The Modern Interior

that took place within those retail spaces – from department stores to
shopping malls – were ones of continually enhanced ‘immersion’, of
being increasingly shut off from the outside world and contained within
safe, unthreatening and (when the technology became available) tempera -
ture-controlled spaces. Commercial branding also played a key role in
those constructions helping the flow of people through them. Gradually,
as the process of interiorization increased its pace it became increasingly
hard to distinguish ‘inside’ experiences from ‘outside’ ones, and more and
more difficult to understand where the boundaries between what previously
had been separate spheres were located. The same thing was happening
in the domestic arena. In the interior of Adolf Loos’s Moller
House, created in Vienna’s Starkfriedgasse in 1927–8, for example, the
designer combined oriental rugs, parquet floors and wood panelling with
a subtle use of different levels, thereby developing, in a domestic setting,
the idea of insides within other insides – a layering of inside spaces a bit
like Benjamin’s layers of envelopment within the compass case. ‘It is no
longer the house that is the theatre box’, one writer has explained in connection
with Loos’s complex interior design, ‘there is a theatre box inside
the house, overlooking the internal social spaces . . . the classical distinction
between inside and outside, private and public, becomes convoluted.’ 3
In locating spaces within other spaces Loos could have been anticipating
the shopping mall of the early twenty-first century.
The work that went on behind the scenes in the construction of
idealized interiors was inevitably hidden from consumers. Model domestic
interiors were presented as static images and spaces, complete with
puffed-up cushions. 4 Real lives, in that context, were replaced by the
modern, mass media-dependent notion of ‘lifestyles’, the idealized versions,
that is, of the lives that people actually lead. 5 An abstract, totalizing
concept created by the sum of consumers’ possessions, activities, aspirations
and desires, the concept of ‘lifestyle’ emerged largely as a result of
the mass media’s engagement with the modern interior. It filled the gap
left by the loss of the home’s economic and productive role and linked it
more firmly with the processes of mass consumption and identity formation.
That, in turn, led to the absorption of interior decoration into the
fashion system and to the ensuing presentation, in mass market women’s
magazines, of a mix of different kinds of information related to interiors,
fashion and leisure activities in a single publication. Rapidly, however, the
idea of lifestyle began to take on an existence of its own, above and
beyond the individual elements upon which it was dependent. 57