Buy essay on “INTIMUS: Interior Design Theory Reader”(2006) by Julieanna Preston and Mark Taylor

“INTIMUS: Interior Design Theory Reader”(2006) is the book co-edited by Julieanna Preston and Mark Taylor, which consists of the short essays about the interior design. General task of the book is to introduce the theory of interior design as the intellectual and spatial practice. Many essays in the book relate to the culture of gender and its reflection on the interior fashion.
Thus, Juliet Kinchin cites the suffragette Francis Power Cobbe, which compared woman’s home with the shell to mollusk and calyx to flower, and concludes that “women, their clothes, their homes, their morality seemed to merge interchangeably with the natural.”(21)
Not so long ago, in the 19th century, woman dressed her home as she dressed herself. In “Hi Honey, I’m Home” the author claims that “public decoration were expected to challenge the mind and provoke thought, the décor of the home was indented to calm, rather than excite, the mind and nerves of the city dwellers”(117).
“The Curtain Wars” by Joel Sanders is started with the discussion of the balance on interior and architecture, the external and internal house design. Within the discussion Sanders touches upon many problem including social anxieties about gender and sexuality.
George Wagner in “The Lair of the Bachelor” views the “bachelor pad” as a male fantasy. His fantastical description of a manly space is a kind of reaction on the earlier social and cultural developments.
Beverly Gordon in “Woman’s Domestic Body” discusses the interior decoration as the reflection of a woman, and correspondently the woman as a reflection of the home.
Speaking about the things that rooms can tell us, we can mention that the room interior reflects the personality of its owner, for example, traditional furniture symbolizes the respect to ideas of past, and bright colors tells that the owner is cheerful, bold person. However we don’t agree that every room has to have the gender aspect of design, like special colors or furniture style, because room interior can reflect the gender of the owner, but it mustn’t.
Pat Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object, New York, St Martins Press, 1996
Gordon, Beverly. 1996. “Women’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age.” Winterthur Portfolio. Vol 31, No. 4: 281-301.
Wagner, George. “The Lair of the Bachelor” in Architecture and Feminism, ed Debra
Coleman et al, 183-220.