Modern Retro

Book extract and images from Modern Retro by Caroline Clifton-Mogg (Murdoch Books)

Above A kitchen-dining room with, along one wall, a range of Ikea units that have been painted black. In the foreground, the kitchen table, which came out of a nineteenth-century French chateau, is surrounded by an assortment of chairs, of different vintages and styles, all of which work together as they are all of the same height.

Eating and dining

In many ways, the dining room, as such, is not an absolute given. Although we all recognise the term, it is not actually a particularly traditional room – its heyday probably only lasted from about the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Before that, few houses had a dining room as we know it, with its attendant permanent dining table and suite of matching chairs. Eighteenth-century tables, except in the grandest of houses, were of various designs, but usually light, portable and adaptable, designed to be used in different rooms and areas around the house wherever food was to be served. But by the nineteenth century, and certainly by the time Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, there was, for the middle classes, a new emphasis on the importance of the family unit. A cult of virtuous domesticity and a hardening attitude towards class differences, as well as a fashionable enthusiasm for separate rooms for every housebound activity, from smoking to reading, combined to introduce the idea of a dedicated dining room – a place used every day and where all family meals were taken in relative, formal privacy.

So it remained until the mid-twentieth century, when two world wars, continuing emancipation and the resultant lack of domestic staff meant that, although dining rooms were still often a fixture in many houses, they had too often become rooms, that were in many cases cold and silent, used only for Sunday family lunches and special occasions. But smaller houses and a less formal way of life generally meant that things had to change, and over the last seventy-five years we have seen various new ways of solving the where-to-eat conundrum, some easier to apply than others, but all variations on a theme. In some homes there is still a dining room; it remains a self-contained room, with the table as its centre, but it is now a much warmer, open space. When not set for a meal, the table might have books, flowers and objects on it, and the room itself might have a hybrid personality – a place for eating, but also perhaps a study, a home office, even a reading room. In other homes there is a dining area – a dedicated space, but set in a larger scene, as part of the living room, and designed and decorated to fit in with the larger domestic world, with chairs that can be used in other parts of the room and a multi-purpose, good-looking table.

A third variation has, most conveniently for many, the dining room as part of the larger kitchen space – distinct from the cooking and preparation area but not in contest with it. In this option the eating area is usually decorated and furnished very much as an offshoot of the kitchen area – informal and comfortable; somewhere for people to sit and chat, eat and drink, or even help with the preparation of the meal.
With the death of the formal dining room, of course came the death – unmourned by many – of formal dining suites, the rectangular table with its matching, high-backed chairs, usually in highly polished wood with upholstered seats. Today’s diners like something different: contrasting tables and chairs, interesting textures, surfaces and colour, as well as shapes and materials, and a variety of styles, often used together, which is why incorporating twentieth-century furniture into an interior scheme makes so much sense. First of all, there are the materials. Resin, moulded plastic, fibreglass and metal – all enthusiastically employed by designers and architects in the making of both tables and chairs – are hard-wearing and, on the whole, light enough to be easy to move around, which is important in an area with a working element to it.

Then there’s the question of colour. Chairs made in moulded plastic and resin, in particular, were produced in a range of bright colours as well as black and white, and so are ideal to add a flash of unexpected colour, particularly in a room where many of the elements may be in neutral tones.
Then there are the inviting shapes – sinuous, rounded, angular, bulbous – which are always interesting. Retro furniture is unexpected in the best possible way – original, quirky and fun, as well as being sometimes extremely elegant.
Retro chairs and tables have chameleon characteristics and fit in, as these pages show, in every kind of interior, either mixed with other pieces of the same vintage or used to spike a scheme that is far more traditional in tone.

Book extract and images from Modern Retro by Caroline Clifton-Mogg (Murdoch Books)