interior. The bright white spaces, dark oak chairs and the variety of
materials employed – from beaten tin to stained glass to painted wood
- combined with Mackintosh’s eye for proportion and harmony to
create a strikingly modern space which must have evoked considerable
excitement in industrial Glasgow.^9 Mackintosh’s other interventions in
the public arena in those years included a design for the city’s department
store, Pettigrew and Stephens, for a lace display stand at Glasgow’s 1901
International Exhibition.^10
Many other architect-decorators working at that time also created
their own interior living spaces. Otto Wagner designed the interior fur-
nishings for his abode at Rennweg 3 in Vienna, while Koloman Moser
created a highly unified interior for himself in the same city. Adolf Loos
designed the interior of his own flat in Vienna in 1903. Creating a fitted
or aesthetically unified domestic interior, in which no modifications or
personal additions were possible for oneself or one’s next of kin, was one
thing, but creating such a set of domestic spaces for a client was another.
It meant an almost absolute adherence to a set of lifestyle rules and the
commitment of occupants to lead their lives as part of a work of art. It
was a brave client, therefore, who took on an Art Nouveau architect-
decorator. A number of international clients proved willing, however, to
commission a New Interior. They included the Heiseler family, for whom
Hermann Obrist created an interior in 1898 ; the textile manufacturer
Herbert Ash and his wife Johanna, for whom Van de Velde created a
house in 1902 – 3 ; Dr Aderhold Froese, for whom the same architect
designed a house in Hanover in 1909 – 10 ; the Glasgow provisions mer-
chant for whom Mackintosh created Windyhill in 1900 – 1 ; the publisher,
Walter Blackie, the owner, as we have seen, of Mackintosh’s The Hill
House of 1902 – 4 ; Dr Hermann Wittgenstein, Josef Hoffmann’s client of
1906 ; and the banker, Adolphe Stoclet, the owner of Hoffmann’s Palais
Stoclet of 1905 – 11. They were united by their wealth, frequently newly
acquired through manu facturing, and their professional standing but,
above all else, by their commitment to modern art as a marker of social
status. Although they were prepared to live in a New Interior, some clients
reached compro mises with their architects. Walter Blackie, for example,
insisted on using his own, traditional furniture in the dining room of
The Hill House, limiting Mackintosh’s intervention in that room to the
fireplace and the light fittings.^11
Stoclet and his fashionable Parisian wife, Suzanne, went the whole
way, however. They commissioned a building and an interior, which were 47