Turning Houses into Homes

A History of the Retailing and Consumption of Domestic Furnishings

Clive Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138263666
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351877275
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the earliest times, people have striven to turn their houses into homes through the use of decoration and furnishings, stimulating in turn a major commercial sector dedicated to offering the products and services essential to feed the ever-changing dictates of domestic fashion. Whilst there is plentiful evidence to show that these phenomena can be traced to medieval times, it is arguable that the eighteenth century witnessed the birth of a widespread and sophisticated consumer society. With a comparatively wealthy and socially mobile society, eighteenth-century Britain proved to be a fertile ground for ideas of home improvement and beautification, which were to persist to the present day. Turning Houses into Homes not only maps the history, changes, development and structure of the retail furnishing industry in Britain over three centuries, but also examines the relationships between the retailer and the consumer, looking at how retailers helped stimulate and shape the demand of their customers. Whilst work has been done on specific aspects of the home, very little has been written on the interaction between the retailer and consumer, and the pressures brought to bear on them by issues such as gender, education, status, symbolism, taste, decoration, hygiene, comfort and entertainment. As such, this book offers a valuable conjunction of retail history and consumption practices, which are examined through a multi-disciplinary approach to explore both their intimate connections and their wider roles in society.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s preface
• List of figures and tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The development of a consuming culture
• 3 The rise of the retail tastemaker: eighteenth-century furniture and furnishing retailing and distribution
• 4 From being to well-being: the growing demand for comfort and convenience in the eighteenth-century home
• 5 The retail revolution: the response to the demands from the nineteenth-century consumer
• 6 Consumption, identity and everyday life: nineteenth-century homes 144 and their importance in society
• 7 Twentieth-century retail responses: from mass to niche marketing
• 8 Changing visions of the ideal and the real: the consumption of home furnishings in the twentieth century
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index