Book excerpt: Rather than attempting an encyclopaedic overview, the author proposed six potent interpretive themes-the Palace, the Garden, the Ruin, the Shed, the Network and the Machine-through which many exemplary interiors could be considered, so that the public interior might become more available to the imaginations of those who design them. All together here, the chosen exemplars form a kind of canon of the public interior. Submitted to interpretation in the context of these themes, they offer another lens through which they might be seen: as manifestations of ideas inscribed within material culture.