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3 The Mass-consumed Interior The more the manufacturer or dealer arranges model rooms or representa-

tive exhibits, or practices ensemble room selling, the more help and suggestion

it will be to the consumer.

Christine Frederick1

From the moment the manufacture of large numbers of domestic goods was transferred to factories, and middle-class home-makers were forced to leave the comfort of their homes to purchase them, mass consumption and the interior developed an intimate relationship with each other. As the domestic interior came to be seen as the destination for consumed goods, its replication in the public sphere (in idealized forms) as a frame for displaying those products became increasingly widespread. We have seen how Peter Behrens created a dining room for Berlin’s Wertheim department store in 1902 which contained a fully laid table. A later com- mercial display, mounted in Bowman Brothers’ London store in the 1930s, set out to be even more ‘authentic’, comprising, as it did, a table set for breakfast complete with boiled eggs and toast. The dinner service being promoted was designed by the English ceramics designer Susie Cooper. Increasingly, represented interiors, or components of them such as these, were used as the frames for objects of desire in commercial set- tings. Through the process the domestic interior was itself transformed into an object of mass consumption.

Mass consumption, it has been claimed, was one of modernity’s defining features.2 That same claim could also be made for the domestic interior, as it became absorbed by the world of mass consumption. The model of consumption that used the interior as a selling tool was highly dependent upon the creation of consumer desire. Through an engage- ment with the evocative design of interiors in commercial spaces in which goods were displayed, the desire to purchase was encouraged. As women came out of their homes to purchase domestic goods, the mod- ern interior’s relationship with mass consumption had an ‘inside out’ push built into it. The evocatively designed interior became, therefore, both a means (of selling) and an end (the location for the consumed 55

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Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=480991. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-10-11 15:10:22.

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goods) in this context. Gradually, as the power of the marketplace expanded the means came to dominate the end and the idealized public sphere interior became as important as, if not more so than, its realized counterparts. Indeed, in that form, the modern interior became an accomplice in the construction of the ‘irrational’ desire which under- pinned the mass consumption of goods intended for ‘real’ interiors. The result was that it became increasingly difficult to view them independently and yet another level of ambiguity between the private and the public spheres was created.

Another effect of the interior’s expanding relationship with mass consumption was felt in retail spaces themselves. Arcades were covered over to make the conditions for consuming more acceptable, and as a consequence the idea of spaces within spaces, of rooms within rooms and of stores within stores became increasingly widespread. The experiences56

A breakfast table set with a service designed by Susie Cooper, displayed in the Bowman Brothers’ Store, London, late 1930s, illustrated in C. G. Holme, ed., The Studio Year Book, 1939.

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that took place within those retail spaces – from department stores to shopping malls – were ones of continually enhanced ‘immersion’, of being increasingly shut off from the outside world and contained within safe, unthreatening and (when the technology became available) tempera - ture-controlled spaces. Commercial branding also played a key role in those constructions helping the flow of people through them. Gradually, as the process of interiorization increased its pace it became increasingly hard to distinguish ‘inside’ experiences from ‘outside’ ones, and more and more difficult to understand where the boundaries between what previ- ously had been separate spheres were located. The same thing was hap- pening in the domestic arena. In the interior of Adolf Loos’s Moller House, created in Vienna’s Starkfriedgasse in 1927–8, for example, the designer combined oriental rugs, parquet floors and wood panelling with a subtle use of different levels, thereby developing, in a domestic setting, the idea of insides within other insides – a layering of inside spaces a bit like Benjamin’s layers of envelopment within the compass case. ‘It is no longer the house that is the theatre box’, one writer has explained in con- nection with Loos’s complex interior design, ‘there is a theatre box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces . . . the classical distinc- tion between inside and outside, private and public, becomes convoluted.’3

In locating spaces within other spaces Loos could have been anticipating the shopping mall of the early twenty-first century.

