‘Imagining Interiors’ is a deliberately ambiguous title, that can refer both to the process of making things up, creating, dreaming, describing and so on; and also, more literally, to the activity of making images.

In The Emergence of the Interior (2008) the interior historian Charles Rice writes of the ‘doubleness’ of the designed interior – both as a space to be occupied, and an image to be contemplated. Today, in a world saturated by images imagined by machines, what might that doubleness actually mean? What opportunities might it present to people who design, build, and occupy – imagine – interiors?

Extending from the 2025 Imagining Interiors conference, this special issue of Idea Journal invited contributions that re-imagine interiors – that is, what interiors might be, as practice or product, as both essays and images. These re-imaginings will interest the designers, historians and theorists of interiors and those who study its representation (imagination) in film, fiction, journalism and other media.