When we come up with a theme for an issue of The World of Interiors, we draw our perimeter and turn our attention to as much of what falls within that line as is possible. This month that boundary takes the shape of a human body (less crime-scene chalk out-line, more Cerne Abbas Giant).
Months ago, our indomitable style director Ruth Sleightholme posited the idea of a ‘body issue’: an exploration of how the human form is depicted on and within interiors; the multitude of ways in which a space can be about bodies and how our anatomies can relate to space. At a moment when conversations around artificial intelligence boil over with rage and confusion, it feels all the more important to return focus to the blood and guts of it all.
Alongside the magazine, we have also created a limited-edition publication entitled Top Shelf, in which we lift the curtain on the history of sex and erotica within interiors and design. This is a beautiful object, filled with wild stories and some eye-popping images; titillating, tantalising, strange and moving, these visuals provide a pictorial account of humans and our relationship with eroticism across time. They butt up against essays on, among other things, the role of women’s bodies in 20th-century design and Catherine the Great’s X-rated furniture collection. You can buy Top Shelf via our website and at a select group of stockists.
But for now, let’s return to this, our September issue, where each story explores a different facet of the human body. There’s the tale of Audrey Marie Munson, an aspiring actress turned artist’s model who posed for dozens of statues across New York; whose ‘sculpted form graced bridges and ballrooms alike’. Munson lived an exceptional life, and it is chronicled beautifully by Rosalind Jana. In this month’s Room for Debate, Adrienne Childs writes about the phenomenon of ‘ornamental blackness’ – ‘the transformation of the Black body into a decorative motif in luxury arts’. She writes: ‘Beauty can obfuscate, and it seems heightened cultural awareness has not reckoned with the manner in which design can normalise racist tropes.’
Heading down to the south of France, we call on painter and ceramicist Lydia Corbett – once known as Sylvette David, ‘the girl with the ponytail’ who modelled for Picasso in 1954. Her house doubles down on her artistic talents: in ‘a testament to her own freewheeling creative eye,’ as Zing Tsjeng reports, ‘she has covered it with luminous murals of angels, saints, flowers, animals and pilgrims’. From elsewhere, we’ve gathered a series of engravings by Baroque printer Martin Engelbrecht that depict men and women clad in the tools of their trade – including a butcher’s wife got up, as Stephen Patience brilliantly puts it, in ‘a “meat dress” some three centuries before Lady Gaga’.
Next up, WoI’s own Donna Salek writes of the relationship between exercise, ritual and community that has existed in the Iranian zurkhaneh, which literally translates to ‘house of strength’, for hundreds of years. Dal Chodha, meanwhile, examines Japanese craftsmanship through the eyes of designer Issey Miyake. ‘Oftentimes people from outside Japan view lacquerware as a craft object, something that you would put on a shelf to look at. But it is something held in our hands, connected to our bodies,’ says Satoshi Kondo, who leads the brand’s women’s collections today.
The handmade villa – covered with concrete people and more than a few severed heads – is ‘a Gesamtkunstwerk dreamed up by Emil Milan Grgurić, a Croatian outsider artist who dedicated his life to making it real’, in Jelena Dunato’s words. Another labour of love is Paimio, a tuberculosis sanatorium built on the edge of a Finnish forest by the pioneering design duo Alvar and Aino Aalto. The building is innately humane; designed to care for its occupants, it is, as Jane Withers writes, ‘an eloquent reminder of architecture’s power to heal’.
We revisit a story first published in WoI in 1992: an underground ossuary created in Czechia in the 19th century. Michael Huey, who wrote about this strange place then, returns to its ‘grotesque beauty’ and raises the ethical questions that surround its restoration. Finally, Lottie Jackson writes this month’s Object Lesson about a tiny self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, an artist who, due in part to an accident at 18, throughout her life ‘experienced cycles of physical trauma and reconstruction’.
It has been such a pleasure putting together this issue, in all its fleshy glory. Nothing shown on these pages has much of a life without a body to interact with: an empty bed, an unread book, a disused table, an idle spoon. We can, if we choose, outsource our thinking and our imagination to machines, or we can stay put within our brilliant, complicated, flawed bodies and use them as instruments to reimagine the world around us. I hope this edition of The World of Interiors tempts you to do just that.
A version of this story appeared in the September 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
