Appropriated Interiors

Deborah Schneiderman, Anca I. Lasc, Karin Tehve, Deborah Schneiderman, Anca I. Lasc, Karin Tehve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Interior Design

Appropriated Interiors uncovers the ways interiors participate explicitly and implicitly in embedded cultural and societal values and explores timely emergent scholarship in the fields of interior design history, theory, and practice.

What is "appropriate" and "inappropriate" now? These are terms with particular interest to the study of the interior. Featuring thirteen original curated essays, Appropriated Interiors explores the tensions between normative interiors that express the dominant cultural values of a society and interiors that express new, changing, and even transgressive values. With case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, these historians, theorists, and design practitioners investigate the implications of interior design as it relates to politics, gender, identity, spatial abstraction, cultural expression, racial expression, technology, and much more.

An informative read for students and scholars of design history and theory, this collection considers the standards, assumptions, codes, and/or conventions that need to be dismantled and how we can expand our understanding of the history, theory, and practice of interior design to challenge the status quo.

Section I

Small

Introduction

Keena Suh

DOI: 10.4324/9781003131632-3

Through a focus on the personal and intimate “small” scale, the authors in this section explore how the textual and textural layers of private domestic interiors are metaphorically, subversively, or overtly intertwined with broader public values, collective memory-making, or national ideologies. From bedding to refrigerators and ephemera to tools, elements of domestic interiors discussed in this section function beyond their intended use, appropriated as vehicles of invented (and reinvented) narratives. Turney and Gola discuss the role of image-making in connecting private and national values. Yildirim and Bártolo examine how communal heritage represented through domestic objects and spaces is appropriated (and reappropriated) to serve state interests or subvert them. Across global contexts, the four authors reveal how the (re)invented language of private interiors—elements, arrangement, and message—participate in the construction and legitimization of personal and collective identities.

1
Duvet Entendre

Getting in Bed with the Continentals

Jo Turney

DOI: 10.4324/9781003131632-4

The British bedroom in the 1970s, if TV sitcoms were to be believed, was a depressing place. The intimacies of the domestic space, so often culturally positioned as a metaphor for the “nation,” seemed to embody the misery of recession and civil unrest as well as embraced the sexual and gender liberation that characterised the decade, which throughout the UK media was largely interpreted as emasculating sexual stagnation. In addition, the economic security of the nation seemed to be under threat. In 1973, the UK joined the “Common Market,” later the EEC (European Economic Community), and by 1974 discussions surrounding a possible referendum to stay/leave was underway. In order to stimulate interest in the debate and establish some type of entente cordiale between the British and their European neighbors, the media embraced “positive” stereotyping, all of which had a domestic twist. From cooking shows that extolled French gastronomy and Italian wine to travel programs that dipped their toes in the warmth of the Mediterranean and advertising that championed the health benefits of Swiss muesli and German rye bread, Europe had never looked, tasted, or felt so good. And its influence spread throughout the home in relation to décor, furnishings, and fittings, where an imagined Europe became a British reality. But it was in the bedroom where the most significant and exciting possibilities were realised, as “sleeping” became synonymous with sexual pleasure, openness, and experimentation. First introduced to the UK in 1964 by Terence Conran’s lifestyle store Habitat, the continental quilt (duvet), by the early 1970s, became a vehicle for marrying the UK with Europe and a means for redressing sexual and marital stagnation. It was instantly associated with “foreignness” and the “Continental” and a particular sense of otherness, or the exotic, that were sexy and decidedly not British. This chapter considers the ways in which the duvet embedded itself within wider discussions of “home” and “abroad” and consequently uncovered discussions about sex and desire.

Introduction

The most popular representations of interior design in the 1970s highlight the kitschiness, the clashing coloursand patterns, the overt use of synthetics, and the retro/repro styles that seemingly typified the decade. The apparent rejection of “good taste” and the modernist project that underpinned such a concept led design historians to describe the period as the decade that design forgot. This chapter argues against this rather short-sighted view, proposing that the period was one of reinvention, one that placed design at the forefront of modern life, encouraging discussions about what it was to be “modern” as well as disseminating these ideas through products to more people than ever before. This “openingup” was not merely in relation to availability and access, and it was not merely about the personalisation of one’s personal space, although this really developed during the period; it was also an expression of the private becoming increasingly public, and discussions of what went on behind “closed doors” emerged as regular features in the popular press and design magazines. The interior was increasingly displayed exteriorly, and this blurring of boundaries extended throughout all aspects of daily life, creating a climate in which nothing was potentially taboo.

