Why minimalism never feels neutral

Interiors with less, as opposed to more, have long been intellectually positioned as spaces that are more refined, more considered and more evolved.

Less colour. Less stuff. Less character. Less personality.

The underlying promise is a familiar one: that restraint leads to calm. That a pared-back home will feel easier to live in, less emotionally intrusive, more serene.

But I’ve come to wonder what this idea assumes. If a restrained, neutral home is framed as the clearest route to calm, where does that leave colour, pattern and stuff accumulated over the years? Do they automatically equate noise, mess and emotional clutter?

In practice, they often do.

And yet I don’t believe our homes are at their best when they ask nothing of us. I don’t think emotional neutrality always offers comfort, nor emptiness necessarily calm.

I also think our surroundings need to support us more generously than that, and give us back something far more powerful and stimulating than blankness or restraint.

Minimalist interiors are often designed to feel timeless and lacking in personal history - in the sense that you’re not aware of the human who is actually living there.

For some people that absence of ‘life’s stuff’ is calming. But for others, emotional fullness comes from the opposite: from filling their home with objects they've collected over the years, from visual reminders of where they’ve been and what they’ve brought with them on their journey through life.

And colour can also play a role in that.

Certain shades mean different things to us at different stages of our lives - one decade we may love them, another we may not. And some colours might always be in our decorating arsenal as we move from home to home - offering a sense of the familiar that helps us to settle into new places that don’t yet feel like ours. Hues that don’t just layer top level colour over a space, but wrap it in something far deeper - a kind of emotional blanket that offers a sense of security whilst we adjust to unknown surroundings.

And I think that kind of support comes from a place of generosity, rather than from continual paring back.

Because colour has a way of stimulating us - whether we’re aware of it or not. Pattern, too, feels deeply familiar - something our brains recognise long before we even try to analyse it, born from a time when we first started to notice the rhythms and repetitions built into our natural environment.

And if colour and pattern are everywhere in our world, how can homes stripped of them ever feel comforting?