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
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.
For years, we designed homes as if they had to pass a constant visual exam: perfect light, perfect white, the right chair, the right vase. Interiors built to be photographed more than lived in. Digital aesthetics — polished, minimal, hyper-ordered — entered interior design like an unspoken rule: if it isn’t “clean,” it isn’t beautiful; if it isn’t coherent, it isn’t successful; if it can’t be shown, it isn’t desirable.In 2026, this narrative is losing its power. Not because beauty matters less, but because beauty alone is no longer enough. A new need is emerging: anti-algorithm interiors, spaces not designed for the shot, but for everyday life. Less performative homes, more real ones. Environments that don’t seek approval — they restore energy.This is not a return to chaos. It’s a return to meaning.
For years, open-plan living symbolized contemporary domestic design: fluid, bright, without barriers. A response to the desire for freedom, openness, and visual continuity.Today, that promise is being reconsidered. In 2026, many projects mark a shift — not a rejection of open space, but its critical evolution. The return of thresholds.
One of the most underestimated challenges in contemporary design is time. Not the time required to design a space, but the time the space must endure: years of daily life, change, wear, and transformation.