Wikimedia Commons has an incredible collection of Fayum mummy portraits from 1st-3rd century Roman Egypt. They could be people from my street. The one above and this one are my favourites.
history
Joseph Gandy’s Rural Essentialism
We’re used to seeing crisp white surfaces as a marker of urbane essentialism—c.f. O.M. Ungers’ Haus 3, or Loos’s Müller House—so it’s a little disorienting to remember that what we talk about as ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ has had quite different connotations in the past. For J.M Gandy (see this profile by Christopher Woodward) in 1805, for example, it was a matter of rustic humility. In his book Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London: John Harding) we find these stark white boxes: windows punched, untrimmed and horizontally oriented; surfaces unornamented; and with minimal overhangs. The images are somewhat surprising, given the sensitivity to materials, light, massing, and detail in his more famous images for John Soane.
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate V.)
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate XVII.)
Interior as a Spiderweb
In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir.”
Walter Benjamin (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.216. [ emphasis mine ]
Diffusive Architectures 
