Go look at any of the sites behind the game Half Life. Not only do the designers of these sites embrace a particular aesthetic, but they do so with a fanaticism you seldom see in commercial Web sites. And I maintain that large-scale, commercial sites have a lot to learn from them. I especially enjoyed your chapter on speed. Some say I'm a bit obsessed myself with webref's front page.
Speed is the absolute most critical factor in the usability of a site.
Even the most elegant interface will fail if a user doesn't wait around for it to load. Not only that, but if your site is doing a fair amount of traffic, each byte on your pages is costing your company money in bandwidth. I was talking to the CIO of a big portal who had figured out that each character of HTML was costing them 19 cents a year. Definitely gets the point across. I'm big on getting small.