The Modern Interior

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the second half of the nineteenth century that language of Victorian
domesticity had become a feature of the interior landscapes of a range of
semi-public and public ‘homes from home’, including cafés, restaurants,
women’s clubs, hotels, the leisure areas of department stores, railway station
waiting rooms, train carriages and mental hospitals. That replication
challenged the separation of the spheres such that modernity, and by
extension, the modern interior, were ultimately defined by the cross-over
between the private and the public arenas rather than the distinction
between them.
Not everyone believed that the Victorian domestic interior was
‘modern’, however. Several progressive architects and designers were
already beginning to see the comfortable, bourgeois Victorian drawing
room as antithetical to everything they were trying to achieve. The design
reformer Charles Eastlake was especially vociferous on the subject. ‘By that
expression [knick knacks]’, he wrote in 1868, ‘I meant that heterogeneous
assemblage of modern rubbish which . . . finds its way into the drawing
room or boudoir.’ 2 The art critic John Ruskin was equally dismissive of
what he saw as the Victorian parlour’s excesses. ‘I know’, he wrote, ‘what it
is to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof . . . and I know it to be in
many respects healthier and happier that living between a Turkey carpet
and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender’. 3 Later, at the
turn of the century, the Viennese architect and critic Adolf Loos was
equally disdainful about the work of the Victorian upholsterer. ‘It was a
reign of terror’, he wrote, ‘that we can still all feel in our bones. Velvet and
silk, Makart bouquets, dust, suffocating air and lack of light, portieres,
carpets and “arrangements” – thank God we are all done with that now.’ 4
The visual and material culture of Victorian domesticity, characterized by
its love of clutter and its devotion to the bibelot, was linked in those men’s
minds with excessive materialism and a lack of aesthetic control. Above
all they believed that Victorian domesticity was defined by its links with
tradition and its resistance to the pull of modernity. 5
Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, looking back from the perspective
of the 1930s, understood the essential modernity of the Victorian
home. For him it was the location in which the very idea of the interior –
self-evidently, in his view, a modern phenomenon – had emerged. ‘Under
Louis Philippe the private individual makes his entrance on the stage of history’,
he wrote, adding that, ‘for the private individual, the place of dwelling
is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes
itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual,