At last week's Salone del Mobile in Milan, event organisers launched an exhibition, Il diavolo del focolare (The devil of hearth and home), which focuses on female artists' interpretations of domesticity - from Tracey Emin quilts to a Chiho Aoshima installation, Sam Taylor-Wood photographs to a welcome mat made of nails from Mona Hartoum. The show doesn't begin to do justice to its vast and controversial subject. But it's interesting in that it officially recognises - albeit belatedly - a significant shift: the arrival of women in their modern guise.
Historically the Milan design scene has been very male-dominated, with archangels such as Achille Castiglione, Vico Magistretti, and Ettore Sottsass reigning unchallenged for decades. Their successors are also male - Jasper Morrison, Alfredo Haberli, Konstantin Grcic and others - but being less playful and sensual than their forebears, their designs have been high on concept, manufacturing and visual values, cool in every sense.
Hence, a vacuum for the warm, the human and the emotional - those right-brain qualities that drive other industries - was created. These traits are, of course, not only found in the female domain. But, whether it's cultural or genetic, women do tend to be good at them.
Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola excels in this regard. So perhaps it's not surprising that so many companies presented pieces by her at this year's Salone. Moroso offered a new sofa that respects how people sit and connect socially, while Artelano had a new chair in three profoundly different finishes, showing how it's often material, not just form, that affects how we feel about our surroundings. Hella Jongerius was equally prominent.
Female designers are the ones thinking of use in a more pragmatic way today - following the few but notable exceptions to the male hegemony through history. Take Nanna Ditzl's hanging egg chair, for example, Eva Zeisel's sensual ceramics, and the work of Eileen Gray, who famously said: "Technique is not everything. One must build for man, so that he may rediscover for himself the joy of feeling . . . as in a whole that extends and completes him." Even avowed modernist Charlotte Perriand designed a chaise longue considered by osteopaths to be the most healthy of its type.
The relative absence of the feminine in contemporary design before now is curious since so much of the furniture is created for the home, an arena in which women make most purchasing decisions. (Ikea estimates that 74 per cent of its customers are female.) In fact, according to architecture professor Witold Rybczynski, the very notion of "home" was invented by women; his book, Home: a Short History of an Idea, credits 17th century Dutch housewives who kicked workers out of the house and invented the concept of private domestic life.
The idea of an "angel of the hearth" dominated for centuries. The ultimate concerns of women were seen to be home-centred and hundreds of products were created for them - from Catherine Beecher and Christine Frederick's books on scientific household management and cleanliness to the time-and-motion-inspired kitchen designed for the Bauhaus in 1926 by Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky, who even as a communist took domestic efficiency as the starting point for feminism.
Some women did have a broader impact on design but largely behind the scenes, either as formidable organisers, such as Castiglione's wife, or as lesser-known collaborators, such as Lily Reich, Mies van der Rohe's design muse, who worked with him early on. (For the record, some of the top design classics were created by couples, most notably Charles and Ray Eames and Alvar and Aino Aalto.) Other women, such as Maddalena de Padova, Patrizia Moroso and Elenora Zanotta, acted on the business side as commissioners and retailers.
So why has it taken until the last few years for female designers to really make their mark? Part of the problem has been education. In the Bauhaus's early years, for example, women were only allowed to do weaving and bookbinding - until bookbinding was cancelled. We were left with the genius of Gunta Stolzl's carpets and Annie Albers' textiles. But who knows what they might have done had they tried architecture or furniture?
Now, the balance of the sexes is being redressed, with more young women coming through schools such as the Design Academy Eindhoven (headed by Li Edelkoort) and excelling even in historically male-dominated fields such as technology. Urquiola, Jongerius and others are winning acclaim, and their predeccesors are finally being recognised, as in the Le Corbusier collection at Cassina, which prominently credited Perriand.
Il diavolo del focolare acknowledges all this change and shows how far the feminine perception of home has moved. In spite of its flaws, it is a significant stepforward - above all in Milan.
Studio Ilse, tel: +44 (0)20-7928 0550, www.studioilse.com
'Il diavolo del focolare' runs through April 30 at the Triennale di Milano, tel: +39 02 724341, www.triennale.it
