one of the walls, a furnishing strategy widely used by many members of
this generation of architect-decorators and which later became a leitmo-
tif in numerous Modernist designs. Behrens extended the same approach
to the fitted shelves in his study and to a small guest’s bed built into the
eaves. The gentle curves on the back of the dining room chairs were
repeated as motifs on the glass doors of fitted cupboards in the same
room, while metal candelabras and a porcelain dinner service featured
the same forms, in three dimensions in the case of the former, and in two
dimensions in the latter. Behrens proudly proclaimed that his house was
a combination of ‘practical utility and abstract beauty’.^5 Like those of van
de Velde, Behrens’s decorating principles were as applicable to the com-
mercial sphere as they were to the domestic arena. In 1902 he designed a
complete dining room for Berlin’s Wertheim department store which
brought together into a single, unified environment, a fully set dining
table and chairs, a geometric light suspended over the table, a painted
frieze around the top of the containing walls, porcelain on the dresser
and pictures on the walls. His ‘theatre set’ approach to the interior took
on a new significance in the modern context. 43
Part of the drawing room in the studio flat of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret
Macdonald, designed by the couple, Glasgow, 1900 , illustrated in a special summer
edition of The Studio, 1901.