The work that went on behind the scenes in the construction of idealized interiors was inevitably hidden from consumers. Model domes- tic interiors were presented as static images and spaces, complete with puffed-up cushions.4 Real lives, in that context, were replaced by the modern, mass media-dependent notion of ‘lifestyles’, the idealized ver- sions, that is, of the lives that people actually lead.5 An abstract, totalizing concept created by the sum of consumers’ possessions, activities, aspira- tions and desires, the concept of ‘lifestyle’ emerged largely as a result of the mass media’s engagement with the modern interior. It filled the gap left by the loss of the home’s economic and productive role and linked it more firmly with the processes of mass consumption and identity forma- tion. That, in turn, led to the absorption of interior decoration into the fashion system and to the ensuing presentation, in mass market women’s magazines, of a mix of different kinds of information related to interiors, fashion and leisure activities in a single publication. Rapidly, however, the idea of lifestyle began to take on an existence of its own, above and beyond the individual elements upon which it was dependent. 57

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A couture dress by Paul Poiret in an interior with fabric also designed by the couturier, illustrated in La Revue de La Femme, May 1927.

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Various forms of the mass media were quick to represent the ideal - ized domestic interior and to use it as a mechanism for stimulating desire and mass consumption. Viewed inside the home the printed pages of magazines, mail order catalogues, advice books, exhibition catalogues and newspapers played important roles, while outside the domestic arena world exhibitions, department stores, restaurants and museums began to contain constructed interiors which were also intended to stimulate consumption, or at least the desire for it.6 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a number of ways in which the mass media, in its various manifestations, helped to construct relationships between consumers and interiors. Developments in lithography and photography made it increasingly easy to represent whole interiors in two dimensions and to reproduce those images in large numbers. The problems of early flash photography and the long exposures that were needed to capture the interior meant that it took longer than other areas of the environment to photograph. By the last decades of the century, however, those technical obstacles had mostly been overcome. Women’s magazines extended their promotion of fashionable clothing items to include components of the interior and complete interiors. An image of a woman wearing a Poiret dress from the 1920s, for example, was published in the French women’s magazine La Revue de La Femme in May 1927. She was framed by, and depicted gently caressing, a pair of curtains designed by the same couturier, suggesting a unity between her body, her dress and the interi- or in which she was located.7 By the early twentieth century interiors had become an important component of a wide range of women’s maga- zines, including the ‘upmarket’ Vogue, then as now a fashion-oriented magazine in which sumptuous interiors created by interior decorators complemented the fashionable images of modern luxury evoked by the couture clothing which graced most of its pages. It was sharply contrasted with the ‘pseudo-rationality’ of other, more ‘downmarket’ magazines such as Good Housekeeping, which targeted home-makers and the work that went on in the home. It claimed to undertake laboratory tests of many of the items it featured as a means of ensuring their scientific validity, their reliability and their value for money.

Magazines, read and looked at in the home for the most part, attempted on a number of different levels to focus women’s attention on idealized versions of the very interiors in which they were frequently sit- ting while they read. Magazine culture was very important in nineteenth- century England. ‘The magazine’, one writer has explained, ‘bought by an 59

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upper middle-class woman, might be read by her daughters, her servants and friends, then swapped for another through the exchange pages of the first magazine before being thrown out or sent to a second-hand bookshop.’8 Advertisements for items of furniture and other decorative domestic objects were the most obvious way in which the housewife was targeted as a consumer of, and for, the interior. They frequently showed their ‘subjects’ within interior settings. An advertisement in the March 1914 edition of the American magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, for exam- ple, which was promoting a brand of floor polish, depicted a housewife and her maidservant busy polishing while a group of children played happily on the floor. The conventional, cosy, middle-class interior setting that was represented, complete with its solid wood dining table, piano and patterned curtains, was intended to make the product seem ‘real’ and appealing. In an article titled ‘How You Can Furnish a Five-room Apartment for $300’ the same journal once again focused housewives’ attention on the interior. ‘A careful shopper’, the author suggested, ‘can furnish her apartment both inexpensively and tastefully’.9 Colour drawings and a list of prices were included. Editorials represented a much softer, and possibly more effective, sell than advertisements. The same idea was also appropriated by advertisers, however, as a Harrods’ advertisement in a 1920 Ideal Home Exhibition catalogue, headed ‘Harrods Furnish a 6- Room Flat Complete for £500’, clearly demonstrated.10 Blurring their promotional and editorial content, magazines played a role in reinforcing their readers’ ambiguous identities as readers/home-makers/consumers. Mail order catalogues provided another means of consuming interiors at home. In the usa, where greater distances made them more necessary than in Europe, the Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward catalogues dominated the field.

Consumers of the interior did not always remain in their homes, however. From the late nineteenth century onwards, as we have seen, people (mostly women) came out of the home to buy household goods to take back into it. A wide range of shopping options for direct purchas- ing were on offer – from market stalls, to fixed shops, to chain stores, to department stores. The last, however, were most linked with modernity in those years and addressed themselves to middle-class female con- sumers most directly. Those modern ‘cathedrals’ or ‘palaces’, as they have been called at different times, played a key role in that context.11 Much has been written about the ways in which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, department stores employed varying levels of60

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An interior of the Bon Marché department store, rue de Babylone, Paris, 1880.

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spectacle to entice customers inside them and to stimulate desire and pleasure so that consuming, for the middle-class women who were their first customers, was perceived as a leisure activity rather than work. In the French department stores, Galeries Lafayettes and Bon Marché among them, consumers were given a sense of being practically exposed to the sky but nonetheless enclosed with a fantasy world.12 This engraving of an interior in the Bon Marché store in Paris reveals an open, multi-storey, iron and steel structure. The cold, industrial nature of those materials was visually offset, however, by the presence of a variety of goods – items of clothing, lengths of fabrics and rugs among them – which were suspended from the balconies of the different floors and on lines hung between the building’s structural columns. One writer has described some of the ways in which that sense of being in a fantasy world was achieved visually. ‘Display managers learned the new color theory and exploited color, often in the most adroit ways’, he has written. ‘They decorated with puffed arch- ways of colored silk; they hung garlands of flowers, draperies of colored plush, cages of colored birds. The biggest stores designed rooms . . . around a single color scheme. Green in all its tints and shades prevailed from basement to roof at William Filene’s Sons Company in Boston in 1901.’13 By that time furniture sets and room settings were beginning to be used both inside American stores and in their windows to achieve an exot- ic, luxurious look.14 ‘To obtain the desired effect of “Parisianism”, store managers imitated French salons . . . and even copied the complete inter - ior of a “real Parisian boulevard appartement”’, one writer has explained, demonstrating, in anticipation of the hotels and shopping malls of Las Vegas several decades later, just how effective evocations of the interior could be in stimulating the imaginations and fantasies of consumers.15 The evocation of the private sphere in the public context satisfied the require- ments of familiarity, voyeurism, curiosity and wish-fulfilment. However the ‘spectacularization’ of the department store applied equally to restaur - ants, hotels, theatres and dry goods stores.16

By the end of the 1920s the furniture sections of American depart- ment stores had fully embraced the modern interior design style, known as Art Deco, that had become popular in Europe following the 1925 Exposition Internationales des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, and they had begun to display complete modern room sets, sometimes in partnership with museums. A mixture of modern French and American designs in room settings were shown at both John Wanamaker and Macy’s in New York in 1927. Macy’s cleared its floor of traditional pieces62

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and showed only modern designs at that time.17 The president of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert W. de Forest, became the chair man of the store’s advisory committee, thereby giving that commer- cial project a level of cultural validation.18

Many other American stores were quick to follow Macy’s lead and displayed rooms filled with designs by European ‘masters’, such as the German Bruno Paul, and the Italian Gio Ponti. The appeal of the room setting over individualized items of furniture undoubtedly lay in its strong visual impact and its ability to evoke an idealized version of ‘reality’. It also suggested a lifestyle. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, so beloved of early twentieth-century designers, had, by the 1920s, been transformed by store designers into a selling tool. In the 1930s Mary, the wife of the designer Russel Wright, devoted limitless energy to selling her husband’s aluminium ware. She undertook live demonstrations in stores using real food as props, thereby sustaining a commercial tradition that had been in place in American stores since the early century. In 1950 the Wrights published a book together titled Guide to Easier Living in which they explained that ‘Good informal living substitutes a little headwork 63

A backcloth for a store window display of furniture, illustrated in a store window display manual, 1925.

