custom of the middle classes was to move house on an annual basis,
thereby accelerating the need to continually redecorate and refurbish
their homes. By the end of the nineteenth century the social messages of
fashionable dress were becoming less clear, however, and the interior was
increasingly taking over the role previously performed by dress.^20 Even
more than fashionable dress, which had taken on a somewhat frivolous
connotation by that time, interior decorating came to be defined as an art
of everyday life, a genuinely modern art form.^2185
An ‘all-white’ living room designed by Syrie Maugham for her house in Chelsea, 1934,
illustrated in Derek Patmore’s Colour Schemes and Modern Furnishing, 1945.