Discussions surrounding what happened or was experienced in the bedroom were played out against the political backdrop of Britain’s entry into the EEC, a common topic at the time and a term phrased as if to imply a very masculine Britain penetrating a sexually available, promiscuous, and thus feminine Europe. And it is here that the crux of the discussion lies: much like a double entendre—or, as the title of this chapter suggests, a duvet entendre—sex or traditionally taboo subjects were much easier to negotiate and approach when applied to or articulated through metaphor, when the personal was mediated through the party political, and when the discussion assumed control through power relations. This linguistic appropriation was commonplace at the time, and plays on words¹ or phrases from European languages were features of daily conversations that might seem risqué, a la Monty Python’s “nudge nudge” sketch (1969). So, as this chapter will argue, notions of European national stereotypes, particularly those that focussed on virility, sexual availability or openness, and liberation in the form of nudity, offered the potential to address two issues pertaining to modernity: a) to accept the government’s drive towards EEC membership and in doing so be rewarded with b) the offer of more and better sex, even if it was with one’s own wife.

The continental quilt (duvet) played on this foreignness; it was originally Scandinavian and was seen to liberate bed users from the confines of heavy and tightly tucked-in blankets,² replacing them with airiness and improved room for movement, which, as advertisers suggested, was akin to nakedness. The dialogue was one that symbolically aligned new bedding with uninhibited sex:

Being trendy, middle-class, early adopters, my family moved to “continental quilts” in the mid-1970s. It was a liberating moment for me, equalled only by my discovery of fitted sheets in my mid-twenties. No more was I forced to fiddle with a thick woolly blanket and a greasy sheet when my mum told me to “make the bed.” Instead, I just threw this enhanced bedspread, with its jaunty cover, over my bed, happy in the knowledge that this was just what groovy Scandinavians would do after a night of unbridled passion followed by a bowl of muesli.³

So, frequently represented as sexually liberated, blond, and naked, jumping from an outdoor sauna or lounging in a pine-clad solarium, notions of Scandinavian-ness, and particularly of Scandinavian women, offered the British consumer what might be considered an acceptable paradox: woman as nature (in an increasingly inauthentic or synthetic world) and woman as nymphomaniac (as in the widespread pornographic representations that flooded the UK from Copenhagen in the early 1970s). The combination of both stereotypes established the naturalness of sex, and this was solidified in the popularity of the duvet. Considered and advertised as an object that “brought the outside inside” by offering the experience of sleeping “under the stars” and without the constraints of blankets, the duvet instigated a stripped-bare appraisal of not just the bedroom but the experience of the space.

Home and Nation

Home is both a place and an idea. In its most positive form, the term speaks of and for the collective and the personal—of something solid and stable. It also speaks of the experience of being “at home,” an experience associated with belonging, safety, and comfort, which combines loosely determined ideals and experiences of what home “means.” Home is also something one “makes” and thus is also a place for personal adornment but also a site of personal responsibility, alluding to the notion that home is what “you” make it. From these potent but subjective terms, and the iconology that solidify them within the popular psyche, home becomes part of wider discourses and narratives of belonging. As Blunt and Dowling acknowledge, “Discourses about the nation as homeland are often characterised by the gendered use of domestic and familial imagery.”⁴ This implies that the domestic is a metaphor for the nation (mother/fatherland or homeland), and, as such, for the purposes of this essay, it offers the potential for political issues to be played out in a collective domestic setting, such as on TV or in other popular culture media, which are already concerned with the complexities and layered meanings of home and domestic life. In considering popular culture as a platform for the interplay between national and domestic issues, it is possible to correlate thematic similarities whilst also identifying the praxes at which traditional meets modern, public meets private, and where the boundaries surrounding gender, pleasure, and leisure become blurred. Much research here derives from popular primary sources such as women’s magazines, newspapers, and Sunday supplements, with an emphasis on product advertising in order to consider the promise of an ideal and European future encompassing the sexual openness expressed in the zeitgeist. As with show homes, for example, magazine exposés featuring the domestic interiors of the wealthy offer an insight into how domestic life might be lived/imagined based on readers’ expectations of what an “ideal” home might consist of and presumptions of how the wealthy “live.”⁵ Likewise, advertising alluding to a better sex life through purchasing bedding because it is “Continental” (Scandinavian) and has a French name (“duvet”) and is so light as to make one feel “naked” addresses both lack and want based on perception and expectation. The real and ideal are two sides of the same coin, and ...