This book explores the beginnings of the interior design profession in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources, from collecting and advice manuals to pattern books and department store catalogues, it demonstrates how new forms of print media were used to ‘sell’ the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.

Explores the shift in the locus of modernity in fin-de-siecle France from technological monument to private interior. The text examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors specific to the French fin-de-siecle that interacted in the development of art nouveau.