11/17/2023
The Creativity Behind Mix & Match
Mix & match is not just about casually pairing disparate items. It's a form of creative expression that requires attention to detail, balance, and a clear vision. Start by identifying a main style or theme for your design that will serve as a guiding thread. This main style provides a solid foundation on which to build.



Matching Colors and Materials
Colors and materials are key elements in mix & match. The combination of color palettes can define the atmosphere of a space. For example, mixing neutral colors with pops of vibrant hues can create an engaging and lively environment. Combine different materials such as wood, glass, metal, and fabric to add depth and visual interest.




Eclectic Furniture
Furniture pieces are often the focal point of mix & match. Choose furniture that draws inspiration from different styles, such as vintage, modern, industrial, or rustic. This variety creates a compelling environment. For instance, a retro-style dining table can be paired with modern chairs for an eclectic touch.


The Art of Accessories
Decorative objects like paintings, mirrors, cushions, and lamps add character and personality to space. Choose pieces that inspire you or hold personal significance. These elements can also connect different parts of your design, creating a harmonious flow.



Maintaining Balance
While mix & match encourages diversity, it's essential to maintain balance. Too much mixing can lead to chaos. Ensure there is visual coherence, perhaps through a common color palette or a specific theme. Also, consider traffic flow and ergonomics to ensure the space is functional.


Interior Designer since 1985
CEO & Founder, Italian Design in the World
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.
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.