4/07/2023
The main characteristics of the modern style are without fail functionality, essentiality and technology: all the furnishings and environments must be designed to be as functional as possible, trying to reduce the superfluous to a minimum and recreating an orderly, clean environment with essential lines , referring in some respects to minimalism, despite being much less rigid and bare.
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Despite the clean shapes and lines, modernism however leaves room for decorations and irregular geometric shapes, as long as they are delicate and coherent with the rooms of our home, for example by opting for design wallpaper, characterized by particular geometries, or possibly evaluating a modern coffee table with a great stylistic impact.
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In reference to the colors, at the base of the modern style, we find black and white, in general therefore neutral colors, combined with earthy shades, such as ochre, caramel, dove gray and beige. However, this does not preclude the possibility of adding a touch of colour, with stronger shades, to some furnishing elements or to some contrasting walls, including green, blue and some pastel shades, such as yellow and pale pink.
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As for the materials, in the modern style, glossy, smooth, brilliant and transparent ones predominate, including glass, ceramics and laminates, with metal and leather details. Even the wood effect can be added, but be careful not to overdo it, otherwise we could risk going out of style.
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A fundamental and essential element is certainly technology: in a modern design, innovative details of the latest generation cannot be missing, in a constantly evolving world, based on technological progress. Without a doubt, smart homes can only be synonymous with modern style.
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Finally, let's not forget the importance of lighting: in order to be able to recreate a perfect style in a modern key, we must start from the architecture of the building, in fact modern houses tend to have very large windows, which let in a lot of light and they illuminate the rooms, of enormous importance for this style. No less important are the artificial light points, useful for highlighting some corners with a strong design impact and for remaining in line with functionality and technological avant-garde, typical of this style, also in terms of systems.
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Interior Designer since 1985
CEO & Founder, Italian Design in the World
The prejudice comes from years of institutional rooms where function crushed aesthetics. In residential work, things have changed: handles that are objects, walk-in showers that are elegance before aid, wide doors and near-invisible thresholds that are build quality before regulation. The gap is not budget: it is awareness that dignity lives in daily details — the ones you touch hundreds of times a year.
Open a catalogue of contemporary homes and you often find cover-worthy kitchens, theatrical bathrooms, living rooms that look like photo sets. Between one image and the next, a narrow corridor appears, lit by a sad single point — or a vestibule reduced to a knot between doors. That is not a technical detail: it is silent design about what life spends most of its time doing — passing through, pausing, shifting register, leaving one room before entering another.
Open plan has dominated the image of the contemporary home: few walls, few boundaries, maximum flexibility. The promise was freedom — kitchen in dialogue with the living room, light flowing, no "closed" rooms. Over time many have discovered the downside: noise travelling, no refuge, difficulty concentrating or switching off. The response isn't to go back to the closed-off house of the past, but to rethink the value of dedicated spaces: environments with a clear function that the body and mind learn to recognise.
Interior design has long favoured sight: colours, shapes, surfaces. Only recently have we started to talk about touch and smell. Hearing, by contrast, remains the most neglected sense at the design stage — yet it's the one we can't switch off. We live in homes that boom, reverberate, carry voices and noise from one room to another. The result is stress, fatigue, difficulty concentrating and resting.
For decades interior design has chased the idea of a "perfect", unchanging space: same colours, same lights, same layout twelve months a year. The home as a photo set always ready, but often distant from the cycles that govern our body and our mood.Today a different idea is returning: the house as an organism that responds to the seasons. Not an aesthetic whim, but a response to the need to align the environments we live in with natural rhythms — light, temperature, colour, vegetation — with measurable benefits for sleep, concentration and wellbeing.March, with the equinox and the awakening of spring, is the ideal time to rethink interiors in a seasonal key.
For years, interior design has lived with a contradiction: an obsession with effect. Marble-effect. Wood-effect. Metal-effect. Stone-effect. A home that looks like something, rather than truly being something.