“If walls could talk.” For interior designer Michael Smith, such a fantasy is not so far removed from reality. In homes from Los Angeles to New York to Mallorca and for residents like Barack and Michelle Obama, Smith uses his design talents to create deeply personal spaces that speak to the attitudes, passions and peculiarities of each homeowner.

“If a home doesn’t reflect the personality of its owner, then the environment that we worked so hard to create won’t feel authentic or fully achieved,” he notes in his book, Classic by Design, which was released last October.

In the book’s glossy pages, filled with eye-catching photography by photographers Michael Mundy, Roger Davies, Magnus Mårding, Adrian Gaut, Miguel Flores-Vianna, Dominique Vorillon, Ricardo Labougle, Lisa Romerein and John Ellis, Smith walks through the details of some of his favorite projects, including two of his personal homes. And while they are all vastly different, existing everywhere from the side of a cliff to a skiing village to the top of a skyscraper, each space serves as a lesson in creating a sanctuary suiting both form and function.

“When he learned that as a writer I like to wander from room to room as I imagine a story, Michael created inviting nooks and havens in every space so that wherever I happened to be, there was a place to sit and invent,” Shonda Rhimes writes of the home Smith designed for her in the book’s forward. “He wants to know more than where you live. He wants to learn how you live.”

Through all 13 houses, this is not only demonstrated but taught. Smith empowers readers to learn and use this same method to translate their own dreams and desires into their spaces. And in doing so, readers can make their homes into reflections of themselves that speak to everyone who enters them.