CSDI - The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London, brings together three institutions: the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London. Launched in September 2001, its goal is to develop new histories of the home, its contents, and its representation. It pursues research into the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of buildings, from tenements to palaces; the objects that furnished those rooms; the ways rooms and objects were depicted; the manner in which people used them; and how they thought about them.

Our research aims
The Centre integrates a range of disparate and often unconnected studies of the domestic interior from a variety of disciplines into a recognizable field of enquiry. The Centre’s work will feed into wider research in the arts and humanities, extend the ways the subject is understood in different academic disciplines, and contribute to new thinking about the display of interiors and domestic objects in museums and surviving historic houses. Knowledge generated by the Centre will be rigorously comparative in character and accessible to the widest possible range of scholars.

To disseminate its research, the Centre has a programme of symposia, conferences, and study days. Future plans include books and articles in academic journals arising out of the Centre’s research projects, and at least one major exhibition, on the domestic interior in Italy, 1400–1600, is planned at the Victoria and Albert Museum.