Stephanie Sabbe’s Interiors of a Storyteller is as much a memoir as it is a book about design. Sabbe is from West Virginia, but she built her career as an interior designer in Nashville, Tennessee. Her affinity for Southern storytelling is clear: Woven throughout the photographs of beautiful homes are personal stories about an absentee dad, a dying mother, even an FBI raid of an uncle’s marijuana crop. “The world around me was literally going up in smoke,” she writes, “and I lay in the treehouse with a smile on my face, staring up at the sky, dreaming of my next construction project.” The home that immediately follows the story of the burning crops reminds Sabbe of her West Virginia treehouse. The Writer’s Cottage, as Sabbe describes it, is an elegant place that Sabbe designed while envisioning former first ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama staying there one day, perhaps on a writers’ retreat together. The book’s final chapter details where Sabbe sourced materials for each project, so inspired readers might be able to replicate some of her designs. Each home is different, but one cohesive element is the presence of books. “Books, books, and more books,” Sabbe writes. “My clients as a whole are a pretty literate group.” Interiors of a Storyteller will delight Southerners, designers and fans of storytelling of all stripes.
