5/15/2026
Stepping into a new home isn't only visual — it's chemical.
Oiled wood, beeswax, lime, raw wool, leather as it ages, metal warming up: real scents signal care and presence. By contrast, the sequence "glue + resin + hot plastic" is an anonymous language the body registers before any catalogue. We're not talking about reed diffusers — we're talking about matter that smells like itself, and how that olfactory signature supports or contradicts the rest of the project.

Sweet chemical, absolute neutral, "lab clean": it's a warning signal, not hygiene.
Surfaces that imitate other materials often bring a palette of solvents and sealants that persist. This isn't moralism — it's sensory sustainability. A room that "smells of nothing" for months may reassure whoever sells it, less so whoever lives there. Honest design includes the fading of installation odours — and the choice of finishes that, once stable, leave room for real domestic smells: coffee, textiles, potting soil.
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Three things to keep in mind before signing off a palette.
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Seeing with your fingers isn't enough — in a showroom you should be able to smell the difference.
Open samples, finishes not only behind glass, side-by-side comparisons: these are educational tools. For those who furnish, smelling two different oil treatments or two felts is part of the craft — like judging a vein in marble. Closing the olfactory loop means giving the client the awareness that home is also that dimension — and that it deserves the same rigour we give to millimetres and lux.
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Further reading
On the IDW blog: The Sound of the House: Acoustics, Silence and Absorbing Materials — because a home is not only seen: every sense deserves the same design rigour.
Partner: Tonatto Profumi — Italian haute parfumerie for the home: diffusers, candles and ambient scents for those who believe every room deserves its own olfactory signature.
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.