902 19 THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR: TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOME DOREEN YARWOOD SURFACE, COVERINGS AND DECORATION Walls Before the late thirteenth century the inside surfaces of the walls of a well-to-do home were usually thinly plastered over the stone or timber-framed structure (see Chapter 18). For decoration this plaster was then painted in patterns or scenes. For warmth in the winter months, hangings of wool or richer fabrics were affixed: in wealthy households tapestries replaced hangings. The practice of lining interior walls with wood dates from the thirteenth century. Such a lining was not panelling but made of boards fixed vertically, tongued and grooved to give a flat face to the interior of the room. The preferred wood was wainscot, a medieval term for a high quality oak grown along the Baltic coastal plain from Holland to Russia. The term is believed to derive from ‘wain’, an early form of wagon for which the wood was also used. Before long wainscoting came to refer to any type of wood wall lining. The next stage was panel-and-frame construction, a system of joined framed panelling which was developed in Flanders and Germany and introduced into England in the fifteenth century: it was an important technical advance. The thin wood panels were tapered on all four sides to fit into grooves made in the framework of thicker horizontal and vertical members which were mortised and tenoned together, then fastened with wood pegs. This method of wood covering, made by a craftsman joiner, was more satisfactory than the earlier one as it allowed space for contraction and expansion in the atmosphere and so maintained its form. Early panels were decorated by painting. From about THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR 903 1485 linenfold panelling, carved to represent folded material, was introduced and this was replaced by the mid-sixteenth century with a more varied form of carved decoration or one made by inlays of coloured woods. Paper wall hangings—wallpaper—were first made as a cheaper substitute for the patterned tapestries and embossed leather hangings which lined the walls of wealthy homes. These papers were in small squares or rectangles, often applied to the wood panelling. With the development of printing (see Chapter 14) wood blocks were made to print designs, at first in black on white paper, with the colour being painted in afterwards by hand. Later, several blocks were used to print in different colours. The earliest example found in England of such patterned papers is dated 1509: it is printed on the back of a bill proclaiming the accession of Henry VIII. In France in the 1620s the idea of flock wallpaper was introduced in order to create a cheaper imitation of the costly Italian cut velvet hangings. The wall- paper was printed in a pattern with wood blocks which applied gum instead of coloured ink. While this was wet finely chopped coloured wool (and later silk) was blown on to the surface using a small pair of bellows. Also in France, in the 1760s, wallpaper was first made in long strips by pasting sheets 12 by 16 in (30.5×40.5cm) together before printing; this gave a roll 12 in wide by 32 ft long (30.5×975cm). Imported hand-painted Chinese papers were available, at high cost, to European households from the early seventeenth century. These were prized and very popular as they blended with the then fashionable oriental porcelain and lacquered furniture which was also being imported. European imitations of these Chinese papers followed later. Paper in continuous rolls was produced in France from 1799, but mechanization of wallpaper printing had to wait until the nineteenth century. Patents were being taken out by the 1830s for machines; these were not very satisfactory, but after about 1845 improved designs were able to produce papers which gradually replaced hand-printed ones. Before this time, the costly flock and Chinese papers had been protected from damp and dirt by being mounted on wood frames backed by fabric. The cheaper machine-printed wallpaper rolls could be pasted to the wall and replaced when they became dirty. Ceilings and walls During the Middle Ages the principal rooms in secular buildings were roofed with open timber trusses, (see Chapter 18). By the later fifteenth century it became more usual to ceil interiors. Such flat ceilings were supported by carved, moulded beams crossing one another at right angles, the interstices being infilled by boards or plaster. From the mid- sixteenth century onwards ceilings and friezes were decoratively plastered all PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 904 over, the ornamental forms changing over the centuries and reflecting the evolution of style from strapwork to Renaissance, baroque and rococo designs. During the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries walls were also often decoratively plastered. Mediaeval plaster was made from lime, sand and water mixed with various other ingredients which, it had been empirically discovered, helped to bind the mixture and prevent cracking: these included dung, blood, feathers, straw and animal hair. The best and finest plaster of the early thirteenth century was plaster of Paris, so called because it was made by using gypsum (calcium sulphate), the chief source of which was then in Montmartre in Paris. Before long other sources of supply were discovered in Europe, but the name survived. In the late sixteenth century the ceilings of important Western European interiors became ornately decorative thanks to the introduction into northern Europe of the stucco duro developed by the craftsmen of fifteenth-century Renaissance Italy. These craftsmen