Interior Design Styles, Told Through Objects

Some interior design styles are easy to name.

Others are recognised long before we know what to call them.

A curved wooden chair, a sinuous iron lamp, a geometric mirror, a moulded plastic object or a table that appears to have escaped from an unusually cheerful geometry lesson can tell us a surprising amount about when — and why — it was designed.

Objects carry the language of their time.

Materials change. Technology changes. Homes change. Ideas about beauty, comfort and modernity change with them.

And styles rarely arrive politely, wait for the previous one to leave, and then take their turn.

They overlap. They borrow. They revive older ideas. They cross borders and acquire local accents. Sometimes they are given names only after designers have already moved on to something else.

This is therefore not a dictionary of interior design styles.

It is a way of looking.

Through seven very different design languages, we can trace more than a century of changing ideas about how objects should be made, how homes should look and what, exactly, it meant to be modern.

Arts & Crafts — When Making Mattered

Our story begins with a paradox.

To understand modern design, it helps to begin with a movement that was deeply suspicious of what modern industry was producing.

The Arts & Crafts movement emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, associated particularly with figures such as William Morris and inspired by the ideas of John Ruskin.

Industrialisation had made objects cheaper and more widely available.

It had not necessarily made them better.

Arts & Crafts designers valued craftsmanship, useful objects, natural materials and the visible evidence of how something had been made. Wood was allowed to look like wood. Construction did not always need to be concealed. Decoration frequently drew on plants, flowers and traditional forms.

The movement was not simply a decorative fashion involving wallpaper, oak furniture and attractive foliage.

Behind it lay a much larger question:

What do we lose when making becomes manufacturing?

That question would never entirely disappear.

Ironically, a movement that looked back towards craftsmanship helped shape later debates about good modern design.

The machine had arrived.

Designers would spend much of the next century deciding what to do with it.

Art Nouveau — When Nature Became a Line

Around the turn of the twentieth century, nature began behaving rather differently indoors.

Stems stretched into furniture.

Flowers climbed across glass and ceramics.

Iron curled into lines that seemed to grow rather than having been manufactured.

Art Nouveau developed differently across Europe — from French and Belgian Art Nouveau to Jugendstil, Vienna Secession and Catalan Modernisme — but one of its most recognisable characteristics was its fascination with organic form.

Nature was not merely represented.

It became structure.

A lamp stem could resemble a plant. A chair back could flow like a vine.

Architecture, furniture, glass, metalwork and graphic design could all participate in the same visual language.

This was one of Art Nouveau's great ambitions: the interior as a complete artistic environment rather than a room containing unrelated decorative objects.

 

Yet its reign was relatively brief.

Those flowing lines would soon meet a formidable opponent.

Geometry.

Art Deco — When Modernity Learned to Dress Up

If Art Nouveau could grow like a plant, Art Deco preferred to arrive properly dressed.

By the 1920s and 1930s, curves had not disappeared, but geometry, symmetry and streamlined forms had acquired a new authority.

Art Deco embraced modernity without requiring it to look austere.

Polished wood, lacquer, glass, chrome, brass, mirrors and luxurious materials could coexist with machine-age imagery, stepped forms, sunbursts and sharp geometric patterns.

Even utilitarian objects, from mirrors to coat racks, could carry the same concern for geometry, proportion and polished materials.

It could be glamorous.

It could be exotic.

It could be theatrical.

And it could look thoroughly modern while still enjoying decoration enormously.

This is one reason Art Deco remains so easy to recognise — and so easy to misidentify.

A geometric pattern does not automatically make something Art Deco.

Nor does a gold finish.

Style is built from a combination of date, form, material, manufacture and context, not from one enthusiastic zigzag.

But Art Deco established something important.

Modern design did not have to choose between progress and glamour.

It could have both.

Mid-Century Modern — When Modernity Came Home

After the Second World War, modern design entered ordinary domestic life on an unprecedented scale.

New houses needed furniture.

New manufacturing techniques offered possibilities.

Designers worked with plywood, aluminium, steel, glass, fibreglass and plastics alongside traditional materials such as wood.

The broad label Mid-Century Modern now covers an enormous territory, and perhaps rather more territory than its original inhabitants would recognise.

American modernism, Scandinavian design, Italian industrial design and other post-war traditions were never identical.

But they shared an interest in forms suited to contemporary life.

Furniture became visually lighter.

Lines became cleaner.

Objects were expected to be useful without necessarily looking utilitarian.

