The Modern Interior

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When the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh married
Margaret Macdonald in Glasgow in 1900 he decorated the interior of
their first home, the first floor flat at 120 Mains Street. The project arrived
just at the moment when the architect was turning his attention to
interiors and furniture, when, that is, he was entering ‘an intimate and
largely domestic world . . . it was as if Margaret Macdonald took him by
the hand and they went in together.’ 6 Although Mackintosh had to work
with the room of an existing Victorian house, he intervened into their
proportions by introducing a frieze which had the effect of lowering the
ceilings. Thwarted by not being able to build furniture into the structure
of this rented property he created a form of micro-architecture within it.
The hanging lamps in the drawing room were made of silver and had
purple glass ornaments set into them. The white writing cabinet, decor -
ated with panels and lock-plates of beaten silver, had rose-coloured jewels
on the outside and four painted panels within. The white, cream, light
grey and purple colours Mackintosh used in the room served to integrate
its components into a single decorative scheme. The flat’s dining room,
following the convention of the day, was decorated in darker colours. In
the bedroom, Mackintosh created a remarkable interior within an interior
through the construction of a hardwood bed frame with curtained sides.
Once again a sense of aesthetic unity was created. The walls and woodwork
were treated in the same tone of white, relieved by green panels in
the broad frieze rail, by richly embroidered bed hangings and window
curtains, and by the glass jewels used in the ornamentation applied to the
bed, the mirror and the wardrobe. When Mackintosh and his wife subsequently
moved to their new home at 6 Florentine Terrace in Glasgow
they took their bed with them and reinstalled it in their large l-shaped
bedroom in that house.
Mackintosh was preoccupied with the creation of an integrated
interior aesthetic through a deliberate use of contrasts, light with dark,
floral with rectilinear motifs, structure with decorative surfaces, and
masculine with feminine spaces. In his creation of the interior as an aesthetic
space first and foremost he was indebted to Japanese art, in which
floral and geometric patterns and shapes often coexisted. In the entrance
to one of his most successful domestic interiors, The Hill House, built
in Helensburgh between 1902 and 1904 for the family of the publisher
Walter Blackie, he introduced a motif that combined a geometric grid
pattern with the curved profile of a tulip. 7 Underpinning the important
shift in that period from curvilinear to rectilinear design, the influence of