Wallpaper was a luxury item until the 19th century, Home decoration began when artistically inclined cave dwellers painted pictures on their walls but it only really came into its own in the 18th century, when luxury items started to become affordable for ordinary people.
Origins in Western antiquity
Furniture is of considerable antiquity, though it is known, for the most part, only from wall paintings, sculpture, and vase paintings. Some furniture survives from ancient Egyptian tombs from about 3000 bc in the form of beds, chairs, tables, and storage chests.
The interior design style known as Mid Century Modern was born. This period was influenced by the Machine Age and new technologies. Decorative styles were less sought after as the Modernism movement focused more on design and function. Materials were minimal, honest, and rustic.
Colors often hovered in the range of pastels. Iconographic shapes like scallops, sweeps, and curves were common. Unfinished pine was a favored inexpensive wood often used for kitchen cabinets. These were touches that hearkened back to an earlier, more innocent age before the war.
The beginnings of the midcentury modern design movement started to take root in the 1940s. But it didn't flourish until after the end of World War II.
Mid-century modern (MCM) is a design movement in interior, product, graphic design, architecture, and urban development that was popular in the United States and Europe from roughly 1945 to 1969, during the United States's post–World War II period.
Bold geometrics appeared in tiling, parquet flooring, door panels, lighting and metalwork. The sleeker form of the style also gave rise to minimalism in interior architecture; pure white walls formed a dramatic backdrop for polished, curved handrails and black and white flooring.
Art Deco was an international decorative style than ran from 1919 to 1939. Known initially as "le style moderne" or "Jazz Moderne," the style received its current name in 1968, during a period of scholarly reappraisal.
Pastel color schemes were huge in 1950s décor, with popular colors being pink, mint green, turquoise, pale yellow, and blue. Kitchens and bathrooms were the two most notable room types for pastel color decoration.
1950s Decorating
The colors used in the 1950s were mostly pastels. These included soft pink, mint green, butter yellow, baby blue, and turquoise (similar to the popular current turquoise). Red and other bright colors were eventually added for dramatic decors.
Most 1940s kitchens kept wall colors neutral, or, if they used color, relied on muted shades of orange, yellow, blue or green. Flooring, countertops, tabletops, curtains and storage accessories were often used to add pops of color, featuring bolder reds, blues, greens and oranges.
Some of the fashionable colors in 1940s; powder blue, mauve, coral, turquoise, beige, rose, light green, dusty rose, plum, gold and honey yellow colors in jewel tones and sunny pastels were popular.
The exterior of a home built during this decade was often of a red brick siding, and the interior home flooring was often of hardwood, just as it was in earlier decades. Other luxuries of 1940s homes included newly-installed roofing, kitchen cupboards, spacious rooms, and thermostat controlled heat.
The first evidence of interior design was found in prehistoric human dwellings. Although they focused on practicalities they still took the time to decorate their dwellings with drawings, usually of plants, animals or humans. Tribes of this era made huts from mud, animal skins and sticks.
Timeless interior design is the intentional choice to incorporate classic, functional, and aesthetically pleasing design elements into your home over trendy, fleeting, or socially loud ideas.
Victorian interior design is a style that originated in the United Kingdom during the Victorian era. Known for its abundance of pattern (in wall coverings and in textiles), ornamentation, and use of jewel tones, the interior decoration style absorbs the visitor in its rich world.
Large areas, such as sofas, beds, carpets, drapes and wallcovers, were covered in vibrant colors and patterns. Employing "psychedelic intensity", the colors and styles were influenced by India, Spain, and the Mediterranean. In the 1950s and 1960s, specialized patterns in wall painting were developed.
Hula Hoop. Who hasn't played with a hula hoop before? Yes, hula hoops date all the way back to the 50s. Being one of the biggest fads of that decade, the hula hoop gracefully stood the test of time.
“We are seeing more textured fabrics, geometric shapes and patterns, and multi-use/free-flowing spaces like sunken living rooms, room dividers, and upholstered seating,” says Corvette. “Hallmarks of 1970s design include bringing nature indoors, materials like velvet and rattan, and patterned wallpaper.
Modernist. The Roaring '20s were nothing if not rebelliously avant-garde, and the Modernist homes of the 1920s fit that bill. Designed with smooth wall surfaces and flat roofs, they were influenced by the no-frills design ideals of the Bauhaus, a modernist art school in Germany.
Art Deco, short for the French Arts Décoratifs, and sometimes referred to simply as Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920s to early 1930s.
Spearheaded by designer Ettore Sottsass, the trend now referred to as Memphis Design first debuted at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1981 with 55 ornamental pieces that infused geometric shapes reminiscent of the Art Deco movement with a bold Pop-Art-inspired color palette.
Art Deco and Streamline Moderne were the two most popular furniture styles in the 1930s. Art Deco, which first appeared in France, celebrated the modern world through architecture, art, and even home furnishings. Streamline Modern echoed industrial products and represented the machine age.
Traditionally, and often seen in country houses and larger suburban houses up until the 1930s in Britain, the box room was for the storage of boxes, trunks, portmanteaux, and the like, rather than for bedroom use.
Retro Architecture:
1930s houses had a very typical layout with a room off the front hall with a second living room and kitchen at the rear. Upstairs in these small homes were usually two bedrooms, a small room and a bathroom with a toilet.