"The first major survey text on interior design for over a decade, A History of Interior Design delivers the inside story on 6,000 years of personal and public space. John Pile acknowledges that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries, in which construction, architecture, the arts and crafts, technology and product design all overlap. These topics are woven together in a fascinating narrative that runs from cave dwellings and temple architecture, through Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance palaces on to the grand civic spaces of the nineteenth century and the sleek interiors of modern sky-scrapers." "Embedded in a social and political context, detailed discussions of famous buildings, from the Parthenon to the Pompidou Centre, are interspersed with investigations of the domestic vernacular - the cottages, farmhouses, apartments and city terraces inhabited by ordinary people. Primary source quotations are used to provide contemporary perspectives on a wide variety of interior settings."--BOOK JACKET.