‘I’m no peeping Tom,’ Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol’s Factory cinematographer, once told me in an interview. ‘As Bill Brandt was known to say: “I am more of a hunter than on the prowl.”’ One hopes that the same can be said for the staff at WoI – and, indeed, its readers. But, if not voyeurism, what is the thrill that underpins our interest in other people’s interiors? Is it domestic prurience, with these magazine pages serving, like Hitchcock’s rear window, as portals through which we might peer into bedrooms and bathrooms, hoping to catch some glimpse of an owner’s essential character – and perhaps their vices? Or is it some polymorphous perversion that has us all ogling tassel-covered centrefolds, entranced by everything from marble busts to eggcups? As psychoanalysis is alas not included with your subscription, I invite you, by way of the imagination, to recline on Sigmund’s couch (on display, draped in a Persian carpet at the Freud Museum London) and interrogate these indecorous impulses.
So, how do you feel when pulling back the curtain? Someone must have asked Sartre this question; in Being and Nothingness, the philosopher described himself crouched at a keyhole, sneaking a peek at the world, and then – quelle horreur! –being discovered in the act. This constituted a moment of both exquisite shame and sudden self-awareness. Coming from someone for whom ‘hell is other people’, that might not be entirely surprising – but the example does reveal something about the act of looking and the drive for escapism. Wool-gathering might be one delight brought about by gazing into an unseen space, but is there another?
Peering through another type of view-finder, Susan Sontag distinguished between voyeurism and witnessing, but noted that both are rooted in desire. What form does this desire take for those giving an unseen interior that first once-over? Lust? Or a lesser deadly sin? We might look on in envy at an inherited country pile, or with covetous delight at a beautifully put-together scheme – or else with shameless judgement, wondering whether a beige carpet or magnolia wall implies an equally toneless personality. ‘Hideous!’ we might exclaim with glee at a celebrity’s less-than-characterful home, somehow pricking the balloon of their fame. It’s like learning a lurid secret.
One answer to the question of why we want to peer into people’s homes, then, is that it reveals something about them. This is borne out by cinematic set-dressing, which is all about exposing character. Take for example dissolute, predatory Uncle Monty’s lavish Chelsea house, teeming with tapestries, animal skins and Liberty prints, in Withnail and I; or sociopathic investment banker Patrick Bateman’s killer pad in American Psycho, all modcons, Mies van der Rohe leather chairs and kitchen knives (read into the Modernist aesthetic what you will). ‘But,’ I hear you cry, ‘these aren’t real homes.’ Consider, then, the Margate flat of British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan, artfully mirror-lined and reframed as a celestial vision (WoI March 2024), or the upturned-boat home in Brittany of the sea-lover Yves Dussin (WoI April 2019).
Interiors are, perhaps, the purest representation of individual personality and taste. We flow out of ourselves into the spaces we inhabit. And we reveal, too, how others shape us, often employing borrowed decorative schemes to paper over the cracks in our own character or using pieces of period furniture to fill in the gaps in our taste. More surprising and rare is a marked incongruence between a person and their place: immaculate presentation rarely hides a hoarding nature. That said, one exception to this rule is Bryan Ferry (WoI Nov 1981), where his public persona and interiors were ostensibly at odds. Not for the glam Roxy Music frontman a cigarette-strewn squat fitted with furniture picked up off the pavement; rather, an elegant apartment – all swags and taffeta – decorated by none other than Nicky Haslam. Then again, Ferry was always formidably aristocratic. It might have been more jarring – or revealing – if he’d had a penchant for minimalism, say.
In 2013, Arne Svenson’s voyeuristic series ‘The Neighbors’ was exhibited in New York. The photographer had used a telephoto lens to take pictures of unsuspecting people in the apartments opposite his own. It represents a mode of looking that is clearly distinct from the gaze you’ll experience in the pages of this magazine. WoI’s intrepid scouts aren’t, like Arne, on the prowl. Plus, there is a difference between the reality of a home and the fantasy of what appears in print. Once invited in, there is an unspoken duty to present not only a brilliant interior but an owner’s sense of themselves, which generally doesn’t include piles of dirty laundry.
So: escapism, desire, curiosity, inspiration – I’d argue that the impulse to explore other people’s homes is less predatory than it is constructive. It arises from a willingness to find out more about their owners – and therefore about ourselves and our own tastes. To witness and to delight in the unexpected: these are the real drives that eclipse any voyeuristic instinct when the temptation to gaze avidly at interiors takes hold. So, like Sartre, WoI remains bent over the keyhole, unreservedly sans shame. At least, that is, until our readers peer back at us. As we come to the end of our session, I’ll leave you with a question: which interiors excite you most and why?
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 July 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Subscribe here
