The Modern Interior

32
Trellis Restaurant, Colony Club, New York, decorated by Elsie de Wolfe, 1905–7 and
illustrated in Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, 1913.
of interiors which complemented a trip to the department store. In
London’s Piccadilly the Criterion pleasure complex, designed by the
architect Thomas Verity in 1871 and built three years later, combined an
underground theatre with a lavish restaurant, the walls of which were
decorated with tiles and gilt mosaic patterns. The theatre, originally
planned as a concert hall within the restaurant complex, was constructed
with a neo-classical street level façade. 26 Whether within the department
store or the adjacent tea rooms, taking afternoon tea quickly became
an integral feature of the female shopping experience. In London Mrs
Robinson’s tea-shop contained a library and a reading room in which
shoppers could recuperate, while Toronto’s Little Blue Tea Rooms, established
in 1906, was a highly domesticated space. It promoted the fact with
the phrase ‘We Bring Home into Town’. For both men and women who did
not stay in clubs, hotels provided an alternative. Although the idea of the
hotel went back several centuries it wasn’t until the nineteenth century
that the modern idea of the grand urban hotel came into existence. Early
examples included the Grand Hotel in Paris, the Fifth Avenue Hotel
in New York and the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. 27 Many others
followed in the principal cities of Europe and the usa. The modernity of