The senses in interior design examines how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilised within various forms of interiors. The chapters explore how the body navigates and negotiates the realities of designed interiors and challenge the traditional focus on star designers or ideal interiors that have left sensorial agency at the margins of design history. From the sensually gendered role of the fireplace in late sixteenth century Italy to the synaesthetic décors of Comte Robert de Montesquiou and the sensorial stimuli of Aesop stores, each chapter brings a new perspective on the central role that the senses have played in the conception, experiences and uses of interiors. -- .
Introduction: sensorial interactions: interior design through the five
senses Marie-Čve Marchand
Part I: Sensory politics
1 Heated bodies: fireplaces and the senses in the early modern Italian
domestic interior Erin J. Campbell
2 Sensitive design: Robert de Montesquious sensorial installations and its
condemnation Benoit Beaulieu
3 Re-assessing Pierre Legrains Black Deco: sensual luxury, primitivism
and the French bourgeois interior John Potvin
4 Brother and I in bed: queer photography at home in New York, 192535
Alice T. Friedman
5 Conquering the home front: Nazi propaganda and sensory experiences in the
German domestic interior 193345 Serena Newmark
Part II: Aesthetic entanglements
6 Into the sensorium: scenes from the dressing room Louisa Iarocci
7 Site-reading: placing the piano in middle-class homes, 18901930 Michael
Windover and James Deaville
8 The Herrenzimmer: masculinity, the senses and interior design in
turn-of-twentieth-century Germany Änne Söll
9 Hands at home? Textures, tactility and touch in interior design Grace
Lees-Maffei
Part III: Sensual economies
10 Forging foam at the 1925 Paris Exhibition Claire I. R. OMahony
11 The stimulating atmosphere of the English public house, c. 194575
Fiona Fisher
12 Interiorising the senses David Howes
13 Sensorial worlds and atmospheric scenes in Terence Conrans The House
Book Ben Highmore
14 Aesops sensory experience D. J. Huppatz
Index -- .
John Potvin is a Professor of Art History at Concordia University Marie-Čve Marchand is an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Art History at Concordia University Benoit Beaulieu is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Concordia University -- .
