Interiors without walls: choice in context at MoDA

Museums offer narratives, usually contructed around objects. The decision-makers within museums have to choose their narratives, and they make those choices in the context of institutional, professional, financial and personal factors. This chapter looks at the way that the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA) chose to represent the domestic interior, and suggests that a congruence in the distinct discourses of professional museum practice and of academic attention to the domestic environment has supported interpretations that focus on the demotic and, increasingly, on personal experience.