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for a lot of legwork. It doesn’t need wealth, but it does take thought, some ingenuity and resourcefulness, and more than a little loving care to cre- ate a home that is really your own.’19

Displays of furniture ensembles and of complete interiors were not only visible inside the bodies of stores, they were also installed in shop windows which could be viewed from the street. By the early twentieth century the three-walled interior frame had become a familiar sight in department store windows. It had its origins in the theatrical stage set and the domestic dramas of the decades around the turn of the century. A 1925 American manual for ‘mercantile display’ advised that ‘the installing of a design of this character is well worth the effort as it lends itself to the display of a varied line of merchandise’.20 The same manual also included a display of living-room furniture, explaining that, ‘The furniture is arranged in a manner to show [it] off to good advantage, using the necessary accessories such as the lamp, book rack, pictures etc.’, rein- forcing the, probably tacit, knowledge of professionals in that field that consumers needed to be shown just enough of an interior for their imaginations to be stimulated and their desires evoked.21 The neo-classical simplicity of one model shop window interior in the manual, intended for a display of furniture, provided a fairly neutral backcloth (p. 63). Draped curtains added a level of theatricality, a chequered floor a sugges- tion of Viennese modernity, and a fringed standard lamp a counterpoint to its otherwise strict symmetry.

While department stores provided an urban means of consuming the interior, the shopping mall became its suburban equivalent. With the advent of the automobile in the us, demand grew for out-of-town shop- ping places where there was plenty of parking space.22 Thus the shopping mall, a collection of individual shops brought together into a single unit, was born. In 1916 the Chicago architect Arthur Aldis created one of the first shopping complexes of that kind, Market Square in Lake Forest, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. He integrated twenty-eight stores, twelve office units, thirty apartments, a gymnasium and a clubhouse, and added landscaping around them. His aim was to position everything in one place so that the consumer could combine shopping with leisure activities. Through the twentieth century the idea of the suburban mall gradually displaced that of the urban department store. Targeting a range of social classes, it offered consumers a very different interior experience, one which was usually less consistent, less spectacular, less luxurious, less glamorous and more utilitarian. By the end of the century shopping malls had taken64

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over from the department store for the most part, offering, through their more nuanced and complex ‘inside’ spaces, an even more ambiguous retail experience than their predecessors.

Although the direct purchasing of objects for the interior did not usually take place at exhibitions on a significant scale, they played a cru- cial role, nonetheless, in the development of the representation of the mass-consumed interior in the public sphere.23 Walter Benjamin described the world exhibitions as ‘places of pilgrimage to the commod- ity fetish’ intended ‘to entertain the working classes’.24 It wasn’t until the last decades of the nineteenth century that complete (or at least two- or three-sided) ‘room sets’ were exhibited in those settings. Prior to that iso- lated items of furniture had been displayed either in elaborate cabinets or in roped-off areas. At Philadephia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876, for example, finely carved wooden display cases containing free-standing items of furniture had stood looking rather lost under the vast iron trusses and plate glass of that vast exhibition hall.25 Full-scale models of workers’ houses had been shown at the 1867 exhibition in Paris, but the emphasis at that time had still been upon their exteriors rather than their interiors.26 The Austrian critic Jacob von Falke, the author of the first German language book on interior design, Art in the House (1871), was among the first designers in Germany or Austria to create a complete ‘ensemble’ interior display in an exhibition.27 By 1880 it had become a fairly common strategy used by curators in applied arts museums and by designers at trade fairs. A William Morris exhibit at The Foreign Fair of 1883–4, for example, held in Boston’s Mechanics Hall, was divided into six compartments, or rooms. A pamphlet describing the display cautioned that ‘the rooms must not . . . be taken to represent the rooms of a dwelling, nor is the ordinary decoration of a house attempted. Morris and Company are exhibiting here as manufacturers only, and the arrange- ment of goods is that which seemed best for showing them in the ways most accordant to their actual use.’28 That caveat could have been applied equally well to all the exhibition room sets that came after it.

