A History of the Interior 002

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A HISTORY HISTORY OF OF A THE INTERIOR INTERIOR THE

Elsie De Wolfe, also known as Lady Mendl ( 1859 - 1950 ) was an American actress and is widely credited with having invented the Interior Decoration profession.

Arriving home from school one day, the young Elsie found her parents had redecorated the drawing room.

She ran in and looked at the walls, all freshly papered in a William Morris design of grey palm-leaves with splotches of bright red and green on a background of dull tan. Something cut like a knife inside of her.

She threw herself on the floor, kicking with stiffened legs, as she beat her hands on the carpet. She cried out, over and over, “It’s so ugly!! It’s so ugly!!”

In her autobiography, Elsie de Wolfe called herself a “rebel in an ugly world.” Elsie (1859-1950) was an American actress and is widely credited with having invented the interior decoration profession.

She was a significant personality on the American cultural landscape, designing and decorating homes for royalty, celebrities and prominent industrialists of the time. A visible social figure and theatre personality, she entertained in the highest circles and also was the nominal author of the influential 1913 book The House in Good Taste. On stage, she became, according to one critic “the leading exponent of the peculiar art of wearing good clothes well.”

Through her design practice, she transformed the interiors of her wealthy clients from dark wooded, heavily curtained palaces into light, intimate spaces featuring fresh colours.

De Wolfe’s inspiration came from 18th-century French art, literature, theatre, and fashion. Her light, breezy, airy style was a huge departure from the gloomy over-crowded rooms of the Victorian era, and caused a huge sensation amongst her friends and visitors, translating to large, lucrative commissions.

As de Wolfe claimed: “I opened the doors and windows of America, and let the air and sunshine in.”

Elsie De Wolfe may have been the first to kick off the celebritysocialite designer stereotype for the rich and famous.

She created a very real escape through her work, allowing her influences of France to shape an exit to a magical world of swirling culture, far away from the oppressive confines of the city. Her particular brand of escape found many patrons, and a large group of influential people who clamoured to buy into her vision.

Elsie’s visceral reaction to the William Morris aesthetic that was thrust upon her, that so disturbed her inner aesthete, is a recurring theme in the stereotype of the celebrity designer.

This trope recurs in various portraits of the profession, even inspiring SNL shows like the Fake Home Tour.

Elsie Wolfe gifted to Interior Design one of it’s deepest anxieties of self-image.

In this farcical world, the colour, material and texture obsessed designer exists in a make-believe world of their own design, oblivious to outside realities.

The unwavering focus on aesthetic obscures any larger inquiries of sustainability, craft or even ethics.

By side-stepping context and any larger forces at play, interior designers create wholly insulated, other worlds to inhabit.

The entire professional act becomes one of crafting alternate realities, with ethereal and sublime proportions, softly faded colours that create dream-like rooms, replete with magical floating orbs of glass and brass that are almost cherubic in their presence.

Perfectly matched colours mirror Perfectly symmetrical arrangements.

We congratulate each other when the escape is complete, so not even a sliver of reality can be let in.

This escape becomes even more critical in our modern world, where the multiple hostilities of degrading city environments, self-similar apartments, depleted public spaces and the dangling swords of pandemics and climate change birth a dystopic world just outside of our main doors.

Elsie’s rebellion against the dark gloom of her predecessors is mirrored in our profession today, where the job of the interior decorator is often to rectify the failings of urban planners and architects.

Even the well-heeled populace lives in self-similar concrete cubicles stacked one above the other, usually fairly compromised in terms of light, ventilation, views, elevator access, public open space and totally devoid off memory and context. 35% of our population is already urbanised, and almost 88 million Indians will live in urban homes by 2050. All our cities will see a further rise in the population in the next fifteen years. If our current cities are to be any indicator, the metrics for quality of life in urban centres is a massive area of concern. Bombay offers it’s citizens a paltry 1.1 sq.mtr of public open space per capita.

The statistics get more and more depressing as one delves deeper.

Interior design comes to the rescue with its magic wand. We use all the tools at our disposal to escape this dismal context.

Our completely fabricated shells of memories are potent time travel portals.

They take us back to our childhoods, our favourite travel destinations, our shared nostalgia dripping memories with our grandparents.

How many interiors recreate memories of a vacation to a tropical beach? How many of us dearly hang on to our priceless Heirloom pieces, lovingly and stubbornly refusing to let their impracticalities cast them out of our matchbox homes?

Our homes simulate the perfect escape, to Bali and Sri Lanka, to mid- century America and 14th century France, to our homevillages in Kerala and Kashmir, through the colours and textures we create to populate our walls.

