The Modern Interior

nineteenth century/early twentieth century department store has been

the subject of numerous studies, the appearance of its interior spaces has

received relatively little attention. The architect of Paris’s Bon Marché

store was L. A. Boileau, the engineer of the famous Gustave Eiffel, and its

founder, Aristide Boucicaut.^19 Built of iron and glass, its interior consist-

ed of spacious open bays, glass skylights and a series of open inner courts.

Inside the monumental and theatrical effects continued. The iron

columns and expanse of glass provided a sense of space, openness

and light. Immense gallery opened upon immense gallery and

along the upper floors ran balconies from which one could view, as

a spectator, the crowds and activity below. Three grand staircases,

elegant and sweeping, conveyed the public to these floors as if they

were climbing to loges at the opera... Part opera, part theatre, part

museum, Boucicaut’s eclectic extravaganza did not disappoint

those who came for a show.^20

The interior of the Parisian store was a vast open space, similar to

the interior of the Crystal Palace, with a glass roof which had a huge

chandelier suspended from its centre. Walkways around the periphery of

the iron-structured space provided customers with vantage points from

which to view the stock which lay beneath them. Side lighting and fabrics

were, as we have seen, suspended in swags from the columns to complete

the effect. The central staircase of the store emphasized the vertical

nature of its cavernous space while the salon was an equally vertically-

oriented space of enormous scale but with ceilings painted in the classical

manner and paintings covering the walls. Away from the commercially

driven shop floors that last space was more historical in style, offering

the store’s customers a more domestic experience. The potential threat of

the commercial world was softened by that more overtly cultural space

which reassured female consumers in what was otherwise an unfamiliar

modern interior.

Selfridges, which opened in London in 1909 , was the only British

department store to equal Paris’s Bon Marché and the Marshall Field’s

store in Chicago. It had ‘wide aisles, electric lighting, crystal chandeliers

and a striking colour scheme – all-white walls contrasted with thick green

carpet.’^21 Typically of that early Edwardian era the interior was at once, in

its negation of the darker Victorian spaces of earlier stores, both novel

118 and, with its crystal chandeliers, traditional at the same time. That ‘cathe-