and museums. Van de Velde designed both the private office and the front
of house for Meier-Graefe’s La Maison Moderne in Brussels, for instance,
while Moscow’s Art Theatre was decorated by Fyodor Shekhtel in 1902 in
the Art Nouveau style.
Restaurants, cafés and tea rooms also embraced the New Interior,
becoming sites of fashionable display in the process. While, as we have
seen, in Glasgow it was linked to tea-drinking, in Vienna it was focused
on the coffee house, a traditional public space for men and increasingly,
in the late nineteenth century, for women as well. The Viennese Secession
itself had been formed in the Griensteidl coffee house in 1897 and six years
later the Wiener Werkstätte were also established in a similar setting.
Loos’s Café Museum of 1899 retained a number of traditional features,
however, including standard bentwood chairs which evoked a classless 51
A sales room on the ground floor of the Michaelerhaus, designed by Adolf Loos for
Goldmann and Salasch, Vienna, 1908 , photograph c. 1912.