had experimented with a plaster which had been used by the Romans (see Chapter 18); this contained lime, some gypsum but also powdered marble. It was malleable and fine yet set slowly—giving time to work the design—and finally very hard. During the neo-classical period of the later eighteenth century, when plasterwork designs were especially delicate and detailed, a number of patent plasters were marketed which were finer and set harder. By the end of the century, with advancing industrialization, plaster mouldings and ornament were beginning to be manufactured by mass production methods so that the builder could apply these ready-made to his ceilings, friezes and walls. Plasterboard came into use in the early 1920s as a result of a shortage of plasterers after the First World War. It was manufactured in panels which consisted of a layer of gypsum plaster sandwiched between sheets of strong paper. The post-Second World War product was much improved. It could be applied directly to brick and concrete surfaces, its joins were imperceptible and a backing of aluminium foil was added to improve thermal insulation. Plasterboard was later superseded by plastic tiling. Floors Until the later nineteenth century floor surfaces on the ground storey were covered by stone flags, bricks or tiles, mosaic, polished wood boards or blocks; upstairs floors were usually of wood. Bricks and tiles were in use from very early times in Europe, the tiles being fired to be harder and smoother than bricks. Roman floor bricks were rectangular, smaller and thicker than their walling bricks and were fired to be more like modern tiles than bricks. Encaustic tiles were widely used for both floors and walls in the Middle Ages, and their use revived in the nineteenth century; they were made of THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR 905 earthenware into which coloured clays had been pressed to make a design before glazing and firing. The craft of lining floors and walls with mosaic is much the same today as it was in the days of ancient Rome. The mosaicist designs his picture then recreates it in tiny cubes of ceramic, stone, marble or glass which are laid upon a mortar base. The top surface of the cubes is painted in colours and, if earthenware, glazed. The cracks between the cubes are filled with a grouting compound. Wood floors were most commonly of planks, very wide in earlier times and of hardwood, generally oak. Quality wood floors might be of parquet, that is, covered by thin pieces of hardwood laid in patterns, most commonly herringbone. Linoleum was the first of the successful easy-care floor coverings which could be washed or polished: it represented a great breakthrough in alleviating the drudgery of floor scrubbing. The Englishman Frederick Walton set up the first factory to make linoleum in 1864 at Staines in Surrey. A base of burlap was coated with a cement which he made from linseed oil, gum and resin with the addition of colour pigments as desired. Linoleum was made in rolls; it continued to be manufactured until replaced soon after 1950 by synthetic plastic coverings (see pp. 906 and 947). The making of carpets and rugs by flat weaving and, later, by knotting, dates from the early centuries AD in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East. The Moors introduced the craft into Spain where beautiful carpets were made by the thirteenth century. In England the ladies of a household were stitching small carpets from about 1575. These were of cross-stitch or embroidered needlework designs worked on a frame on a canvas ground. Both these and the imported carpets from Persia and Turkey were considered to be too valuable to place on the floor and were used as wall or furniture decoration. The French tapestry workshops such as Gobelins had been established during the seventeenth century. From these developed the carpet workshops of Savonnerie and Aubusson which made woven carpets of, at first, oriental design but which later reflected European art forms. After 1685 many of the Huguenot carpet weavers fled to England to escape religious persecution and set up their craft under royal patronage. During the following century manufacturers such as Wilton, Axminster and Kidderminster became renowned for their carpet production. The steam-powered carpet loom, devised in the USA in 1839 by Erastus B. Bigelow, was a great advance. At first the machine would produce only flat- weave carpets but soon it was adapted to make a Brussels type of pile. By mid- century the Jacquard attachment was incorporated into machines for patterned carpet weaving (see Chapter 17). Before long the use of the steam loom was extended to the Wilton type of cut pile, the loops of the pile being raised by PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 906 one set of wires while another set with knife-blade attachment was incorporated to cut the pile. Later the power loom was able to produce cheaper ‘tapestry’ carpets and, using two looms, chenille carpets. Hand-made tufted carpets, based upon the idea of candlewick bedspreads, were pioneered in the USA soon after 1900. In the 1920s sewing machines were being adapted to make tufted fabrics but it was about 1950 before a suitable machine was designed to produce tufted carpets in volume. In modern tufted carpet production the tufts are held in position by a latex coating and the carpet is backed by a polyurethane layer. From about the 1950s also synthetic fibres were beginning to challenge wool as the prime carpet material. Facing materials A patent for plywood was taken out as early as 1840. Early plywood was cut by saw and the thin sheets glued together, each layer being placed so that the grain ran at right angles to that