Bringing modernity home

<i>Bringing Modernity Home</i> offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post Second World War period. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of grim austerity and recovery from the war while the state and production considerations held sway when consumers couldn't afford taste. The case studies of so-called frivolous items like the cocktail cabinet the coffee table and the rise of DIY in the working-class homes of the new towns gives a flavor of the excitement and thrill they afforded designers makers and consumers after the harsh deprivations of the war.