1 The interwar house: ideal homes and domestic design
2 Suburban: class, gender and homeownership
3 Modernisms: ‘good’ design and ‘bad’ design
4 Efficiency: labour-saving and the professional housewife
5 Nostalgia: the Tudorbethan semi and the detritus of empire
6 Afterword: modernising the interwar ideal home
Index
Deborah Sugg Ryan is Professor of Design History and Theory, and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth. She is also a contributor for BBC2's A House Through Time.
‘A fascinating book, dealing with a range of themes, including
class, gender, empire, taste, good design, efficiency and
nostalgia, which are linked to the idea of ‘suburban modernity’ in
Britain and its material manifestations in suburban houses and
their interiors. Sugg Ryan succeeds in evoking the material culture
of a past era which, in certain ways, resonates strongly with our
own.’
Professor Penny Sparke, Kingston University
‘Ideal Homes is a superb evocation of interwar living as expressed
in its homes and furnishings. Deborah Sugg Ryan’s new book
skilfully interweaves social and design history and beautifully
melds the academic and personal. Her exploration of ‘suburban
modernity’ and its idiosyncratic blend of tradition and novelty,
home and Empire, challenges the intellectual condescension of
critics to find meaning and value in the lived experience of
consumers and the messy, sometimes contradictory, choices they
made. Along the way, it charts both the apparently rigid boundaries
of gender and seemingly more fluid divisions of class. It’s that
rare thing – a book that will appeal to academic specialists and
the general reader.’
John Boughton - independent scholar and author of Municipal Dreams
(2018)
‘The long-running Studies in Design and Material Culture series
focuses on the history of design and material culture in Britain
between the two world wars. Grounding her discussion in the
discipline of design history, Ryan (University of Portsmouth, UK)
explores the aspirations and tastes of new suburban communities in
England during the interwar period. Four individual stories of home
ownership and homemaking reveal different aspects of emotional
investment in domestic design and the drive for individuality. The
author investigates how the design and decoration of these domestic
spaces forged gender identities and a new suburban class. The book
builds off the author’s extensive doctoral research on Britain's
annual Ideal Home Exhibitions, a show begun in 1908 by the Daily
Mail and sponsored by it for a century. Plenty of contemporaneous
photographs and drawings sprinkled throughout the volume clarify
and reinforce the text.’
R. P. Meden, Marymount University, CHOICE, Vol. 56, No. 4 (December
2018)
‘Deborah Sugg Ryan’s book makes an important contribution to the
history of design as it was experienced by lower-middle-class and
middle-class consumers in Great Britain in between the two World
Wars. Weaving a narrative out of such varied sources as the Daily
Mail’s Ideal Home exhibitions, period advertisements for new
housing developments, women’s domestic advice literature, and the
individual histories captured in the Mass Observation Archive, she
presents a history of the architectural style and interior design
practices of new suburban developments in the 1920s and 1930s […]
Sugg Ryan’s book makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the complexities of Modernism in interwar Britain.
She reminds us to study objects and architectural designs that fall
outside of the canon of Modernism and asks us to reconsider how we
actually define Modernism.’
Kristina Wilson, Journal of Design History (2019)
‘Deborah Sugg Ryan’s book begins with the personal and then
develops into a fascinating and detailed study of housing design
and the meanings of home in interwar Britain. These interesting
intersections between the subjective, design history and a social
history of the home makes for a gratifyingly fresh take on the
history of housing design and domesticity during the years 1918 to
1939. Adopting this original approach readers are introduced to the
world of the interwar house by Sugg Ryan as she reflects back on
the house she purchased and moved into in 1995, no. 17 Rosamund
Road, Wolvercote, Oxford […]The book is well written, convincingly
argued and successfully merges design history, social and gender
history in what is undoubtedly an important new contribution to
twentieth-century British history.’
Dr Caitríona Beaumont, London South Bank University, Cercles: Revue
pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone
‘[Deborah Sugg Ryan’s] new book covers the type of content and
arguments rarely seen in publications on modern design history: the
invisibility of certain styles, their potential for inclusion and a
commensurate re-evaluation of significance[.] Keeping ordinary
people’s histories, rather than heroic architects’ and designers’,
at the heart of her work distinguishes this book from others. The
findings are shaped by primary sources, rather than locating
examples to fit “predetermined theories of Modernism and
modernity”, allowing the importance of home ownership, decoration
and social standing to determine the outcomes. This book succeeds
in contesting the exclusion zones design history has placed on what
Kjetil Fallan, an academic leader in the discipline, calls “the
vast masses of modern material culture not conforming to the
modernist ethos”, with Sugg Ryan calling the field to account in
its pursuit of the endorsement of the Modernist Movement alone,
with the exceptions escaping these narrow parameters few and
recent. When the author refers to multiple modernisms that are
inclusive of interwar ‘medieval modernism’, ‘liveable modernism’
and ‘amusing styles’, you can be sure this book is going to open
the reader to entirely new and unconstrained ways of thinking about
suburban interior decoration.’
Catriona Quinn, Parlour: Women, Equity, Architecture
‘Sugg Ryan’s deep knowledge of the history of inter-war domestic
design brings us some fascinating detail on the genealogy of the
key objects used by residents to signal their knowledge and
appreciation of modernism’.
The English Historical Review
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