Interior design: modern or comfortable, but not both?

I like looking at pictures of people at home. There's something quite comfortable about domestic interiors, especially if they are from the past. In contrast, modern art is often controversial: you might argue about Tracy Emin, but nobody gets too het up about Van Eyck. Art that happened several centuries ago is somehow safer, and perhaps even taken for granted by the majority of people. You don't often hear the cry "it's not art" for paintings over a hundred years old. Some of the controversy appears to have arrived with the concept modern; at at some time in the 19th century, art starts to be modern (or perhaps more precisely, to think of itself as modern). How much grief has that simple word “modern” caused! Baudelaire was one of the first to use the term, even if he picked the wrong man to describe as modern (Constantine Guys, all but forgotten today). 

Like many terms, "modern" has several implications and shades of meaning around it. It doesn't just mean contemporary; if you believe Mr Rybczynski (and many others share this idea), “modern” in architecture and design is in many ways the opposite of “comfort”. A modern chair is not comfortable; it’s not even supposed to be comfortable. At least, that’s what some people would have us believe.

Rather surprisingly, Peter Thornton (in Authentic Décor, 1984) seems to share this opinion, albeit in a rather less overt fashion. Only those dedicated readers who have battled their way through the small print describing each of his chosen 50-year periods in the history of interior design (each introduction a compressed yet tantalizing overview), will notice the following passage, slipped in between discussions of minutiae such as the length of curtains, the position of chairs in a room and the distinction between Louise Quinze and Louis Seize style (not much, in case you are interested). The passage occurs in one of Thornton's introductions to the modern period, 1870 to 1920, in which he writes of the “main tradition”, the mainstream of design in this period, against which Morris and the Bauhaus reacted. During this period,

delightful, extremely comfortable, and in no way despicable interiors were created in this widely accepted mode right into the 1920s. The reason for their having received so little attention from the historians is presumably that they could not be seen as paving the way towards the Modern Movement. Failing a test of progressiveness, such interiors were good for a sneer or a scoffing remark… Now in the 1980s when the Modern Movement itself is coming to be judged more critically, it may well be that a rather more balanced assessment of the alternatives will emerge.

This is remarkable. It suggests nothing less than a revisionist view of much of 20th-century art history, primarily Nikolaus Pevsner, if you accept David Watkin’s view of the Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), which Watkin describes as “an attempt to persuade the English to accept the Modern Movement as the only style in which a modern man ought to express himself.”  That explains why all those poor schoolchildren suffered in the glass panels of modern school design, such as Hunstanton Secondary School (by Alison and Peter Smithson, 1954, one of the early examples of Brutalist architecture in Britain). 

Perhaps Thornton’s implication is that modernism and comfort are mutually incompatible goals; in the 20th century you can be comfortable, or you can be stylish, but not both, Thornton seems to imply. This seems rather simplistic, given that his book describes three hundred years of people wilfully choosing the uncomfortable option. For them, “stylish” and “comfortable” were certainly not considered in the same breath. One astonishing image from Thornton’s Authentic Décor shows a new build of a medieval hall, the very example of uncomfortable and unsuitable architecture that most people were reacting away from. The image shows Shiplake Hall, completed in 1890 to look like a medieval hall that had been adapted to use in the 19th-century.

Can you be modern and comfortable? You wouldn’t think so from Authentic Décor, yet Jim Ede, at Kettle’s Yard, seemed to manage it quite effectively. Is that a lesson for us?