The Story of the Interior traces the evolution of inside space from ancient Egyptian tombs to contemporary airports, reading the room — its walls, doors, windows, and furniture — as a record of how human life has been organised, imagined, and inhabited.
About This Book
Interior design history rarely manages to be both scholarly and genuinely wide-ranging. Graeme Brooker's survey, structured across three sections — The Room, The Private Interior, and The Public Interior — achieves both. Moving from antiquity to the present, the book traces how the fundamental elements of interior space have been conceived across wildly different cultural and functional contexts. Nomadic dwellings sit alongside Baroque palaces; Buddhist rock-cut temples are read alongside high-fashion retail environments. Brooker's method is to attend to the basic grammar of a room — wall, threshold, light, furniture, ambience — and show how these elements carry meaning and shape behaviour. The result is a serious contribution to interior architecture discourse that remains accessible to students and practitioners alike.
Key Features
- 400 pages of globally sourced case studies spanning architecture, urbanism, furniture design, art installation, and imagined spaces
- Author: Graeme Brooker
- Notable examples include Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, the Prada store in Marfa Texas, Sou Fujimoto's NA House, rock-cut Buddhist temples of India, medieval European castles, and ancient Egyptian tombs
- Published by Thames & Hudson
What You'll Discover
- How the basic elements of a room — wall, door, window, furniture, ambience — have remained consistent across millennia while accumulating radically different cultural meanings
- The distinction between private and public interiors as a framework for understanding how designed space shapes daily life, work, learning, and leisure
- How art installations and imagined spaces — not only built architecture — contribute to the history of interior thinking
- A global scope that places Western canonical interiors in genuine dialogue with non-Western spatial traditions, from Indian rock-cut temples to nomadic dwellings
About the Author
Graeme Brooker is the author of this survey of global interior history. His work engages with interior architecture across historical periods and cultural contexts, drawing on architecture, urbanism, and furniture design to build a comprehensive account of how inside spaces have been conceived and inhabited.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 400
- Dimensions: 223 x 290 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500027592
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Interior designers, architects, and design students seeking a historically grounded and geographically expansive account of how interior space has been conceived from antiquity to the present.