Erin Gates

Gates started the Elements of Style blog in 2007 while working as an interior designer in Boston, and it grew into the practice she runs now. The book is arranged room by room with the usual material about lighting and scale, then breaks that pattern with essays about her own life, including infertility and miscarriage, which is not what the genre normally does between a sofa and a rug. Readers who arrived for paint colours have tended to remember those pages instead.