design. It featured Morris and his partners’ designs for carefully crafted, simple, and straightforward furniture, textiles, and other decorative art objects. The Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop), which Hoffmann and others established in 1903, offered elegant, hand-made furniture and accessories in the newest Jugendstil idiom. Frank’s underlying philosophy for Haus & Garten, however, was different from that of either Morris or Hoffmann. Although he and Wlach insisted on the highest standards of craftsmanship, they rejected Morris’s emphasis on medieval styles and Hoffmann’s insistence on matched “suites” furniture; instead, they produced modern furniture and encouraged their clients to choose and match pieces at will, and to arrange them piecemeal in their rooms. But Frank also rejected the hard-edged geometric forms of the Bauhaus and other radical designers, specifying softened contours and ergonomic forms. “A modern living space,” he wrote in the early 1930s, “is not an art work, it is neither conspicuous, nor effective, nor exciting.” Rather, “it is comfortable, without one being able to say why, and the less reason that one can provide, the better it is.”

Frank’s many designs for Haus & Garten included sofas, chairs, tables, beds and desks, as well as lamps, pillows and printed textiles. The last were particularly important for Frank; he was convinced that brightly colored curtains and upholstery would foster a feeling of hominess and interest in modern spaces and domesticate what would otherwise be cold and unappealing rooms. His insistence on doing so brought the ire of many of his modernist contemporaries. When Frank installed a striking array of such fabrics in the interior of his house at the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, an exhibition of modern houses and interiors overseen by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, he was sharply criticized. (One Dutch architect referred to the spaces mockingly as “Frank’s bordello.”) But Frank remained undaunted, and throughout the later 1920s and