By the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, room sets were being extensively used. That exhibition set out to celebrate modern art, industry and commerce and for all the exhibiting countries the inte- grated interior represented a level of achievement in all of those three areas. It also demonstrated the degree of progressiveness, or modernity, embraced by the countries in question. Examples of exhibited interiors at Paris 1900 included those designed by German exhibitors, Richard 65

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Riemerschmid among them, and the famous Art Nouveau settings creat- ed by Eugène Gaillard, George de Feure and others which were displayed in the Samuel Bing pavilion. Austria also made its presence felt with, among other displays, the Viennese Interior, a Gesamtkunstwerk designed by Joseph Olbrich, and an Interior of a Pleasure Yacht created by the same designer.29 Other interiors were sponsored by the Parisian department stores, Bon Marché among them, again in the Art Nouveau style. (The pioneer American interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, later recounted in her autobiography that the last had been purchased by her friend, the Marchioness of Anglesey, who, in turn, had passed on to her the eight - eenth-century wooden wall panelling which it had displaced.)

Through the twentieth century the exhibition room set increasingly became a commonplace, at least until the late 1950s. At the Turin 1902 exhibition the Italian designer Carlo Bugatti showed his dramatic interior based on a snail’s shell, while Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret66

Georges Djo-Bourgeois, study for the ‘Studium Louvre’ Pavilion, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris, 1925.

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Macdonald’s Rose Boudoir was widely admired at the same event. The 1925 Paris Exposition Internationales des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes depended heavily upon its spectacular exhibited interiors to entice its visitors into its buildings. Although actual shopping was not 67

Marcel Guillemard, dining room for the ‘Pavillon Primavera’, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris, 1925.

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possible anywhere in the exhibition, many of the displays reinforced the fact that Paris was the city in which consumption took place on a spec- tacular scale.30 A number of room sets were constructed in a group of pavilions which were created to promote the interior decorating sections of Paris’s leading department stores. One such room, an office designed by Georges Djo-Bourgeois, was installed in the Grands Magasins du Louvre’s Studium Louvre pavilion. Featuring leather armchairs, a piece of sculpture by Léon Leyritz and lacquered panels by Pierre Demaria, it was a rich, masculine space offset by a number of feminine touches including vases of flowers and patterning on the curtains and carpet. A dining room was designed by Marcel Guillemard as part of Au Printemps’ Primavera pavilion. The rich woods and modern furniture forms in Guillemard’s room set were intended to persuade visitors that employing Primavera to decorate their homes would bring a high level of elegant luxury and modernity into their lives.

It was not only the large international exhibitions that employed the concept of the constructed interior as a display strategy, however. At a more local level, events such as Britain’s Ideal Home Exhibition, established by the Daily Mail newspaper before the First World War, and the annual exhibition held in Paris, the Salon des Arts Ménagers, also used room sets.31

Their aim was less to present a display of national prowess in an interna- tional context but rather to inspire the public, fulfil their dreams and aspirations and to encourage them to consume. As the century progressed the messages conveyed by constructed interiors in exhibitions became increasingly complex and their audiences more sophisticated. At the Britain Can Make It exhibition, held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946, a range of room sets were presented as representations of class, age and gender. Examples included ‘a technical office for a televi- sion research engineer’, ‘a secondary school classroom’, ‘a cottage kitchen for a miner’, and a ‘bachelor’s bed sitting room’.32 The exhibition curators aimed to encourage a more reflective response from its audience than that of consumer desire alone. A notice on a wall at the exhibition instructed visitors to ‘view the rooms as if the family has just vacated it’. The inten- tion was to move one step nearer to the occupant than had been achieved at earlier exhibitions, and in so doing, to engage the audience’s imagina- tions as completely as possible. Several reviews were critical of the strategy, however, and one commentator wrote that, ‘we feel bound to remark that in most cases the rooms bear no relationship to the imagined families and the class-distinction in naming the rooms appears utterly meaningless . . .68

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This is an exhibition, and therefore it is no criticism to say that most of these rooms lack reality. It is important that the public should realise this. Otherwise they may feel that it is all rather outside their powers of attainment.’33

