Materiality and masculinity : 'ordinary' men and interior design

This article discusses men’s engagements with day-to-day interior design and decoration – the arrangement, appearance, colour, and texture of domestic interiors, including fixtures, furnishings, and ornamentation. The focus is not professional design and decoration. Rather, data is drawn from a study of ‘ordinary’ men’s meanings and everyday practices of homemaking in twenty-first-century inner-city Sydney. This context is one of changing gender, work, lifestyle, and household patterns, thus enabling empirical observations that help refine knowledge of, and re-conceptualise, the relationships between masculinity, domestic life, and the modern home. This is an abbreviated article based on the chapter ‘Materiality, masculinity and the home: men and interior design’, which appeared in Masculinities and Place (Routledge, 2014), edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Peter Hopkins. The data is drawn from an Australian Research Council funded project, ‘Men on the Home Front: Spatialities of Domesticity and Masculinity’.