This book is concerned with recent research on the history of the domestic interior that has highlighted the significance of meanings embedded in the landscape, architecture, decoration and objects that comprise the furnishings and fittings of houses and homes, public and private buildings. That, despite the expansive reach of this field of research, encompassing grand, architectural schemes and minute inventoried, personal, belongings, often the interpretative and communicative aspects of art and design that make up the social meanings of these spaces is misrepresented or can be overly speculative. Therefore, in reflecting, remaking and reimagining historical interiors, the contributions of artists, designers, architects, landscape gardeners and craftspeople are foregrounded in constructing ideas of authenticity, transparency, and materiality in the making process, alongside scholarly study. This book explores such ideas by reflecting on how historical interiors are remade and reimagined by looking inside and out; at how a reassembling of spaces ought to avoid ‘a shrinking definition of the social itself’ (Latour, 2007). Surveying a range of interior ‘types’ from a number of historical periods, the book’s contributors are practitioners, scholars and makers, interested in how meaning is made in refashioning domestic and social spaces, and in public environments. Research for this book explores real and reimagined spaces, and explains how historical interiors and exteriors are made meaningful from a contemporary viewpoint, suggesting how they might be embedded in the social and grounded in the present.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10198/
• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10203