Available as an Open Access publication, Intimate Interiors explores how a growing desire for individual expression, the concealment of domestic labor and enslavement, and an increasing appetite for comfort and solace reshaped eighteenth-century interiors. By examining architectural, visual, and material culture, the book foregrounds the interconnected roles of intimacy, privacy, informality, and sociability in shaping the period's increasingly specialized domestic spaces.

Across eleven innovative chapters that explore issues of gender, politics, travel, exoticism, imperialism, sensorial experiences, identity, interiority, and modernity, this volume demonstrates how intimacy was a fundamental goal in the planning of private quarters. In doing so, the political nature of private spaces is uncovered, whilst highlighting the contradictions and complexities of these highly performative “private” interiors. Employing distinct methodological perspectives across various geographical sites, from Turkey to Versailles, Britain to Benin, Intimate Interiors draws as-yet untraced connections between Enlightenment Europe, imperial outposts, and major metropolitan centers across the globe.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by Vanderbilt University.

Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY. She has received fellowships from NEH, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fulbright Program, and the John Carter Brown Library.

Christopher M. S. Johns was the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, USA, and a founding member of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture.