The Modern Interior

This book is the result of my attempt to address some of the unanswered questions that arose in the

late 1990 s and early 2000 s while researching the work of the pioneer American interior decorator

Elsie de Wolfe. The scope of the book I wrote then did not permit me to dwell in any detail on the

meaning of the modern interior in the first half of the twentieth century. My overriding question at

that time had been whether de Wolfe, working as she did in French eighteenth-century period styles

for the most part, was a ‘modern’ decorator or not. That deceptively simple question took me to the

vast literature on the subjects of modernity and identity, especially where they touched on issues

relating to gender, class and sexuality. Indeed, I had already begun to interrogate those themes in my

1995 publication, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, which had led me to Elsie de Wolfe

in the first place. While researching The Modern InteriorI was reminded again that the scholarship

on the subjects of modernity and identity in the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities

and cultural studies operates at a considerable distance from work undertaken in the visually

oriented areas of the history and theory of art, architecture and design. This book is a modest

attempt to help make that bridge a bit more crossable.

Writing this book has not just been an academic exercise, however, but rather a lived experience.

The fact that it exists at all is due to the countless memorable visits I have made to many modern

interiors over the years with colleagues, friends and family, and alone. It couldn’t have been written,

for example, without the experiences of the annual overseas study trips made with the staff and stu-

dents of the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum History of Design macourse,

between 1982 and 1999 , during which we visited many fascinating modern interior spaces. Hvitträsk

knee-deep in snow, and Carl Larsson’s house in Dalarna, where we met remaining family members,

are among the many memories that come immediately to mind. For those I thank Gillian Naylor,

Charles Saumarez Smith, Paul Greenhalgh, Jeremy Aynsley and Christopher Breward, among many

others. Among the many debts that I owe to friends and family, one must go to Wendy Caplan who

kindly took me to the Eames’s Santa Monica House, and another to my daughter Molly, who proved

an able research assistant on visits to Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House and Le Corbusier’s Villa

Savoye, among others.

Equally, this book couldn’t have been written without the support of my fellow researchers at

Kingston University – Trevor Keeble, Anne Wealleans and Brenda Martin in particular – who

constitute the core members of the Modern Interiors Research Centre (mirc). The Centre’s

annual conferences, held from 1999 onwards, have provided an important international forum

234 in which many of the ideas presented in this study were rehearsed and debated. The us-based

Acknowledgements

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