Unseen Boundaries: Listening to domestic environments

The interwar period witnessed a heightened focus on domestic life and housing reforms, with state intervention aimed at improving living conditions. As historians like James G. Mansell have shown, noise was increasingly seen as a threat not only to public health but also to the privacy of the home, intruding on both physical and mental privacy. Despite this, the role of noise as a factor shaping domestic spaces has received little attention within architectural history. This paper situates its exploration within this overlooked context, focusing on the acoustic challenges faced in Gayfere House, Westminster, built by Oliver Hill for Lord and Lady Mount Temple in 1929.

To explore these challenges, Lady Mount Temple’s complaints to her architect serve as the starting point for an investigation into how noise undermined the intended privacy and functionality of domestic interiors, challenging the notion of the home as a protected, peaceful refuge. Through the sonic landscape of Gayfere House this paper argues that noise acted as an invisible but potent force, influencing how people experienced and inhabited their homes. Building on this case study, the paper will ask: how can we ‘listen’ to the archive and recover the sounds that once filled these spaces?

By considering the sonic dimensions of domestic life, we can access different ways of understanding the lived experience of historical environments, expanding beyond the visual and material evidence that typically dominates architectural studies. This approach not only deepens our knowledge of how interwar homes functioned but also challenges the ocularcentric tendencies in the history of domesticity, offering a more holistic view of the domestic sphere under siege.