The Vogue for a New Interior: A Study of the Presentation and Interpretation of Servants’ Quarters in Country House Visits

Abstract

The article is a study of the presentation and interpretation of servants’ quarters in country houses in England and Wales (Erddig, Lanhydrock, Audley End, Petworth and Ickworth), directed at theorizing the latest popular fascination about the ‘downstairs’. Hinging on Gaston Bachelard’s twofold reading of the interior as a contained physical space and an elusive imaginal one, the notion of home as the site of domesticity is compared with that of the country house, whose ‘domestication’ is surveyed in a series of visual and spatial analyses of its rooms and, specifically, its servants’ quarters. Probing the tendency of ‘leaving the green baize door’ to the servants’ quarters ‘ajar’ allows for an understanding of the reasons behind the inception and development of such a vogue, arguing that it is the experience of the tangible everyday that defines the popular ‘doing’ of the country house visit.