By the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1925, the idea that an interior and its furnishings should form a complete design--a "total look"--dominated the thinking of both designers and their sophisticated clients. In the later 1920s and 1930s, whole studios were established, notably in France and the United States, to serve the needs of a design- and style-conscious middle class intent on showing off its newly refined taste for things modern and...