of the previous one. The development of efficient knife-cutting machines, which have the advantage of being able to cut round a log and so produce a continuous layer, also the introduction after 1945 of synthetic resins, have made possible cheaper, stronger plywood. Particle board is another modern product, made from chips and shreds of wood compressed with synthetic resin. In 1913 a method was found in the USA to make a laminated plastic sheet and by the 1930s decorative plastic laminates were being manufactured, although it was not until after 1945 that these were developed as a tough, attractively-patterned, easy-care finish suited especially for bathroom and kitchen surfaces. The best-known name in these veneers, which are applied to all kinds of core materials, such as wood or particle board, is Formica laminate. This veneer, 1.5mm (0.059 in) in thickness, consists of seven layers of paper impregnated with phenolic resin, on top of which is a patterned sheet of paper impregnated with melamine resin and a further overlay sheet of alpha cellulose paper similarly treated. The whole laminate ‘sandwich’ is bonded chemically under controlled heat and pressure into a single veneer. FURNISHINGS AND FURNITURE Before the sixteenth century the home was furnished with few fabric coverings and these were mainly made at home or locally by the simple textile processes of the day; similarly, the fabric most often used was that produced nationally— in Britain, wool. The richer materials of silk, velvet and brocade were costly imports. In Britain only the larger homes had window glass, the window THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR 907 openings generally being fitted with wooden shutters which were closed at night and to exclude very cold air. By the mid-sixteenth century window hangings were becoming fashionable, and during the following century they were being made from rich, patterned fabrics and fitted with pelmets or frills. Seating furniture was covered by similar fabrics or by home-stitched tapestry work which was edged with fringe or tassels. The mechanization of all the textile processes, which was initiated early during the Industrial Revolution, especially in England, brought cheaper furnishing materials within reach of many homes. Such fabrics were used for covering many kinds of furniture and for draping bedsteads, windows, doorways and, in the nineteenth century, even chimney-pieces. The introduction of the sewing machine, which became an essential item in many households by the second half of the century, encouraged home furnishings. In the same period colour schemes were greatly influenced by the availability of aniline dyes which made strong, vivid colours popular for fabrics as well as wallpapers. Upholstered furniture appeared soon after 1600; before this cushions were used to soften hard seats while bedsteads possessed a wood-board or ropemesh foundation upon which were piled one or two feather beds. Seventeenth-century upholstered chair seats comprised simply the cushion encased in the covering material and were padded with feathers, wool, horsehair, down or rags. Springs were available in the eighteenth century but they were used for carriages, not furniture. In 1826, Samuel Pratt patented a spiral spring intended to make a swinging seat to be used on board ship to counteract seasickness. Soon he appreciated its possibilities for furniture and the spiral spring began to be incorporated into chair and sofa design. Such seating furniture became very bulky because of having to accommodate the springs inside a great thickness of horsehair and feather stuffing. The French confortable easy chair was typical. In 1865 the woven wire mattress for beds, supported on spiral springs, was patented. In more modern times new materials have replaced the sprung and stuffed upholstery with a simpler, more comfortable, cheaper and more hygienic upholstered form. This is based upon plastic foam material used for cushions and seat backs; it is supported on rubber webbing or cable springing. Mattresses vary in softness and resilience according to taste and utilize combinations of sprung, padded and suspension systems. Furniture-making The most far-reaching changes in the technology and consequent style of cabinet-making were brought about by the late medieval introduction of panel- and-frame construction (which was applied to furniture as well as wall PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 908 panelling, see p. 902), the development of veneering in the seventeenth century, the progress of mechanization in the nineteenth century and the introduction of new materials and techniques in more modern times. Until about 1660 oak was the chief furniture wood. It was used both solid and panelled and was decorated by carving, painting and inlay of coloured woods or other materials such as ivory. In the craft of inlay these materials are deeply recessed into the solid piece of furniture; it differs from marquetry, which is applied as a thin veneer. The age of oak was followed by the age of walnut, a wood which lent itself to a more delicate style and one which, being more costly and available in smaller quantity, was especially suited to veneering. This is a cabinet-making technique where thin sheets of decorative high quality word are glued to the flush surface of a carcase of cheaper wood. The art of veneer is old: it was practised in ancient Egypt and by the Romans. The idea of so decorating furniture was revived with Italian Renaissance inlay (intarsio). The craft was then developed in France and the Low Countries and in the later seventeenth century the Huguenot refugees brought it to England. It was during the nineteenth century that