Interior

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Acknowledgements
This book is the result of my attempt to address some of the unanswered questions that arose in the
late 1990s and early 2000s while researching the work of the pioneer American interior decorator
Elsie de Wolfe. The scope of the book I wrote then did not permit me to dwell in any detail on the
meaning of the modern interior in the first half of the twentieth century. My overriding question at
that time had been whether de Wolfe, working as she did in French eighteenth-century period styles
for the most part, was a ‘modern’ decorator or not. That deceptively simple question took me to the
vast literature on the subjects of modernity and identity, especially where they touched on issues
relating to gender, class and sexuality. Indeed, I had already begun to interrogate those themes in my
1995 publication, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, which had led me to Elsie de Wolfe
in the first place. While researching The Modern Interior I was reminded again that the scholarship
on the subjects of modernity and identity in the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities
and cultural studies operates at a considerable distance from work undertaken in the visually
oriented areas of the history and theory of art, architecture and design. This book is a modest
attempt to help make that bridge a bit more crossable.
Writing this book has not just been an academic exercise, however, but rather a lived experience.
The fact that it exists at all is due to the countless memorable visits I have made to many modern
interiors over the years with colleagues, friends and family, and alone. It couldn’t have been written,
for example, without the experiences of the annual overseas study trips made with the staff and students
of the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum History of Design ma course,
between 1982 and 1999, during which we visited many fascinating modern interior spaces. Hvitträsk
knee-deep in snow, and Carl Larsson’s house in Dalarna, where we met remaining family members,
are among the many memories that come immediately to mind. For those I thank Gillian Naylor,
Charles Saumarez Smith, Paul Greenhalgh, Jeremy Aynsley and Christopher Breward, among many
others. Among the many debts that I owe to friends and family, one must go to Wendy Caplan who
kindly took me to the Eames’s Santa Monica House, and another to my daughter Molly, who proved
an able research assistant on visits to Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House and Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye, among others.
Equally, this book couldn’t have been written without the support of my fellow researchers at
Kingston University – Trevor Keeble, Anne Wealleans and Brenda Martin in particular – who
constitute the core members of the Modern Interiors Research Centre (mirc). The Centre’s
annual conferences, held from 1999 onwards, have provided an important international forum
in which many of the ideas presented in this study were rehearsed and debated. The us-based