This book inaugurates a new series of publications under the title Stones devoted to interior design, and presents an overview of new homes, the home being increasingly the place that best shows the altered anthropological conditions of new architectural ideas. The book showcases twenty such homes, twenty mini-narratives, each one conveying an individual lifestyle and design for living, and illustrative of the shifting frontiers in which the common denominator seems to be the quest for new interior models and functional blueprints that can express, through specifically architectural means, quite distinct identities. The theme that continues to gain momentum, as evinced here, is not so much that of the visual language as of whether interior design can manage to interpret the nature of the living space now that the field has broken free of all the pre-coded formulas and imposed vernaculars. For this reason it is misleading to sum up the various ideas in linguistic terms: these fragments are not intended merely as an eclectic overview, but a document of the complex upheaval that interior design has been undergoing, branching out in all directions at the start of the new millennium with a spate of new ideas on the home as the "mirror of the soul," and meanwhile reinvesting the act of designing with its former poetic and conceptual contents.