Introduction
An estate agent’s photograph of an interior space in Montevetro – a
Richard Rogers-designed, riverside apartment building in Battersea –
published in a south-west London magazine in July 2007 , portrayed an
all-white living room furnished with hard-edged white sofas, a Le
Corbusier chaise longue upholstered in white leather, low ‘Japanese-
style’ white coffee tables and a huge plasma screen television. Described
as ‘contemporary and stylish’, this room, and others like it, would
undoubtedly fulfil most people’s expectations of a ‘modern interior’.
Countless images of a similar nature reveal themselves to us through the
glossy home-oriented magazines, furniture retailers’ catalogues and tele -
vision advertisements that form part of our daily lives. Indeed our sense
of the early twenty-first-century modern interior is, arguably, largely
formed by its presence in the mass media, where it is frequently repre-
sented as a highly desirable, uncluttered backcloth to an increasingly
complex existence.
For those with a more historical frame of reference, however, the
term ‘the modern interior’, may evoke an open-plan space from the 1920 s
featuring chromed tubular steel, black leather chairs and large expanses
of glass. Whichever image comes to mind – contemporary or historical –
it is likely that the epithet ‘modern’ is understood stylistically and that the
interior in question is located in a domestic setting. This book adopts a
different starting point, however. The Modern Interior sets out to demon-
strate that ‘the modern interior’, which was formed and developed
between the middle years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, went
beyond style and encompassed many more inside spaces than those con-
tained within the home. The modern interior addressed in this study is
defined by its relationship with the everyday experiences of modernity
during those years, which were as profound in the office, the factory, the 7006_018_Modern_Intro:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:31 Page 7