minded people could meet to spend their leisure time together. As interior
spaces they were frequently designed in the classical style and contained a
number of rooms created for the distinct activities of dining, smoking,
playing billiards and cards. Bedrooms were added to many clubs in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century and nearly all had impressive libraries.
The style of decoration was usually dark, plush and overtly ‘masculine’ in
nature, and the familiar clutter of the typical middle-class domestic inter -
iors of the period was notable by its absence. The comfortable leather
armchair fitted the bill perfectly. The smoking room of London’s Carlton
Club, for example, was populated with a range of comfortable, upholstered
leather chairs and sofas which gave it a masculine appearance. In ‘borrow-
ing’ the club’s leather chair for his residential interiors Le Corbusier was
able to introduce an element of semi-private masculine comfort into them,
thereby avoiding the ‘trap’ of bourgeois domesticity.
By the inter-war years, in the us, Christine Frederick had aban-
doned her attempts to impose a rational model on to the household and
had gone into the employ of General Electric to earn her living demon-
strating their household technologies in department stores. Her commit-
ment to the efficiency of factory production was overtaken by a realization
of the importance of the ‘irrational’ force of women’s consumption to the
economy. In 1929 she published a book entitled Selling Mrs Consumerin
which she outlined the ways in which ‘human instincts’, she believed at 145
The smoking room in the Carlton Club, London, 1890 s.