From March, the Design Museum in Ghent will host the travelling exhibition ‘Home Stories’, produced by the internationally renowned furniture brand Vitra. In it, curators Jochen Eisenbrand and Anna-Mea Hoffmann showcase 100 years of interior design history, represented by twenty visionary domestic interiors. Starting from the present, the exhibition—presented in reverse chronological order—highlights three recent designs: Assembles Granby Four Streets, Arno Brandlhuber’s Antivilla in Berlin, and the pastel-coloured pocket apartment by the Spanish firm Elii. From there, the curators guide visitors step by step through the last century via four different galleries. They conclude at Elsie de Wolfe’s Villa Trianon, which, as the first professional interior designer, serves as the starting point for this exhibition.

The various interiors are not only visually illustrated through a combination of isolated pieces of furniture and life-size imagery, but are consistently contextualised within the key social developments of their time. Within this narrative, there appears to be room for (Western) interior designs of all kinds. For example, alongside modernist classics such as Mies and Loos, there is room for the temporarily exhibited House of the Future by Alison and Peter Smithson, which illustrates the radical spirit of progress of the 1950s. Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower tells a story of a new, organic urbanism in 1960s Japan, and ample attention is also paid to the ubiquity of Ikea.