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

Stefan Muthesius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500514194 ISBN 13: 9780500514191

Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review:

`A long, dense, scholarly work with an amazing breadth of international references' -- Art Quarterly

`Ambitious ... Throughout, paintings, woodcuts and frontispieces of fantastic opulence and detail leap off the page ... offers a new angle on a fascinating period'
-- House & Garden

`Does much to enhance our understanding and appreciation of 19th-century domestic interiors and their relevance to today's homes'
-- The Financial Times

`One of the most important books on interior design to be published in recent decades'
-- World of Interiors

About the Author:

Stefan Muthesius is a specialist in the 18th to 20th century history of architecture, urban design, and applied arts and design. His book The English Terraced House won the Sir Banister Fletcher Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0500514194
• ISBN 13: 9780500514191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352