Materiality, masculinity and the home : men and interior design

This chapter begins an investigation of men’s engagements with day-to-day interior design and decoration – with the arrangement, appearance, colour and texture of domestic interiors, including fixtures, furnishings and ornamentation. The focus is not professional design and decoration. Rather, I draw on data 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 reconceptualise, the relationships between masculinity, domestic life and the modern home. The material includes in-depth interviews, reflective diaries and home tours conducted with 52 men. From analysing this data I suggest that there has been, arguably, a shift in men’s material and ontological connections to the domestic sphere in twenty-first century Sydney. Against traditional stereotypes of feminine domesticity, the men in this study are active in practices of interior design and decoration, deciding the style and appearance of their homes alone and alongside their partners. Consequently, these men are ever more engaged with the aesthetics of domestic materiality, emphasising its importance for expressing identities, cementing relationships and fostering feelings of comfort and wellbeing. With these shifting gendered practices of homemaking, new (domestic) masculine subjectivities are possible. As I have argued elsewhere, as men make homes they create and reconstitute masculinities (Gorman-Murray 2008a).