Every year we sit down as a studio and ask ourselves the same question: what are we actually seeing in the homes we're designing, and what do our clients want that they couldn't articulate twelve months ago? The answer in 2026 is less about a single dominant aesthetic and more about a collective correction — away from the cold, the performative, and the trendy, toward the warm, the tactile, and the enduring.
These are the interior design trends we're working with across our Los Angeles and South Florida projects this year. Some are new. Some are a continuation of directions that started two or three years ago and have now fully arrived. And a few are quiet counter-moves against things that have had their moment.
1. Warm minimalism replaces cold minimalism
The all-white, hard-surfaced, clinically spare interior has been fading for a few years now, and 2026 feels like the year it's finally gone. What's replacing it isn't maximalism — it's a warmer, softer version of the same restraint. The same commitment to editing, the same lack of clutter, but built from materials that breathe: linen, raw oak, travertine, terracotta, aged brass, rattan.
The shift is about temperature, not volume. Rooms still feel calm and uncluttered, but they feel inhabited rather than staged. A warm minimalist living room might have only eight pieces of furniture — but all eight feel like they belong to someone, like they have a history. That quality of seeming collected rather than specified is what our clients are asking for most consistently.
Columbus Way
2. Sculptural furniture as focal point
For the better part of a decade, furniture was largely background. The architecture and the finishes were the stars, and the furniture filled the space without demanding attention. That's changing. In 2026, we're seeing furniture — particularly sofas, lounge chairs, and dining tables — doing real compositional work in a room.
The shapes are organic and considered: curved backs, sculptural bases, forms that read as objects rather than just surfaces to sit on or eat at. Materials are doing the same work — a dining table in travertine or a sofa in a bouclé that stops people in their tracks. These pieces don't need accessories to justify them. They're the room's reason for being.
What this means practically: clients are willing to invest more in one or two exceptional furniture pieces and spend less elsewhere. We're designing rooms around a single extraordinary sofa or a table that took three months to source. The trade-off in budget allocation is worth it — those pieces anchor everything else and give a room a point of view.
3. Layered, considered lighting
This is not a new trend so much as a trend that finally has clients' full attention. Layered lighting — the combination of ambient, task, and accent sources, with careful attention to colour temperature and dimming — is now one of the first conversations we have with clients rather than an afterthought at the end of a project.
In 2026, the specific moves we're making: lower ambient light levels (rooms that aren't trying to be as bright as an office), more table lamps and floor lamps rather than relying exclusively on recessed cans, warmer colour temperatures throughout (2700K rather than 3000K), and statement pendants that contribute to the architecture of a room as much as its illumination.
Peary Way
4. Materials that improve with age
There's a strong counter-reaction underway against interiors that look perfect on day one and worse every year after. Clients are increasingly drawn to materials with genuine patina potential — things that will develop character rather than just wearing out. Unlacquered brass that oxidises. Concrete that picks up variation. Leather that softens. Linen that relaxes. Reclaimed wood that already has a history before it arrives.
This is both an aesthetic preference and a practical one. An interior built from materials that age gracefully doesn't need to be refreshed every five years. It looks better in year ten than it did in year one. For high-end residential work, that durability is increasingly a selling point — clients are thinking about their homes as investments in the truest sense, not just financially but in terms of quality of life over time.
We're specifying unlacquered brass hardware on almost every project right now. We're using more honed and leathered stone surfaces rather than polished. And we're steering clients away from high-gloss lacquer finishes on cabinetry toward matte and satin alternatives that don't telegraph every fingerprint.
5. The return of the dining room
The open-plan kitchen-living-dining layout had a very long run, and it's not going away entirely — but we're seeing a meaningful return of interest in dedicated dining rooms, or at least in creating a genuine sense of enclosure and occasion around dining. A table in the corner of a great room isn't the same thing as a dining room, and in 2026, clients are remembering why.
What's driving this: people want to entertain again, and they want to entertain well. A dedicated dining space — or a dining area separated from the living space by architectural elements, lighting, or a change in ceiling height — makes dinner feel like an event rather than just a meal. We're adding pocket doors, ceiling treatments, moody lighting schemes, and significant wall treatments to dining areas across our current project list.
Dining Rooms
6. Biophilic design — done properly
"Biophilic design" became a buzzword a few years ago and suffered the usual fate: it was reduced to its most superficial expression, which mostly meant putting a large potted plant in a corner and calling it done. In 2026, the real version of biophilic design is having a moment — which means integrating living systems into the architecture of a space, not decorating around them.
This looks like: built-in planters that are part of the millwork, living walls that frame a view or divide a space, interior courtyards where the architecture allows, and careful attention to natural light and its quality throughout the day. The goal isn't a botanical garden inside the house — it's a sense that the interior is in conversation with the outside, that the boundary between the built and the natural is porous and intentional.
7. Art as architecture
Art has always been part of the residential interior, but we're seeing a shift in how it's integrated. Rather than artwork being selected to complement a finished room, we're increasingly designing rooms around specific pieces — or at least around the kind of piece the client intends to acquire. The art is driving architectural decisions about wall scale, ceiling height, and lighting specification.
Large-format works on paper, oversized photography, and sculptural installations are particularly prominent. A single piece that takes up most of a wall — properly lit, properly framed by the architecture around it — can do more for a room than an entire gallery wall of smaller works. We're also seeing more clients commission works directly from artists they admire, which brings a layer of personal narrative to the interior that no amount of careful sourcing can replicate.
Frances
What's on its way out
A trends piece isn't complete without noting what's fading. In 2026, we're seeing less of: all-white kitchens (finally); open shelving in kitchens as a primary storage solution (it looks good in photos and is exhausting to maintain); greige as a dominant colour direction (it had a very long run); farmhouse aesthetics of all kinds; and the ubiquitous gallery wall, which has become a shorthand for "interior design" in the same way the shiplap wall did before it.
None of these things are wrong if they suit a space and a client genuinely. But they've lost the quality of feeling considered — they feel like defaults rather than decisions. The most interesting interiors in 2026 feel like they were designed for a specific person in a specific place, not assembled from a mood board of trends.
A note on restraint
The meta-trend underlying all of the above is restraint. Not austerity — restraint. The willingness to leave something out, to let a room breathe, to trust that a few exceptional things will outperform a room full of good things. This is harder than it sounds and easier to say than to do. It requires confidence from the designer and trust from the client. But the rooms that result are the ones people come back to — the ones that feel inexplicably right years after they were completed.
That's what we're designing toward in 2026. If you're thinking about a project and want to talk through what it might look like, book an intro call — we'd be glad to hear what you're working on.
