The Modern Interior

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embraced the equally fashionable Moorish style as an alternative. Fearful
that they would alienate their more cautious visitors who came for luxury
and comfort rather than for high fashion, most hotels preferred to
stick to more conservative idioms however, neo-classicism and revived
eighteenth-century French styles among them. Fairly typical was the
interior created by the firm of Mewes and Davis for the Carlton hotel in
London. The ‘Palm Court’ look they created in the early 1890s rapidly
became a familiar sight in a range of early twentieth-century luxury
leisure interiors, including luxury ocean liners. Thomas Edward Collcutt,
the designer who carried out much interior work for the P&O line, was
also commissioned by Richard D’Oyly Carte to create interiors for
London’s Savoy Hotel in 1893, demonstrating the close links between
these two interior spaces. 13 Hotels, liners and other luxury leisure spaces
of the era depended on communicating an image of an aspirational
lifestyle to attract a nouveau riche clientèle. While both hotels and liners
embraced the same modern, luxury, domestic aesthetic, the former took
their lead from the latter rather than directly from the home. 14
Ironically, although it was born in, and given its meaning within,
domesticity, the New Interior ultimately failed to transform the popular
home, except through the inclusion of small decorative artefacts. It
thrived, however, in the public urban setting as a fashionable style, or set
of styles, which successfully evoked modernity for middle-class women
and enhanced feminine consumer desire. Between the mid-1890s and the
outbreak of the First World War the public, commercial interior was
transformed. This was especially the case in department stores, many of
whose interiors were decorated in the modern style, florid Art Nouveau,
evident in the displays of the French stores at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. In
Brussels Victor Horta created a striking new Art Nouveau interior for the
Waucquez store in 1906. Consumers were shown modern interiors within
modern interiors, the suggestion being that as well as bringing domesticity
outside with them they could also take a piece of the public arena
back home. The latest fashions, equally expressed by interior settings
as by dress, could be embraced outside the home as well as within it.
Adolf Loos’s strikingly modern interior of 1908 for the menswear shop,
Goldman & Salatsch, showed the way forward where fashion salons were
concerned. The interior of that shop, with its dramatic geometric forms,
shiny surfaces, glass display cabinets and ‘functional’ hanging lights, was
hugely influential on many store interiors that came after it. The New
Interior also permeated cultural spaces, among them art galleries, theatres