Designing and consuming the modern in Turkey

The materiality of interior space reveals a celebration of some ideas, values, beliefs, visions, and even ideologies, while suppressing others. Its reading provides an intriguing social history and serves as a tool through which we can make sense of dominant design concepts, inclinations, and preferences oating around globally at a historical moment in a society. Although never fully in command of how interiors are shaped, all actors responsible for their creation, such as owners, users, decorators, interior designers, and architects, contribute to the discursive formation of certain concepts such as modernity ( Gürel 2008: 230 ). This chapter discusses the production and consumption of design and modernity through design practices in Turkey. From late-nineteenth-century Ottoman palaces to twentieth-century domestic spaces, the chapter shows how design served as a mechanism for constructing and consuming modern identities associated with Westernization.