The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior - Hardcover

'Superbly illustrated and supplied with a detailed, thematic bibliography, the major achievement of the book is in satisfying the needs and pleasures of a wide spectrum of people interested in interior design, including professionals and more general readers' - The Art Book 'Carefully conceived and deeply evocative ... one of the most important publications in the field for years' - Home Cultures 'Required reading way outside the narrow definition implied by the title' - The Art Newspaper 'Profound, well-informed and factually rich ... an astounding source of textual and pictorial material, which will be a lasting enrichment to further research in the area of interior design' - The Victorian

Today we are surrounded by glossy publications and TV shows demonstrating the latest interiors. We take notions of style, comfort and atmosphere completely for granted, even designing our own rooms to achieve the right ‘mood’. Yet this language, seemingly so current, emerged in the 19th century, when a combination of economic, social and artistic factors first allowed architects, designers and clients to think about home interiors in a completely new way. Their challenge was to create atmosphere and character in ordinary living rooms – in short, to aspire to the new ideal of the ‘poetic home’. This book examines the Western domestic interior from the 1800s to the mid-1890s, but rather than concentrate on individual types of furnishing or on familiar historical styles, it proceeds in a radically different way: it considers the design of the interior as a whole, making use of original 19thcentury texts and images to reeveal what the designers, producers, shops and clients actually thought about the business of conjuring up romanticized interiors.

Table of Contents

Modernity, Anti-Modernity, Comfort and Décor since 1800 · I. A Poetic Everyday Home? · II. ‘Art in the Home’: A New Discourse · III. The Unified Interior: Decoration to Design · IV. Atmosphere · V. National and Vernacular Revivals · VI. A Disparate Legacy