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.

The richly illustrated book Without and within: essays on territory and the interior contains a series of essays that trace a thread of ideas,