some poor quality workmanship gave rise to the word ‘veneer’ becoming synonymous with the veiling of a shoddy article with something finer. Veneering is a highly skilled craft and, by cutting different parts of a tree, beautiful patterns may be obtained. Walnut is particularly suited for this, the ‘oyster’ designs coming from small branches cut laterally and the ‘burr’ veneers from malformations of the tree. Other woods, such as maple, olive, laburnum and kingwood, were also used. By the early eighteenth century the technique had so advanced that it was possible to saw fine woods to a thickness of 1.5mm (0.059 in) and glue large sections to the carcase. Veneering then gave place to marquetry. In this, different woods of varied colour and pattern are cut into thin layers and made up to fit into a design which is then married into the ground veneer and the whole marquetry panel is then applied to the piece of furniture. Floral, arabesque and geometrical patterns were used. Particularly elaborate designs also incorporated metals, ivory, mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell; the French cabinet-maker André Charles Boulle made this form of marquetry internationally known. From the 1720s mahogany—the most famous of all furniture woods—was increasingly imported into Europe and America from the West Indies. This is a wood superbly suited to carving and caused veneered furniture to go out of fashion, although it was revived in the neo-classical work of the later eighteenth century by such designers as Adam, Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Lacquered furniture was imported into Europe from the Far East from the mid-seventeenth century. This richly decorative process originated in China and was then perfected in Japan. The sap of the sumac tree was used to lay a THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR 909 dark, glossy surface on the furniture, which was then painted and gilded with oriental designs. Such pieces possessed great cachet in Europe, blending as they did with the equally fashionable oriental porcelain also being imported at the time. Imported lacquered furniture was very expensive and in short supply. Also this type of sumac tree was not grown in Europe, so European imitation pieces were made and sent to the orient to be lacquered then returned. By the early eighteenth century the Dutch, and later the French and English, had perfected a method of imitating oriental lacquer which they (naturally) termed ‘japaning’. In japanning, as it came to be called, a coating of whiting and size was applied to the piece of furniture, then it was further coated with several applications of varnish and the pattern gilded. Relief designs were built up with a paste made from gum arabic and whiting. Another form of furniture decoration, particularly fashionable in the years 1690–1730, was gesso (the Italian word for gypsum). A paste was made up from whiting and parchment size and applied in several coats until it was thick enough to incise, or even carve, a design upon the piece of furniture, which was then finally gilded all over. Gilded gesso work was especially suited to the baroque styles of the time. Papier mâché was a material particularly beloved by furniture makers of the years 1830–60; the process is an ancient one, originating in the orient, its European use stemming, as its name suggests, from France, whence it was introduced into England in the 1670s. The material is a prepared paper pulp, pressed and baked to produce a very hard, durable substance. A fine quality papier mâché was produced in England in the eighteenth century from a method patented in 1772 by Henry Clay of Birmingham. In this process the sheets of paper were soaked in a mixture made up from resin, flour and glue, then were applied sheet by sheet to a moulded core, after which they were baked, sanded smooth and finally decorated and japanned. In the nineteenth century the Clay method was still in use but there was also a different process whereby the pulped paper was pressed between dies and then received many coats of varnish to produce a very hard material which could be turned, planed or filed. The article of furniture was then painted, gilded and, often, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and given a final coat of varnish. Although machines to carry out many wood-working processes had been invented by 1800, the furniture trade was slow to adopt mechanical methods until the unprecedented increase in population triggered off a heavy demand for new furniture. By the 1870s the process of mechanization had accelerated and designs were being made specifically for such production means. Machines suited to furniture-making, powered first by steam and later by electricity, were gradually made available to saw, plane, bore, groove, carve, mould and mortise. In the twentieth century all stages of manufacture of a piece based on the work of a talented furniture designer can now be carried out by machinery so PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 910 providing good furniture for sale at reasonable prices. Mechanization has not completely replaced handcraft, but a hand-made piece will be very expensive. Much of the best furniture now available is the product of both methods. All modern technological means of reducing costs and speeding production are employed, but the use of good materials and careful hand-finishing ensures a quality article. While machinery has modernized the processes of furniture-making, new materials, and different methods of handling existing ones, have been developed during the twentieth century, particularly since 1950. One example is metal. Japanned iron tubing had been widely employed during