Mark Taylor

Georgina Downey

Anca I. Lasc

Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development in the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogues, photographs, guidebooks and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this originla volume identify and historicise the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. This important volume enables an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.

The Modern Home and Mass Media

Designing the French Interior

In the act of enclosing space and making rooms, we make and define our aspirations and identities. Taking a room by room approach, this fascinating volume explores how representations of domestic space have embodied changing spatial configurations and values, and considers how we see modern individuals in the process of making themselves 'at home'. Scholars from the US, UK and Australasia re-visit and re-think interiors by Bonnard, Matisse, Degas and Vuillard, as well as the great spaces of early modernity; the drawing room in Rossetti's house, hallways in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the Paris attic of the Brothers Goncourt; Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen, to explore how interior making has changed from the Victorian to the modern period. From the smallest room - the bathroom - to the spacious verandas of Singapore Deco, Domestic Interiors focuses on modern rooms 'imaged' and imagined, it builds a distinct body of knowledge around the interior, interiority, representation and modernity, and creates a rich resource for students and scholars in art, architecture and design history.

Georgina Downey

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