On a Saturday morning, you can see them everywhere across the land. Eyes fixed
on the middle distance, shoulders slumped, plastic bag dangling from each
hand. It is the familiar sight of Homo Sapiens in John Lewis, while Mrs
Sapiens does the shopping for soft furnishings.
Look closely and you will see she’s holding a swatch of baby-blue ticking for
his inspection.
“What do you think?” “Yes, it’s lovely, let’s get that one,” he says, his
voice drained of all emotion, his heart set on beating the traffic and
getting back in time for Football Focus.
Mrs S may be the one asking the questions, but you don’t have to be an
anthropologist to see who is making the decisions. Mr S would be perfectly
happy to floor every room with lino and paint every wall in magnolia. An
Englishman’s home may be his castle, but when it comes to the ruching and
stippling of the crenellations, it’s the Englishwoman who calls the shots.
’Twas ever thus. Or was it? A new exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, in east
London – Choosing the Chintz: Men, Women and Furnishing the Home, from 1850
to the Present – suggests otherwise.
For all his devotion to empire, rough woollen garments next to the skin and
robust heterosexuality, Victorian man was surprisingly metrosexual once he
got the other side of the portcullis. When it came to decoration, he
controlled the purse strings. After all, until the Married Woman’s Property
Acts of 1882 and 1897, married women couldn’t own property in their own
right.
Men had tremendous sway over decorating the “male” parts of the house, such as
the library, study and smoking room. And over the dining room, which was
used for all-male discussions after dinner, as well as being the place where
Victorian dad told his son off for being caught with a copy of Ankles Weekly
or Billiard Table Legs, Fully Exposed.
“I’ve never found any evidence for the legend of Victorian men covering up
table legs,” says Christine Lalumia, deputy director of the Geffrye Museum.
“But they certainly had traditional, sombre, masculine tastes when they
decorated their rooms.”
Among the objects on show is a Cowtan wallpaper book from 1860, with strips of
paper for each room in the Kent home of the Reverend Edward Moore. The
colour that the vicar chose for the dining room is a deep, velvety red – the
classic male choice, then. Indeed, picture after picture shows the
paterfamilias centre stage in the house he decorated himself, with his
family ranged behind him. The decor is classically male: that deep-red
wallpaper, packed bookshelves, walls cluttered with pictures and loads of
brown furniture.
The hard-wiring of the male mind towards collecting and cataloguing was also
catered for by the trade boom. Among the objects on show is a collector’s
cabinet, stuffed to the gills with fossils found and sorted in 1858 by a
nephew of Charles Darwin. It is only a short leap to the alphabeticised
record collection – that exclusively male habit nailed by Nick Hornby in his
1995 novel High Fidelity.
Even Oscar Wilde – who you might have thought above such conventions, for both
sexual and artistic reasons – followed male decorating patterns. When he
said on his deathbed in a Parisian hotel, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a
duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go”, it was to a light,
floral chintz that he was objecting.
Chintz had once been much valued as an Indian cotton cloth printed with flower
designs. By the time of Wilde’s death in 1900, however, it had long since
become a term of abuse for naff, girlie, floral patterns. As early as 1851,
George Eliot equated chintzy with being unbecoming.
The supposed girliness of the world of interior decoration got going only in
the 20th century. After the Representation of the People Act 1918, women
over the age of 30 were allowed to vote. By the 1930s, they had the right to
pledge their own credit.
And, as the servant class disintegrated, shopping – once the preserve of the
maid and the cook – became an increasingly respectable activity for
middle-class women, In 1851, there were 115,000 women between 15 and 20
years old in London and the suburbs, 40,000 of them in domestic service.
Between 1911 and 1921, the number of servants in the capital’s commuter belt
fell by 50%.
As a result of all this, middle-class women began to assert control over their
houses for the first time. By the 1920s, Furnishings, the leading journal
for the decorating trade, was declaring: “Woman is the purchaser of at least
90% of the furnishings for the home.”
By the end of the second world war, the transformation of the house from
Victorian male den to matriarchal warren was complete. Julie Summers writes
in her new book, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning
from the Second World War, that sales of garden sheds rocketed as 4m
demobilised men came back to an unrecognisably female home and sought
comfort behind unadorned walls of creosoted timber.
“The 1950s were the height of female domination in interior decor,” she says.
“The profession of interior decorator got going in the 1920s and 1930s. The
1950s saw the emergence of celebrity female decorators such as Nancy
Lancaster [1897-1994], the owner of Colefax and Fowler. Only later did the
men creep in, as they always do. And you even got a change of name. They
became known as interior designers – much more male and professional
sounding.”
For all the misery of our man in John Lewis, the pendulum has been swinging
back, in recent years, away from female domination. In a series of videos at
the end of the Geffrye’s show, seven couples, from those in their thirties
to those in their seventies, talk about which of them makes the decorating
decisions.
The older men confine themselves to the technical – where the stereo speakers
should go, how you get to the garage – while women dominate the
cushion-plumping front. The younger men – heads fashionably shaved,
conscious of what constitutes taste in every aspect of their lives – are
much more vocal about how their home should look.
This shared decision-making leads to houses that are neither male nor female –
the modern rooms in the videos have monochrome, boxy, simple furniture and
blank walls illuminated by uplit pools of stark, white light.
The deep-red Victorian-man walls are gone, unless you’re a barrister
decorating your chambers. Or a bit of a fogey. Going, too, is the
consciously girlie look. Take a look at the Laura Ashley catalogue these
days – there’s barely a floral motif to be seen. Its catalogue could have
been shot in a hedge-fund manager’s house in Notting Hill: spare armchairs
tightly upholstered in Damien Hirst-style dots perch on stripped floorboards
beneath staircases with no banisters, cantilevered into exposed brick walls.
Homo Sapiens has begun to shake off his shopping gloom and is preparing to
meet Mrs Sapiens halfway – in the minimalist section of the John Lewis
soft-furnishings department.
The Geffrye Museum is at 136 Kingsland Road, London E2; open Tuesday to
Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday noon-5pm. Choosing the Chintz is on until February
22, 2009; www.geffrye-museum.org.uk
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from Portcullis to Pebble-Dash is published by Little, Brown at £12.99
