The Modern Interior

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Henry Van de Velde’s Studio in the Villa Bloemenwerf, Uccle, Brussels, 1895–6.
dining table, for example, featured softly curved backs which flowed into
their gently curving legs. Even the flowing forms of his wife’s dress,
designed by the architect from Morris fabric, were echoed in the interior
spaces she inhabited. Van de Velde’s studio, was also subjected to the same
unifying process. He covered its walls with his own paper designs, placed
one of his own chairs in the space, filled the shelves with vases he had
created himself and hung one of his own paintings on the wall. Van de
Velde described his forms and decorations as organisms, a metaphor that
helped him explain the way in which he conceived of the exterior and the
interior as a single entity. In this way he linked the structural aspects of
his interiors with the non-structural, the practical with the decorative
and the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional.
Unlike Morris, Van de Velde was working in a new era in which,
through the expansion of the mass media and the growth of mass consumption,
the boundaries between the public and the private spheres
were being rapidly eroded. As a result he crossed over from the domestic
sphere to the commercial arena with ease, seeing no boundary between
them. This flexibility was reflected in an 1899 design for an office interior
for the Havana Tobacco Company in Berlin. The space he created featured
arches, the forms of which were repeated in stencilled patterns on
the walls and in the arms of the chairs he positioned within the space.
Two years later Van de Velde decorated the interior of a hairdresser’s