The Modern Interior

of Vassar graduates living in inter-war New York, Kay, one of the main

characters, was among those for whom the new, compact furnishing style

was enormously appealing. Her apartment consisted of

Two rooms, plus dinette and kitchen, plus a foyer, plus, Kay’s pride

and joy, a darling little dressing room. Every stick of furniture was

the latest thing; blond Swedish chairs and folding table... in the

dinette... in the living room a bright-red modern couch and arm-

chairs to match, a love-seat covered in striped grey-and-white

mattress ticking, steel standing lamps, and a coffee table that was

just a sheet of glass that Harald had had cut at the glazier’s and

mounted on steel legs, built-in bookcases that Harald had painted

canary yellow. There were no rugs yet and, instead of curtains, only

white Venetian blinds at the windows. Instead of flowers, they had

ivy growing in white pots.^23

Those designers positioned themselves somewhere between European

Modernism on the one hand and American commercial product design

on the other. Above all they sought to exploit the possibility of modu-

larity and standardization in furniture manufacture. Their contribution

was defined by their ‘willingness to make use of the language of the

marketplace to reach potential users’.^24

With the exception of their emphasis on the curved forms of

streamlining, the interior designs developed by the American designers

of the inter-war years were not especially visually innovative as they

tended to combine the strategies of the European Modernists with those

of the exponents of the Art Deco style in a fairly straightforward way.

The impact of their strongly commercial approach to interior design

was more significant, however, especially in the years after the Second

World War when their influence provided a counterbalance to that of

the Modernists. The approach to the modern interior adopted by the

American industrial designers was much more pragmatic and less ideal-

istic than that of their European counterparts and they anticipated a

world in which, increasingly, objects were to take centre stage and define

the interiors that contained them.

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