chaotic proliferation of mass-produced goods for the home, the problem
of ‘taste’ created by the democratization of consumption, and the emer-
gence of the amateur, usually female, home decorator whom they
believed to be ignorant of architectural principles and driven solely by
the dictates of fashion, the Art Nouveau architect-decorators sought to
gain complete control over their architectural constructions. Because of
its visual, material and spatial complexity, its psychological density, its
multi-layered relationship with modernity and its stylistic possibilities,
the interior increasingly became the focus of their intentions. The New
Interior architect-decorators first directed their gazes on the private
spaces of domesticity. By that time, the English Arts and Crafts definition
of ‘home’, as formulated by C. R. Ashbee, C.F.A. Voysey, M. H. Baillie
Scott and others, had not only repudiated display in favour of simplicity,
privacy, comfort and family life, but had also encouraged many others to
readdress the subject of the domestic interior. In France, for example, ‘the
... importation of the word “home”, evoking the Arts and Crafts concep-
tion of the domestic sphere as a place of both beauty and comfort’, was
widespread.^4 Following on the heels of those developments a new gener-
ation of international architect-decorators began to use the domestic
interior as a test-bed in which to try out new ideas about the relationship
between architectural structures and the spaces within them and, for a
period of less than a decade around the turn of the century, in spite of
Benjamin’s fear that it had been ‘shattered’, the interior became the focus
for a number of key debates about the nature of modernity itself.
As a means of promoting the principle that the domestic interior
environment should be created in sympathy with the architecture that
housed it, several architects chose to design their own houses and interi-
ors for themselves and their families. Once again the inspiration came
from England, specifically from William Morris’s commission to Philip
Webb to create a house for himself and his new wife which he filled with
his own furnishings and those of his associates. The Red House in
Bexleyheath, Kent, marked a turning point in the emergence of the mod-
ern interior. When the Belgian architect, Henry Van de Velde, decided to
create a complete home for himself in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, he
inevitably looked to Morris for inspiration. The exterior of Bloemenwerf,
the house he created for his family, owed much to Arts and Crafts neo-
vernacular designs. Inside the walls of his little cottage Van de Velde
created a set of spaces, the structure, furniture and furnishings of which
were conceived and designed as a whole. The set of chairs around his 39