The world of inside

The 450 photos in this well-produced book show vastly different interiors from around the world yet so many of them share a common element: an oblong table with a few large books, all at right angles to the table sides, a sort of icon for culture and wealth. The author has selected a fascinating collection of interiors that immediately suggest the creative use of room elements like furniture, wall and floor coverings, fabrics, lighting, vegetation and especially colour. 

There are certainly some unique (and unorthodox) interiors to be seen. One of the rooms in Trip Haenisch's LA house has a seating unit in the shape of a boxing ring. Designer Paul Rudolph's New York townhouse has made a feature of transparency using a lot of Plexiglass, a similar thought occurred to Japanese architect Kengo Kuma who designed a three-level house almost entirely made of glass, the photo shows the dining room with its glass floor and ceiling and a translucent table and chairs. In Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico, Javier Senosiain created a biomorphic home with virtually no straight lines in any of the rooms, so he created custom furniture that reflected the curves of the interior. Aires Mateus, in Comporta, Portugal,  designed some small beach cabanas using local material, the eye-catching photo of the living room in one cabana shows the furniture standing on the beach sand floor.

Most of the interiors have one photo, two on a page but there are several whole page or over a spread. Obvious space limitations prevent more of each house being shown. I would like to have seen more of Kuma's house I mentioned and Pezo and von Ellrichshausen's Spanish house that has floor to ceiling glass walls that completely retract into the floor to create instant verandas and bring the landscape into the building. With so many interiors in the book, some now famous ones are included like the Eames House (oddly there are not too many Eames chairs and ottoman to be seen, I think I counted four throughout the book) Farnsworth House, Johnson's Glass House, Gwathmey House, Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo in Venice and Dieter Rams.

One thing I really liked about the book is the quality of the photos, actually helped by the author's long-term photographer Richard Powers, who took about two hundred of them. They all have very detailed captions. The back pages have a bibliography, index and a useful twenty-one-page Timeline with a thumbnail of each interior, dated from 1947 to 2021. 

I mentioned, above, the tables with their books, this one with its distinctive cover will surely be seen in future interior photos.