the nineteenth century for making bedsteads and rocking chairs but the introduction of tubular steel (later chromium-plated) led to its more extensive use, for instance for the cantilevered chair first introduced by Marcel Breuer in 1925, and its reappearance in a variety of guises since. For lightness steel is often replaced by aluminium. A second instance, and one more generally employed in domestic furniture, is lamination, a method evolved by some Scandinavian designers in the 1930s. The new bonding resins developed for military purposes during the Second World War, together with the availability of modern techniques of moulding and bending plywoods by electrical means of heating without danger of damage and splitting, have encouraged the use of lamination in furniture design. These curved shapes are especially suited to seating furniture. The production of a range of plastics since the 1950s has introduced a new, tough, inexpensive material to furniture-making. In particular, polypropylene moulded by injection methods has made possible all kinds of unbreakable, stain-proof furniture especially useful in kitchens, bathrooms and nurseries. Wall mirrors and chimney glasses were very important features in interior decorative schemes of the principal rooms of a home especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was partly for aesthetic reasons but also, importantly, because of their reflective contribution to the inadequate level of artificial illumination of the time. Many mirror frames incorporated clusters of candle-holders. After the introduction of the making of plate glass (see p. 197) in England in the 1620s, larger mirrors of higher quality were being manufactured. Before this mirror glasses had been small and of poor reflective quality. The term ‘plate glass’ seems to derive from the early glass of this type which was a luxury product reserved for coach windows and mirrors: these were called ‘looking glass plates’. The method of giving reflective properties to the glass was a lengthy one of coating with tinfoil amalgamated with mercury. The experimental discoveries by Baron Justus von Liebig, the German chemist, in 1835 of a new chemical method of depositing metallic silver upon glass led to a greatly improved process of silvering; this incorporated a shellac coating and a backing of red lead. THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR 911 HEATING AND LIGHTING Ignition It is almost impossible, even for the most imaginative person living at the present time, to appreciate the problems over hundreds of years of making a flame in order to light a fire to provide warmth and means of cooking and, most important, to make a light to push back the enveloping darkness. Yet these difficulties were the lot of everyone living in an age up to about 1850. People at home tried to keep at least one fire, usually in the kitchen, perpetually burning. At night it was damped down, the ashes drawn over the embers, then covered with a curfew for safety’s sake. In the morning the curfew was removed and fresh life was blown into the embers with the assistance of a pair of bellows. A curfew is a metal cover with a handle; the name is a corruption of the French word couvre-feu. During the Middle Ages a bell was rung in the streets at a prescribed hour each evening to warn people to cover their fires. The term has survived in the military sense. From primitive times until the later eighteenth century there were two chief ways of creating a flame, by wood friction and by tinder box: in the damp climate of northern Europe the tinder box was the usual method. The metal box, in later times fitted with candle and holder, contained a piece of hard stone (the flint), one of metal, which was an iron and sulphur compound, and the tinder, which was of dry, flammable material such as charred linen, dried fungi, feathers or moss. The flint was used to strike the metal (it was later called a ‘strike-a-light’) to pare off a tiny fragment and so create heat. The fragment, with luck, fell upon the tinder, ignited it and, by blowing on it, a flame could be induced. It was not an easy process, especially on a dark winter morning; it needed experience and patience. Tinder pistols were developed in the seventeenth century from the flint-lock pistol. They were expensive. Early designs contained tinder and, when the pistol was triggered, a spark ignited a charge of gunpowder the flame from which lit the tinder. By the eighteenth century many designs incorporated a flint and steel and after 1800 more sophisticated pistols also held sulphur matches, extra tinder and a candle in its holder. For most people the tinder box continued to be the usual way to obtain a flame until matches became fairly cheap after 1850. For the well-to-do, however, a number of expensive, ingenious, and often dangerous, ways of obtaining a light were invented. From about 1775 to 1835 these were based upon the interaction of one chemical upon another. They were termed generally instantaneous lights. There was the development of the phosphorus match which was marketed in various forms. One was the phosphoric taper . joined framed panelling which was developed in Flanders and Germany and introduced into England in the fifteenth century: it was an important technical advance. The thin wood panels were tapered. SOCIETY 908 panelling, see p. 902), the development of veneering in the seventeenth century, the progress of mechanization in the nineteenth century and the introduction of new materials and techniques. to the flush surface of a carcase of cheaper wood. The art of veneer is old: it was practised in ancient Egypt and by the Romans. The idea of so decorating furniture was revived with Italian