With more than 500 photographs and illustrations packing its already information-rich 400 pages, The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us, might just be the defining text on the history of interiors. “We spend between 90 to 98 percent of our existence indoors,” begins interior designer and professor Graeme Brooker in his introduction. “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why, how or from where the forms of interiorism that you occupy have emerged?” The book answers all these questions and more by slowly dissecting every element of an interior space. It is divided into three parts—The Room, The Private Interior and The Public Interior—and each of them could easily stand on its own as a fully realized book. The Room is conceptually rich, breaking down a room into its most miniscule parts. So much can be written about an interior’s ceiling, from Michaelangelo’s venerated Sistine Chapel fresco in the Vatican to British artist Tracey Emin’s “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995,” which uses the inside of a camping tent to pay homage to Emin’s former bedfellows and lovers “like a prehistoric cave adorned with paintings.” A disregard for traditional cultural hierarchy serves Brooker well throughout the book and keeps it just as fun to read as it is informative. In a section dedicated to bathrooms, a single spread includes film stills of Marilyn Monroe taking a bubble bath in The Seven Year Itch right next to the haunting pea green bathroom from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but also a photograph of a rustic (and kind of gross, by my 21st-century standards) medieval toilet chamber and an ambitious contemporary 2010 art installation called “The Portable Psycho Shower Scene Stage Set Party.” As if in explanation for the breadth of images, Brooker explains that bathrooms are one of the few interior spaces where people regularly disrobe: “Intimacy and vulnerability are therefore mixed with the rituals of cleansing, creating a potent combination.” These unexpected connections make The Story of the Interior the perfect curiosity-sating companion for anyone living within four walls.