Review: The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-century Domestic Interior, by Stefan Muthesius

Abstract

Stefan Muthesius. The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-century Domestic Interior . London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, 352 pp., 120 color and 176 b/w illus. $88, ISBN 9780500514191. The Poetic Home is a major contribution to the literature on the history of design of the domestic interior. Initially, the book’s appearance might suggest a visually driven survey. Large-format and heavily illustrated, it is a beautifully produced volume of high quality. Yet immediately on opening the work, it becomes apparent that its author has a more ambitious agenda. With its dense and detailed exegesis, The Poetic Home promises to join a growing number of standard references on the formation of the designed domestic interior for scholars of the decorative arts, architecture and design, as well as the cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, for years to come. Fueled by interests in feminist history, anthropology, material culture studies, as well as the social history of architecture and design, the domestic interior has become a hot topic for interdisciplinary scholarship over the past twenty years. In this sense, The Poetic Home adds to a field originally defined by Mario Praz (1964) and extended by Peter Thornton (1984) and Judith Neiswander (2008), among others.1 Muthesius’s study provides readers with an in-depth study of the definition, development, and, in his view, demise, of the central concept of the book: the poetic home. In the author’s words, “this book … concentrates on the design of the interior as a whole, and deals with what the designers, the makers and their spokespersons postulated themselves during the 19th century” (9). This was a period, he suggests, when “[t]hey placed a new emphasis on the textural and colour effects of fabrics, wood or metal objects as attractive in themselves, and they evolved a new, more abstract terminology of form and colour, light and dark” (9). In his important preface, Muthesius describes poetic home …