The Modern Interior

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The drawing room car on a late-19th-century British train.
parlour. Only the arrangement of the seating gave away the fact that it
was a railway carriage. Even British mental asylums chose to employ the
aesthetic of ‘homeliness’ at that time as it was linked to the preferred therapeutic
treatments of the day. 22 In the turn-of-the-century female day
room of the Northern Counties District Lunatic Asylum in Inverness in
Scotland, the familiar upholstered armchairs, potted plants, side tables
and patterned wallpaper and rug were all in place.
Along with many other cities, such as New York and Paris, London
witnessed a huge growth in ‘homes from home’ for women in the last
decades of the nineteenth century. Women’s clubs were established to
provide a facility for middle-class women, who travelled on the new forms
of transportation, to take advantage of the shopping and other pleasure
activities on offer. 23 They replicated the domestic environment and were
experienced more as private, than as public, institutions. An article in
Queen magazine of 29 June 1901 described the interiors of London’s
Empress Club, indicating that its decor had moved beyond the heaviness
of the earlier Victorian style to embrace the lighter, more fashionable
domestic idiom of that era. ‘Walls, mirror frames, and ceilings are in