So what are Nostalgia and Escape really about ?

Derived from the Greek words Nostos (or homecoming) and Algos (meaning pain/ ache), Nostalgia was once thought to be a diagnosable disease. It made soldiers unable to fight, and inflicted them with a deep melancholia, an irresistible longing for home.

New findings in Neuroscience paint an even more exciting, more nuanced picture. We actually experience a dopamine rush when our brains encounter certain Nostalgic memories. This dopamine deposit on the hippocampus in turn creates a very high resolution memory, making the recollection even more vivid and potent.

Nostalgia is a constant reward system, uplifting us by reliving our pasts.

We’re literally rewarding ourselves neurologically every time we drift down memory lane.

In a shared context, Nostalgia deepens connections within our brains and helps us excavate old memories, to relish and relive.

Shared Nostalgia brings families closer, uniting the home and creating more positive visions of the Future. There’s a potent neurological reason that Heirloom furniture, old family pictures on the wall, homes designed to invoke memories of memorable travels and a wall of collected artefacts, all resonate so deeply with our ideas of home.

Then what of new connections?

Why do so many of our interior design urges stem from travel? Is it just nostalgia, or is there something else going on?

Pick up any one of a dozen lifestyle, culture, design or architecture publications, and try to spot the number of projects that have their root in memories of another place or time. Travel and an escape from the present are deeply rooted in our life experience, and Interior Design responds to this urge like a moth to a flame.

Strangely enough, the idea that life experiences can affect our brains is fairly recent. We believed till quite recently that only genes determined intellect, and any neural potential was inherited through genes. What you were born with, is what you had.

New developments in neuroscience now emphatically state that the brain is ‘plastic’ and capable of great feats of adaptation and change.

One of the great contributors to Neuroplasticity is travel.

Your brain literally gorges itself on new experiences, new locations and new stimulus to create new dendritic connections.

When you’re walking through a museum looking at Renaissance masters you’re stimulating your frontal lobe. When you inhale the hot acrid grains of the desert at night you’re stimulating your olfactory cortex, when you taste new food your gustatory cortex goes into overdrive.

Your Wernicke’s area is lighting up when you’re struggling to order food in a foreign country. Your motor cortex is computing furiously when you’re exploring the hill behind your vacation rental. Your parietal lobe is buzzing when you’re trying to map your way around a new precinct.

And of course, your visual cortex is soaking in the sunset reflected in the glass of Merlot.

The perfection of that moment is already being hard-wired into your brain as a Nostalgic fragment, ready to access when you have a sip of the same wine two years later.

Genuine Homes Make Genuine People

When Elsie De Wolfe created adaptations of her influences from France in the living rooms of New York, she was channeling potent neuroscience.

Her rejection of the Victorian style was a rejection of the memories of her own sad childhood. She at once created a Nostalgia for another land, a world of fantasy and escape, wonder and magic.

We do the same when we create our homes around our own personal Nostalgia and Escape.

Our home environments and our neurochemistry are intricately tied up, it’s why we must be extremely particular about what we surround ourselves with.

A Genuine home can be almost therapeutic, it’s deep intelligence teasing out potent neurology from the every-day act of inhabiting it.

These homes subscribe to a strong autobiography, and less to the prevailing trend of the day, or colour of the year.

Genuine homes look inward and outward simultaneously to find stories that resonate with it’s inhabitants, and maybe our own neurology can offer us clues to navigate this exciting territory.

Homes could be whimsical, impractical, surreal even, but what makes them satisfying it that they are autobiographical. What serves our interests better creating meticulously curated autobiographical cocoons of memories, or store-bought mass produced copies of copies, however highly priced those copies may be?

In the emerging visions of future cities we’re seeing around us, our Homes must perform this deeply restorative and critically relevant function, that of keeping us neurally aware and connected.

We must develop our own personal understanding of what fascinates us, what we collect, and what we bring back home from our travels.

We must create a nuanced acceptance of what those objects mean to us, and a deep respect for these objects that transcend space and time. These objects invoke in us a sense of continued wonder and respect, while taking us back to that particular place in time.

We simultaneously create new associations and connections through travel, but look further within our own Nostalgic pasts to rediscover our own selves. Our brains are simultaneously expanding and deepening with each travel, both internal and external.

Each of these journeys is deeply personal, deeply autobiographical.

Interior designers then partner with clients on these sojourns, helping tease out insights, and creating homes that will make us more connected and aware of our own journeys.