During the pandemic, I responded to three calls for chapters in edited books related to my research for The Hand Book, a book I’m writing about hands in the history of design. I’m delighted to say that today I have received my author copies of the hardback book containing final chapter of my trio.

The first appeared In March this year: my chapter ‘Getting a Handle on It: Thomas Lamb, Mass Production and Touch in Design History’ is including in the volume Capitalism and the Senses, edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman, for the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

The second of my chapters, ‘Knowing Hands: Using Tactile Research Methods in Researching and Writing the History of Design’ was published in Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing, edited by Kevin A. Morrison and Pälvi Rantala for Routledge’s series New Textual Studies in Literature (2023), as I reported when I received it in June.

Thirdly, my chapter, ‘Hands at Home: Textures, Tactility and Touch in Interior Design’ appears in The Senses in Interior Design: Sensorial Expressions and Experiences, edited by John Potvin, Marie-Ève Marchard and Benoit Beaulieu for the series Studies in Design & Material Culture (Manchester University Press, 2023). It was published on 5th September, so I have been on tenterhooks to read the other chapters in the book for a couple of months and now, happily, I can.

According to its blurb, The Senses in Interior Design

examines how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilised within various forms of interiors. The chapters explore how the body navigates and negotiates the realities of designed interiors and challenge the traditional focus on star designers or ideal interiors that have left sensorial agency at the margins of design history. From the sensually gendered role of the fireplace in late sixteenth century Italy to the synaesthetic décors of Comte Robert de Montesquiou and the sensorial stimuli of Aesop stores, each chapter brings a new perspective on the central role that the senses have played in the conception, experiences and uses of interiors.

Following the introduction, ‘Sensorial interactions: interior design through the five senses’ by one of the three co-editors, Marie-Ève Marchand, the book is divided into three parts. The first of these, ‘Sensory politics’ contains the following chapters: ‘Heated bodies: fireplaces and the senses in the early modern Italian domestic interior’ by Erin J. Campbell; ‘Sensitive design: Robert de Montesquiou's sensorial installations and its condemnation’ and ‘Re-assessing Pierre Legrain's 'Black Deco': sensual luxury, primitivism and the French bourgeois interior’ by co-editors Benoit Beaulieu and John Potvin respectively; ‘“Brother and I in bed”: queer photography at home in New York, 1925-35’ by Alice T. Friedman and, lastly, ‘Conquering the home front: Nazi propaganda and sensory experiences in the German domestic interior 1933-45’ by Serena Newmark.

Part II, ‘Aesthetic entanglements’ groups ‘Into the sensorium: scenes from the dressing room’ by Louisa Iarocci with Michael Windover and James Deaville’s ‘Site-reading: placing the piano in middle-class homes, 1890-1930’ and ‘The Herrenzimmer: masculinity, the senses and interior design in turn-of-twentieth-century Germany’ by Änne Söll as well as my chapter ‘Hands at home? Textures, tactility and touch in interior design’.

The final part, ‘Sensual economies’ includes ‘Forging foam at the 1925 Paris Exhibition’ by Claire I. R. O'Mahony; Fiona Fisher’s ‘The stimulating atmosphere of the English public house, c. 1945-75’; ‘Interiorising the senses’ by David Howes; Ben Highmore’s ‘Sensorial worlds and atmospheric scenes in Terence Conran's The House Book’ and finally ‘Aesop's sensory experience’ by D. J. Huppatz.

First double page spread of chapter 9, 'Hands at Home' by Grace Lees-Maffei.

My chapter begins from the fact that Interior design is the result of a range of designed elements being brought together to produce an orchestrated space. Just as the interior spaces that accommodate much of our lives are designed, so the sensory experiences we have in those spaces are also designed, whether by professionals or by householders. Some interiors are put together with all of the senses in mind, while others prioritise one sense over the rest, for example in appealing to the eye. I go on to explore a variety of ways in which interior designers, mediators and consumers accommodate and stimulate the sense of touch, including landmark examples of designers’ appeal to the hand such as Adolf Loos’ furry bedroom for his wife Lina Loos, to the smooth plastic curved shell chairs produced by Charles and Ray Eames.

The later part of my chapter examines the ways in which design mediators such as retailers, curators and journalists appeal to the sense of touch in both understanding and promoting designed objects and interiors. For instance, a 2019 retrospective exhibition of Charlotte Perriand’s work encouraged visitors to sit on her furniture to experience of its ergonomic excellence, while texture has been emphasised by writers and editors such as Ilse Crawford and Michelle Ogundehin, as an antidote to the visuality of the interior design press.

Users/consumers identify affordances unanticipated by designers; we use tables as chairs, benches as tables, chairs as ladders. We fondly use familiar furnishings long after their ostensible lifespans have expired. We learn to inhabit our interiors using touch sense-memory, reaching out for the expected door knob, stair rail, drawer and light pull, and the soft cushion, flock wallpaper, leather seat. By foregrounding touch in design ideation or production, mediation and consumption, this chapter offers an alternative to interior design histories which focus exclusively on eye appeal.

The next writing that I publish on hands, and touch, in the history of design and in design history, should be The Hand Book. I’m excited to be finishing the manuscript, bringing together ideas and approaches that have been my focus for several years.

Double page spread showing, on the left, a view of the pantry at Villa Savoye outside Paris (Le Corbusier, 1931) and on the right, Charles and Ray Eames' DAR armchair (1950).