Back to basics - minimalistic interior design

Minimalism first conquered the visual arts, followed by design and architecture. In the meantime, the art of leaving things out has become an established style of living and frees our homes from the superfluous.  

Minimalist design reached its first peak in the 1980s, when its clear lines, smooth surfaces and the colours white, black and grey were the counter-movement to postmodernism. This demarcation still applies to contemporary minimalists. "My main criticism is directed at the Memphis group," says Jasper Morrison, for example, who calls his designs "super normal". For him, the playful Memphis shapes were "design that ignored the needs of the user". Morrison wants the opposite: no decoration! His products are characterised by user-friendliness and simplicity.  

One of Morrison's teachers is Naoto Fukasawa, creative director of the Japanese lifestyle and accessories chain Muji. "My job," he explains, "is to reduce an object to its essence while preserving its poetry." And that is why Fukasawa's reinterpretation of Mies van der Rohe's phrase is: "Just enough." 

Minimalism is therefore about functional design, but not functionalism. It is an approach that favours simplicity and the reduction of unnecessary elements. It focuses on using only the essential elements to create a clear, calm and functional aesthetic. The focus is not on revealing the mechanism, but on the aesthetics of the product. This means that not everything that looks simple is simple. Translated into product design, this means that complicated technology is integrated into an uncomplicated and beautiful form. Calm versus restlessness, a field of tension that also affects our everyday lives, because the more complex the world, the greater the desire for simplicity - a minimum instead of a maximum. This is how an art movement could become a lifestyle. And a style of living that has had a lasting influence on our interiors. 

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