8/23/2024
Sight
Sight is the most immediately involved sense in interior design. Using colors, shapes, and lighting can significantly influence the atmosphere of a space. For example, warm tones like red and orange can make a space feel cozy and stimulating, while cool tones like blue and green can promote relaxation.

Touch
Touch is often overlooked in interior design, but it is crucial for creating a physical connection with the environment. Materials like wood, velvet, linen, and stone offer different tactile experiences. Incorporating surfaces with interesting textures can make spaces more inviting and comfortable.

Smell
Smell has a strong connection with memory and emotions. Using natural fragrances like lavender, eucalyptus, or citrus can enhance mood and well-being. Scented candles, essential oil diffusers, and aromatic plants are great ways to introduce pleasant scents into environments.

Hearing
Hearing can be stimulated through the use of natural sounds or music. Indoor fountains, natural sound diffusers, or simply good acoustics can transform a space. Ambient music can also create specific atmospheres, making spaces more welcoming or stimulating.

Taste
Although taste is the least directly involved sense in interior design, it can be creatively integrated. A well-decorated coffee corner, a kitchen with attractive accessories, or a dining room with details that invite you to enjoy food can enhance the overall experience of the space.

Designing spaces that stimulate all five senses can transform the perception and use of environments. Sensory design not only makes spaces more beautiful but also more functional and enjoyable to live in, improving overall well-being.
Interior Designer since 1985
CEO & Founder, Italian Design in the World
Kitchen and bathroom are where the home meets water every day — preparation, cleaning, care, rest. That is why they are also where the gap between beautiful in rendering and sustainable in use shows first: droplets at joints, twisted paths, light that lies about the face, surfaces that demand obsessive cleaning.
In the city, those few square metres beyond the door are often the only truce between the flat and the noise outside. They are not a decorative extra: they are a border — different light, different wind, different rules. Yet too many balconies stay storage for crates, folding chairs and rushed tiles, as if design stopped at the glass.
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.