Where aesthetes wander, writers, thinkers and polemicists soon follow. Yet only interior design languishes in a critical desert. Other areas of creativity are forever facing up to sharp-tongued authorities: those who furnish themselves with verbal whetstones for axe-grinding. That’s even true of disciplines at the aesthetic margins. Food, despite its transience, has its aficionados – this time brandishing dinner knives – who tower in judgement over empty plates. Even the tailor has been retailored: in his 1834 satirical novel Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle, who criticised anything that stood still long enough, lamented the lack of a philosophy underpinning ‘the grand Tissue of all Tissues’ – fashion, that is. Johann Mattheson, meanwhile, founded the periodical Critica Musica as early as 1722. And theatre can trace its analytic descent all the way back to Aristotle. So why is it that, while we weigh the worth of art in column inches, as Andy Warhol instructed, we refuse to write up the value of our rooms?
Interiors are, after all, inevitable, the insides of houses owing their antecedents to the expulsion from Eden. Except, where architecture has continually exposed itself to critical assault – witness the ‘great heap of stone’ missile Voltaire hurled at the building more commonly known as Blenheim Palace, or Prince Charles’s carbuncular slingmatch surrounding the National Gallery’s extension in 1984 – in their interiors, fig leaves remain firmly in place. Perhaps it’s because, from town planners to princes, designers of structures have mostly been men. But while manors maketh the man, more often than not women make the manor (pleasant to live in). What is not taken seriously is rarely critiqued; at best, it has simply been mocked. Evelyn Waugh’s acerbic portrait of the decorator Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust is, let’s not forget, a satirical sketch of Sibyl Colefax fused with Syrie Maugham, the figures who professionalised the interior-design industry.
Since then, the business they built has grown to become a global market valued at $136 billion, trouncing the art market almost twice over. We calculate the cost; if only we quantified the value. Consider, for instance, among the wallpapers of Westminster, the depths to which discussions of décor have descended. In 1998, the then Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, spent a small fortune restoring his office’s flocked Pugin wallcoverings, a move that provoked comparison to Cardinal Wolsey. In 2022, when Carrie Johnson had the walls of 10 Downing Street expensively repapered, it was as if the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which saw off Louis XVI’s court, had been resurrected. Between the shrieks of the tabloids and the clutching at (presumably plastic) pearls, the worth of the interiors themselves went without comment: tradition, craftsmanship, creativity and, indeed, jobs were ignored for the myopic measure of mammon.
Such debates hinge on the distinction between public and private space. Since Sir Edward Coke’s 1604 ruling it has been a matter of common law that ‘the house of everyone is to him as his castle’, and, as Mr Wemmick, with his drawbridges and sham Gothic windows, demonstrated in Great Expectations, they can be decorated and defended as eccentrically as they like. ‘Looks pretty, don’t it?’ he enthused. Who are we to disagree? In the compact, interrelated interiors industry, with its confidential designer–client relationships, censure soon tumbles into farce. Anton Ego – yes, the arch-gourmet from Ratatouille – may have advised that ‘in many ways the work of a critic is easy’, but here, if the voyeuristic urge to peer into other people’s homes isn’t perverse enough, to pass judgement verges on obscenity. As the adage emblazoned on Charli XCX’s crop-top puts it: ‘They don’t build statues of critics’.
However, ‘although it may be foolish to judge by appearances,’ as Jonathan Meades, himself a Ray-Ban-wearing rockstar of a critic, once warned, ‘it is even more foolish not to judge by them.’ There’s a reason why Imelda Marcos’s high-rise condo is filled with faux-Louis XV furniture and purloined Picassos, if we cared to find out. It is why Saint Bernard of Clairvaux denounced the ‘misshapen shapeliness and shapely misshapenness,’ not of under-set jellies, but worship-distracting ornament on early 12th-century architecture. Whether abetting the status of dictators or aiding the salvation of souls, interiors speak of more than the prettiness of their upholsteries; in them are arranged, not just the identities of their inhabitants, but the material and spiritual state of the world.
Take Chardin’s noble roomscapes, plucked from the morass of chi-chi ancien régime scenes; or John Ruskin who, wrangling his gang of Gothic geeks, forged a style of design that embodied all the obsessions of the Victorians. Well might we ask how our interiors define us today. Do abundant antiques imply a pacifying dependence on the past? Could the hollow Oriental-ish husks designed by the culturally lazy or ignorant continue to cling on unnoticed? ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death,’ wrote Oscar Wilde, destitute in a French boarding house. ‘One of us has to go.’ Design’s wellsprings are profound and its effects acute (remember: the wallpaper won). Interior design matters as much as any painting, pop performance or foam-engulfed morsel. We owe it to ourselves to pay them equal critical attention. To echo Carlyle’s coinage, it is time to redecorate the decorator – and commend the critic to the house.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication online, email it to us at roomfordebate@worldofinteriors.co.uk
A version of this article originally appears in the June 2025 issue of The World of Interiors. Subscribe here
