Notes from the Studio: What 2025 Has Taught Us About the Way People Want to Live

We are midway through a year that has felt, from inside the studio, like a quiet inflection point. The projects we are working on are not dramatically different from those of previous years — they are still, at their core, about creating homes that are beautiful, considered, and deeply personal. But the conversations we are having with clients have shifted in ways that feel significant. And those conversations, more than any trend report or trade fair, tell us something true about where domestic life is heading.

The clearest pattern: people are asking for less. Not in the sense of budget or ambition — those remain high — but in terms of visual complexity. After years of layered, collected, richly accessorised interiors, a striking number of clients are arriving with a different kind of aspiration. They want rooms that feel settled and clear. They are tired of spaces that demand attention. They want to come home and feel rested.

This has translated, in our work, into a renewed focus on quality of material over quantity of object. Clients are choosing fewer pieces and spending more on each one. They are asking for built-in storage — not just for practicality, but because they want surfaces to be clear. They are interested in rooms that do not shout, that do not perform, that simply exist in a state of quiet confidence. This is not minimalism in the cold, spare sense of the word. It is something closer to calmness as an interior design value.

A second pattern: the relationship between inside and outside has never been more important to the people we work with. Across projects spanning urban apartments and rural retreats, nearly every client is asking how the interior can be extended, opened, or at minimum visually connected to what lies beyond the glass. This is partly a response to the years when that boundary was forcibly closed. But it goes deeper than that — it reflects a genuine desire for interiors that are porous, that breathe, that exist in dialogue with light, season, and landscape rather than in opposition to them.

The third shift is harder to name, but we feel it clearly: clients are asking for permanence. Not in a conservative sense — they are not asking for traditional interiors — but in the sense of wanting spaces built to last. Built of materials that age well. Built in a way that does not require reinvention every five years. There is a wariness, we think, of the disposable and the trend-driven. People want to invest — financially and emotionally — in a home that will still be right for them in twenty years.

For us, these are not inconvenient constraints. They are precisely the conditions under which we do our best work. The clients asking for calm, for connection, for permanence are asking for exactly what considered, unhurried design can deliver. And they remind us, in the midst of a busy year, why this work continues to matter.