WHAT, OR WHEN, IS INTERIORS? In December 2013, interiors designed by the Lyons architecture practice Dank caused a minor flurry on the pages of Dezeen. Or, at least, the photographs they'd taken of them did. The idea for these images had come to the architects after they had paid their clients a visit in their completed flat, and had found "a complete mess, with empty bottles of Champagne on the table and wrapping paper all over the floor" (Frearson, A. 2013) Rather than tidying the place up, Dank decided to recreate the mess for the photoshoot they had planned for the property. Rather than the pristine state usual in most architectural images, the photographs they sent to Dezeen showed the flat in three states: all laid out for a dinner party, with tea lights lit on a table laid for a meal; with the party in progress-the space animated by figures blurred in movement; and the morning after, with the remaining survivors slumped on the sofa. Reactions were mixed. 'Concerned citizen' found the photos 'a distraction from the design' (Frearson, A. 2013) while 'LOW' felt that the conceit had not been taken far enough: 'I don't think any of the people involved in this have had a proper house party.' (Frearson, A. 2013) 'Robert' found the whole thing rather too staged: 'There is something about the way that the party string has been placed carefully on the banister that is very off-putting' (Frearson, A. 2013) while 'Jorrs' asked: 'Haven't Ikea done this 99999999999 times already?' (Frearson, A. 2013) It was a mild-mannered joke, played on-and about-the carefully styled pages of Dezeen (or the IKEA catalogue), but it's a telling one, too, about the ways in which we, as both producers and consumers of interiors imagine them. In this paper, I shall explore how this media flurry can help us think about an answer to the odd grammar of the question that this journal poses: what is interiors? *** Recent academic discourse has favoured a view of interiors as, as the very word (a plural adjective curiously used as a singular noun) suggests: a plural, inclusive and open-ended discipline. Much writing (the author's included) has argued that interiors themselves are plural, inclusive and open-ended things too-if things they are at all. Brooker and Stone's Re-readings (2004) or Fred Scott's On Altering Architecture (2007) position works of interior architecture as altered states and state of alterations: classic examples of the postmodern open work. Drawing on curatorial theory and Elizabeth Grosz' readings of Deleuze, Susie Attiwill's writing (2013) decentres the interior as a 'thing', talking instead of a process of 'interiorisation' that sets interiors and the subjects that inhabit them in temporal and temporary
