The Modern Interior

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possible anywhere in the exhibition, many of the displays reinforced the
fact that Paris was the city in which consumption took place on a spectacular
scale. 30 A number of room sets were constructed in a group of
pavilions which were created to promote the interior decorating sections
of Paris’s leading department stores. One such room, an office designed
by Georges Djo-Bourgeois, was installed in the Grands Magasins du
Louvre’s Studium Louvre pavilion. Featuring leather armchairs, a piece of
sculpture by Léon Leyritz and lacquered panels by Pierre Demaria, it was
a rich, masculine space offset by a number of feminine touches including
vases of flowers and patterning on the curtains and carpet. A dining room
was designed by Marcel Guillemard as part of Au Printemps’ Primavera
pavilion. The rich woods and modern furniture forms in Guillemard’s
room set were intended to persuade visitors that employing Primavera
to decorate their homes would bring a high level of elegant luxury and
modernity into their lives.
It was not only the large international exhibitions that employed the
concept of the constructed interior as a display strategy, however. At a
more local level, events such as Britain’s Ideal Home Exhibition, established
by the Daily Mail newspaper before the First World War, and the annual
exhibition held in Paris, the Salon des Arts Ménagers, also used room sets. 31
Their aim was less to present a display of national prowess in an international
context but rather to inspire the public, fulfil their dreams and
aspirations and to encourage them to consume. As the century progressed
the messages conveyed by constructed interiors in exhibitions became
increasingly complex and their audiences more sophisticated. At the
Britain Can Make It exhibition, held at London’s Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1946, a range of room sets were presented as representations
of class, age and gender. Examples included ‘a technical office for a television
research engineer’, ‘a secondary school classroom’, ‘a cottage kitchen
for a miner’, and a ‘bachelor’s bed sitting room’. 32 The exhibition curators
aimed to encourage a more reflective response from its audience than that
of consumer desire alone. A notice on a wall at the exhibition instructed
visitors to ‘view the rooms as if the family has just vacated it’. The intention
was to move one step nearer to the occupant than had been achieved
at earlier exhibitions, and in so doing, to engage the audience’s imaginations
as completely as possible. Several reviews were critical of the strategy,
however, and one commentator wrote that, ‘we feel bound to remark that
in most cases the rooms bear no relationship to the imagined families and
the class-distinction in naming the rooms appears utterly meaningless . . .