For Walter Benjamin the bourgeois coziness of the nineteenth century domestic interior

was a kind of closeted dreamspace: ‘To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense

fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web.’1 Benjamin relates

the experience of dwelling in these nineteenth century spaces to the process of fash-

ioning a shell around one: ‘“To dwell” as a transitive verb – as in the notion of “indwelt

spaces”; herewith an indication of the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behaviour.