The Modern Interior

3 The Mass-consumed Interior

The more the manufacturer or dealer arranges model rooms or representa-

tive exhibits, or practices ensemble room selling, the more help and suggestion

it will be to the consumer.

Christine Frederick^1

From the moment the manufacture of large numbers of domestic goods

was transferred to factories, and middle-class home-makers were forced

to leave the comfort of their homes to purchase them, mass consumption

and the interior developed an intimate relationship with each other. As

the domestic interior came to be seen as the destination for consumed

goods, its replication in the public sphere (in idealized forms) as a frame

for displaying those products became increasingly widespread. We have

seen how Peter Behrens created a dining room for Berlin’s Wertheim

department store in 1902 which contained a fully laid table. A later com-

mercial display, mounted in Bowman Brothers’ London store in the

1930 s, set out to be even more ‘authentic’, comprising, as it did, a table set

for breakfast complete with boiled eggs and toast. The dinner service

being promoted was designed by the English ceramics designer Susie

Cooper. Increasingly, represented interiors, or components of them such

as these, were used as the frames for objects of desire in commercial set-

tings. Through the process the domestic interior was itself transformed

into an object of mass consumption.

Mass consumption, it has been claimed, was one of modernity’s

defining features.^2 That same claim could also be made for the domestic

interior, as it became absorbed by the world of mass consumption. The

model of consumption that used the interior as a selling tool was highly

dependent upon the creation of consumer desire. Through an engage-

ment with the evocative design of interiors in commercial spaces in

which goods were displayed, the desire to purchase was encouraged. As

women came out of their homes to purchase domestic goods, the mod-

ern interior’s relationship with mass consumption had an ‘inside out’

push built into it. The evocatively designed interior became, therefore,

both a means (of selling) and an end (the location for the consumed 55