With contributors drawn from a broad range of disciplines, The Modern Period Room brings together a carefully selected collection of essays to consider the interiors of the modern era and their more recent reconstructions from a variety of different viewpoints.

Contributions from leading design historians, architects and curators of the history of the domestic interior in the UK engage with the issues and conventions surrounding the modern period room to expose the conflicting tensions that lie beneath the conceptual and physical strategy of the modern period room's...

Today s home is filled with pieces from Pottery Barn, IKEA, and Crate & Barrel, and we pore over glossy catalogs in hopes of achieving the modern interior. This idealized aesthetic is the subject of Penny Sparke s study, as she explores the style in both its absolute form and the diverse decorating approaches seen in the contemporary home.
The shift from Victorian to modern style, The Modern Interior reveals, was not as simple and smooth as it is often perceived and the book probes the complicated history behind that transition. Sparke examines the work of such designers as Marcel...

Through a series of case studies from the mid-eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, this collection of essays considers the historical insights that ethno/auto/biographical investigations into the lives of individuals, groups and interiors can offer design and architectural historians. Established scholars and emerging researchers shed light on the methodological issues that arise from the use of these sources to explore the history of the interior as a site in which everyday life is experienced and performed, and the ways in which contemporary architects and interior designers...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2010. Designing the Modern Interior reveals how the design of the inside spaces of our homes and public buildings is shaped by and shapes our modern culture. The modern interior has often been narrowly defined by the minimalist work of elite, reforming architects. But a shared modernising impulse, expressed in interior design, extends at least as far back as the Victorians and reaches to our own time. And this spirit of modernisation manifested itself in interiors, designed both by professionals and by amateurs, which did not necessarily look modern...