The Modern Interior

3 The Mass-consumed Interior
The more the manufacturer or dealer arranges model rooms or representative
exhibits, or practices ensemble room selling, the more help and suggestion
it will be to the consumer.
Christine Frederick1 From the moment the manufacture of large numbers of domestic goods
was transferred to factories, and middle-class home-makers were forced
to leave the comfort of their homes to purchase them, mass consumption
and the interior developed an intimate relationship with each other. As
the domestic interior came to be seen as the destination for consumed
goods, its replication in the public sphere (in idealized forms) as a frame
for displaying those products became increasingly widespread. We have
seen how Peter Behrens created a dining room for Berlin’s Wertheim
department store in 1902 which contained a fully laid table. A later commercial
display, mounted in Bowman Brothers’ London store in the
1930s, set out to be even more ‘authentic’, comprising, as it did, a table set
for breakfast complete with boiled eggs and toast. The dinner service
being promoted was designed by the English ceramics designer Susie
Cooper. Increasingly, represented interiors, or components of them such
as these, were used as the frames for objects of desire in commercial settings.
Through the process the domestic interior was itself transformed
into an object of mass consumption.
Mass consumption, it has been claimed, was one of modernity’s
defining features. 2 That same claim could also be made for the domestic
interior, as it became absorbed by the world of mass consumption. The
model of consumption that used the interior as a selling tool was highly
dependent upon the creation of consumer desire. Through an engagement
with the evocative design of interiors in commercial spaces in
which goods were displayed, the desire to purchase was encouraged. As
women came out of their homes to purchase domestic goods, the modern
interior’s relationship with mass consumption had an ‘inside out’
push built into it. The evocatively designed interior became, therefore,
both a means (of selling) and an end (the location for the consumed 55