ABSTRACT
This chapter will adopt a design historical perspective to re-consider Pierre Bourdieu’s engagement with the expression of taste in the arena of the home as a marker of social class. It will focus on the gendering of taste in the development of nineteenth-century middle-class domesticity, and the erosion of that concept within early twentieth-century modernist architecture and design. While acknowledging the continued significance of Bourdieu’s socio-cultural framework for contemporary analysis of taste, superseding deeper historical ideas of it being defined either as an absolute value or, subsequently, as a set of binary oppositions, the essay will propose that it would be enriched by a discussion of the implications of gender difference as well, potentially, of several other cultural categorisations relevant to the early twenty-first century. In addition, the chapterwill offset Bourdieu’s exclusive interest in taste in the context of the consumption of home decoration with a discussion of it in the context of production and examine how, where the aesthetic practices of interior decoration and design are concerned, the boundaries between them are, in fact, porous.