Museums played a crucial role in collecting and displaying period interiors through the twentieth century and, indeed, many of the strate- gies used in the more commercial contexts of exhibitions and depart- ment stores had originated in the context of the ‘period room’. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired its first complete interior in 1869 while New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art began to collect rooms in 1903.34 The Brooklyn Museum also engaged in acquiring period rooms. One of its exhibits, an eighteenth-century dining room from a plantation house in South Carolina, called Cane Acres, contained a number of tasteful, English-influenced items of furniture. Visitors to the museum were encouraged to believe in the ‘authenticity’ of the setting by the presence of wine in the glass carafes. The original motivation behind what came to be known as the ‘period rooms’ phenomenon had been to educate the public in historical styles at a time when historicist eclecticism 69

A period room from Cane Acres, an eighteenth-century house on the Perry Plantation, Summerville, South Carolina, exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

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was the taste of the day. The Cane Acres room set out to do just that. At one of its exhibitions, held in 1934, instead of showing the usual domes- tic period interiors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on the con- temporary workspaces of well-known industrial designers of the day as a means of educating the public about the design profession and it contri- bution to modern life. Raymond Loewy and Lee Simonson recreated a version of the former’s office as a ‘frame’ in which to display his design skills and their wide application to boats and cars as well as interiors themselves.

Popular films, or ‘movies’, provided another important means through which the interior was mediated and a desire to consume stimu - lated on a mass scale through the twentieth century. Movies were created to entertain, distract and provide a level of fantasy and escapism from the realities of everyday life. They offered, therefore, an ideal vehicle for70

Raymond Loewy and Lee Simonson, reconstruction of Loewy’s office for an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Contemporary Industrial Art: 1934’, New York, 1934.

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The second-floor drawing room of Hope Hampton’s residence at 1145 Park Avenue, New York, designed by Elsie de Wolfe Inc., c. 1934.

A still from Jacques Feyder’s 1929 film The Kiss, starring George Davis and Greta Garbo.

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commercial and ideological messages and product placements.35 In the 1930s the idea of Hollywood ‘celebrities’ homes’ acquired media appeal. Elsie de Wolfe’s decorating firm created several home interiors for movie stars, including one for Hope Hampton in New York and another for Gary Cooper in California. The former contained a multitude of luxurious materials. ‘It’s all white and gold and shimmering’, a journalist explained in 1938, ‘with a kind of lighthearted dignity about it. The oyster-white furniture is trimmed with gold, the draperies are white satin; and the marble floor is quite sumptuous, with its inlay of gray, oyster-white and yellow. A French window and a scrolled iron gateway lead out to a terrace for al-fresco dining.’36 The glamorous atmosphere of that sumptuous apartment was mirrored in the countless ‘fantasy’ sets created for Hollywood films in that decade. In Grand Hotel (1932) the cinematogra- phy, sets, costumes and the slim figures of Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine all contributed to a glamorous representation of modernity in which the ‘moderne interior’ played a star role.37 In Dinner at Eight of the following year a ‘moderne’ setting was used to represent ‘arrivisme’ and to contrast with a more ‘tasteful’ classical setting which stood for upper class tradi- tion.38 A 1929 film, The Kiss, directed by Jacques Feyder and starring George Davis and Greta Garbo, also wooed its audience through its use of stylish ‘streamlined moderne’ sets. Film interiors were hugely influen- tial. A bedroom set in The Kiss reappeared, for instance, in a bedroom design created by John Wellborn Root which was shown at the Architect and the Industrial Arts exhibition held in New York’s Metro politan Museum of Art in the same year the film was released.39 The level of spectacle employed in those films, as in many others, evoked high levels of consumer desire.40

The idealized modern interior made an impact in many different contexts and fulfilled a number of different purposes. Through its prox- imity to consumers’ everyday lives and its role in helping to form the concept of ‘lifestyle’ it was able to perform a powerful communicative function which could only be equalled by dress or food. Providing a level of familiarity for consumers outside the home, it tapped into their desires and succeeded in stimulating their dreams and aspirations. Arguably, as a result, in its idealized and mediated forms, the modern interior was one of the key drivers of mass consumption in the twentieth century as well as, in its realized versions, the destination of many of its objects.

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