During the past five years there has been a rise in interdisciplinary studies of the domestic interior. Art history, design history, historical geography, social and cultural history and anthropology have all contributed to this growing field. Charles Rice's The Emergence of the Domestic Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity offers a new exploration of the subject from the perspective of architectural theory. Rice develops a new theoretical understanding of the historical emergence of the domestic interior that will make thought-provoking reading for the many scholars currently involved in this expanding research area.

Rice argues that the concept of the domestic interior emerged during the early nineteenth century. As this developed, it embodied a sense of ‘doubleness’ being understood and experienced through space and images. The first two chapters, ‘Orientations’, develop the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, showing their significance for the domestic interior. Rice's constructive elaboration of these theories expands our understanding of the potential of the domestic interior to shape social and emotional life. The analysis is clearly written and renders these sometimes quite abstruse theories more accessible. Rice uses Benjamin to critique previous visually based histories of the interior, linking the emergence of the interior to the concepts of privacy, intimacy and comfort. Benjamin's writing on the emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior is used to explore the subjective inhabitation of the interior, the relationship between domestic space and the body that inhabits it. The second chapter develops this theme, positing that ‘psychoanalysis must be considered in relation to a spatialization of its power and effects’. The discussion that follows outlines the interior's connection with ‘the social’, and its function as a mechanism of psychoanalysis.

The idea of doubleness is further developed in a series of case studies of the processes through which the interior is imagined, consumed and recognized. In chapter three, Rice considers the relationship between plan and comfort in two key contemporary works on domestic planning: Robert Kerr's The Gentleman's House (1864), and J.J. Stevenson's House Architecture (1880). How the English domestic interior travelled, through images and as a set of material artefacts, is explored in the following chapter through an analysis of the German architect Hermann Muthesius' Style Condition and Building Art (1901/03). This is juxtaposed with the domestic interiors of the wealthy Scots Australian pastoralist Robert Barr Smith and his wife Joanna, who imported interiors from the London firm Morris & Co. for their houses in Adelaide, South Australia, demonstrating the fractured geography of the modern domestic interior. The final chapter looks at how the relationship between the interior as a space and the interior as an image was articulated in the works of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. The conclusion assesses the distinction between the private home and the outside world, through a discussion of contemporary analyses of electronic media and the boundaries of the home. Through these case studies Rice offers a series of new conceptual insights into the growth of nineteenth-century domesticity and its transition to modernity.

The book unpacks the nuances of a series of carefully chosen images and texts, and is clearly not intended as a broad empirical survey in the historical tradition. Indeed, Rice seeks to distance his narrative from previous analyses that have perpetuated what he views as ‘mythic’ history. However, the analysis is occasionally compromised by this range of source materials. For example, Rice argues that the English discourse of domestic planning was controlled by male architects and addressed to male clients, in contrast to America where discussions of domestic planning took place in the context of domestic advice literature. Undoubtedly, the relationship between gender and planning was geographically diverse, but Rice does not mention the many English female domestic advice writers, such as Jane Ellen Panton and Mrs Loftie, who also criticized plans by male architects. As an historian of the nineteenth century, this reviewer would also have liked to see a further development of the intriguing proposition that the interior as a concept emerged during the early years of this period, through a sustained analysis of source material from this time. However, my criticisms of this book stem from my perspective as an historian and perhaps demonstrate the limits of interdisciplinarity in this new field. Overall, this is a stimulating and provocative book that will prompt both academics and students to reflect further on the historical meaning of the domestic interior.