A chair could be comfortable, mass-produced and sculptural at the same time.

A lamp could illuminate a room while looking interesting when switched off.

A mirror could acquire a corona of metal rays and suddenly require considerably more wall than mirror.

Modernity was no longer confined to manifestos, exhibitions and experimental architecture.

It had moved into the sitting room.

This search for useful, affordable and well-designed objects was also at the heart of initiatives such as MoMA's Good Design programme, which explored what good modern design might mean for everyday life in the post-war years.

Hollywood Regency — When Restraint Was Optional

Not everyone wished the sitting room to exercise restraint.

Hollywood Regency offered another version of twentieth-century modernity — one involving mirrors, lacquer, metallic finishes, dramatic contrasts, luxurious fabrics and furniture that knew perfectly well it was being looked at.

Its roots are associated with the glamorous interiors of Hollywood's Golden Age, where designers created rooms suited to people whose professional lives already depended upon spectacle.

Unlike strict modernism, Hollywood Regency was perfectly happy to borrow.

A neoclassical form might meet mirrored furniture.

Chinoiserie could share a room with brass.

An ornate frame might appear beside something sleek and modern.

The result depended less upon historical purity than upon effect.

This is also why the term is used rather generously today.

Not every gold mirror is Hollywood Regency, just as not every chair with tapered legs is Mid-Century Modern.

But the style does provide a useful reminder that twentieth-century design was never a steady march towards simplicity.

Some rooms had no intention whatsoever of becoming quieter.

Space Age — When the Future Entered the Living Room

Then the future arrived.

Or, more accurately, the version of the future imagined during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

Space exploration, new technologies and new materials transformed the visual imagination.

Plastic, once an exciting symbol of industrial possibility, could be moulded into curves and shells that traditional materials resisted.

Furniture became rounded.

Lamps resembled helmets, planets, capsules and unidentified objects that might reasonably have required clearance from mission control.

Bright colours sat beside white, chrome and transparent materials.

The domestic interior became a place in which the future could be rehearsed.

Many objects now associated with the Space Age were simply contemporary designs when they were made. Their designers were not nece ssarily trying to create a historical style called "Space Age".

That label came to describe a broader visual language.

This distinction matters.

An object belongs first to its own history.

The label comes afterwards.

And sometimes the future turned out to be something as ordinary as a plastic umbrella stand.

Postmodernism & Memphis — When Design Stopped Behaving

By the late twentieth century, modernism had accumulated rules.

Postmodern designers discovered that rules were considerably more entertaining when questioned.

Function still mattered.

But so could symbolism, decoration, historical quotation, humour and deliberate excess.

Then, in Milan in 1981, Memphis arrived.

Led by Ettore Sottsass, the Memphis group produced furniture and objects using bold colours, geometric forms, patterns and inexpensive materials in combinations that seemed almost calculated to offend anyone hoping for tasteful restraint.

A table no longer needed to look serious simply because it was a table.

A bookcase could resemble architecture, sculpture and a joke simultaneously.

Materials traditionally regarded as ordinary or even cheap could be displayed rather than disguised.

After decades in which much modern design had pursued visual purity, Memphis cheerfully invited pattern back into the room and apparently neglected to ask it to wipe its feet.

Not everyone liked it.

That was partly the point.

Seven Styles, Thousands of Rooms

Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Mid-Century Modern, Hollywood Regency, Space Age and Postmodernism do not constitute a complete history of interior design.

Far from it.

We have walked past Bauhaus, Scandinavian Modern, Pop, Brutalism and many other movements, traditions and decorative languages without properly introducing ourselves.

They will have their turn.

Nor do real interiors usually belong neatly to one category.

A room evolves.

Objects arrive at different times.

Something inherited sits beside something bought yesterday. A nineteenth-century table acquires a 1960s lamp. An Art Deco mirror finds itself above a contemporary console and, assuming mirrors have opinions, eventually learns to cope.

That is precisely why individual objects are so useful.

They give us clues.

A material suggests a technology.

A shape suggests a period.

A manufacturing mark may suggest a place.

A decorative motif may have travelled across centuries before appearing on the object in front of us.

Learning the names of styles helps us notice those clues.

It gives us vocabulary.

But vocabulary should help us look more carefully, not encourage us to force every object into the nearest available category.

Because an object can belong to a period without perfectly representing it.

It can borrow from an earlier language.

It can anticipate what comes next.

And occasionally it can refuse our labels altogether.

Style is a clue, not a cage.