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'.