Unveiling layers of interior design in three interwar domestic interior experiments by the avant-garde

Using contemporary theoretical frameworks in interior design, this paper discusses and compares three interior experiments by interwar modernists in the Low Countries, specifically Belgium and the Netherlands, where the relation between the body and space is crucial in different ways. First, the atelier and residence of abstract painter Jozef Peeters in Antwerp reveals a whole personal universe within the existing social housing block. Next, the design process of the so-called experimental kitchen for the Dutch firm Bruynzeel, based on the Belgian rational CUBEX kitchen by the modernist Louis Herman De Koninck, is investigated in relation to its aim for democratic access to affordable modern kitchens in the Netherlands. Finally, the live radio home gym classes by avant-garde dancer Lea Daan, a national broadcast from the Flagey studio in Brussels, was an effort to democratize physical exercise in the home as a means of emancipating the audience through cultural elevation. Each of these experiments highlights an aspect or layer of the interior articulated by Rice, Weinthal and Somers, while also touching on several at once. The aim of this paper is twofold: these three experiments are discussed and compared in detail using three interior design theoretical frameworks that allow a systematic in-depth comparison in many aspects of the interior. In doing so, these experiments are test cases of sorts, making it possible to illustrate and refine the richness of the interior and its multilayered nature as the result of the fluid or interdisciplinary field of interior design.