ABSTRACT
The Kaiserliche Hofmobliendepot (The Imperial Furniture Collection) in Vienna evolved
after the First World War from an imperial furniture store into a major museum
of furniture and interior design. In addition to individual pieces of historic furniture, it
now houses many room sets taken from buildings as varied as imperial palaces to
bourgeois apartments. One recent acquisition which stands out, on display since
1999, are two rooms of built-in and free-standing furniture that had belonged to the
potter, Lucie Rie. These rooms were originally designed in 1928 by Ernst Plischke,
an architect friend of Rie, and her husband Hans, for their flat in Vienna. When the
Ries were forced to leave Vienna in 1938 at the Anschluss (the enforced union of
Austria with Nazi Germany), the interior was dismantled and shipped to London,
where it was reassembled by another Viennese architect and refugee, Ernst Freud,
the son of Sigmund Freud. The fittings were adapted by Freud to fit into a small
house at 18 Albion Mews, W2, immediately north of Hyde Park, London, where Lucie
Rie had her flat and studio (Figure 9.1). Following her death in 1995, the interior was
again taken back across Europe, restored and reconstructed for display at the
Hofmobliendepot.
