The Earth
Rooting the Future of Interior Design
“The future will be slow. The future will be brown.”
— Lidewij Edelkoort, Bloom
In an age overwhelmed by noise, acceleration, and synthetic promise, design is turning inward—downward—toward the earth. Not in metaphor only, but in matter, in memory, and in method.
This shift is not a trend. It is a re-rooting—a reckoning with what we’ve paved over, peeled back, and extracted from. The next frontier in interior design is not technological or even aesthetic. It is elemental. Clay, stone, chalk, terracotta, peat, ash, straw, soil: these are not rustic gestures. They are futures formed from ground truths.
As trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort has long argued, especially in her Bloom publications, we are entering a design epoch led not by innovation, but by reverence. The Earth is no longer a backdrop to human living—it is becoming the medium of meaning.
Earth as Colour: A Palette of Patina
The future’s colour story is quiet, mineral, and layered. We are moving away from high-saturation, digital tones toward muddy pinks, burnt ochres, iron blacks, limewashed whites, and lichen greens—colours pulled from stone, clay, and root, not from screens.
“Colour will come from the ground,” Edelkoort writes, “and all its rusty, dusty, mossy, mushroomy hues.”
This chromatic humility is not nostalgic—it’s neurological. Colour psychology has shown that earth tones calm the nervous system, increase perceived safety, and promote a sense of presence. In a world where anxiety is ambient, earth colours are an act of care.
Earth as Material: The Return of the Tactile
Design is shifting from the sleek to the sensed. Materials that bear fingerprints, carry scent, and age visibly are re-entering luxury spaces: raw terracotta floors, clay-rendered walls, compressed earth blocks, reclaimed timber, sandstone basins, muddy lime paints.
Brands like Studio Mumbai, Sanaa, and Faye Toogood are already honouring these materials—not to replicate a rural past, but to build a radically grounded present.
Even major interiors forecasts from WGSN and The Future Laboratory now list “Earth Materials” and “Soil Aesthetics” as primary design directions for 2025–2030. This includes:
Unfired brick and rammed earth construction.
Hempcrete and hay walls for scent, breathability, and thermal regulation.
Interiors designed to accept dust, weather, and wear—not resist them.
We are witnessing the slow end of perfection as a metric. In its place: patina. The idea that age equals value is not new—it is simply being remembered.
Earth as Ritual: The Home as Grounding Space
The home of the future is not a showroom. It is a grounding site—a place to reconnect with bodily time, environmental rhythms, and ancestral memory. In this way, earth-based design becomes spiritual.
“We will make sacred again the acts of sleeping, eating, gathering,” Edelkoort has written. “The home becomes temple, threshold, terrain.”
This is showing up in:
Soil-toned bedrooms, painted with natural pigments that absorb and diffuse light.
Compost-integrated kitchens, built not just to cook, but to close loops.
Indoor gardens, mossy walls, and herbal thresholds to bring the forest home.
Earthen seating, hand-formed in curves that mimic hills and dunes—offering rest shaped by landscape logic.
The act of designing with earth is, increasingly, an act of ritual design: how we mark seasons, remember ancestors, invite calm.
Earth as Teacher: Rewilding Aesthetics and Ethics
In Edelkoort’s Earth Matters exhibition at the TextielMuseum, she warned that we are out of touch with the planet’s rhythms—not just ecologically, but emotionally. Design, she said, must now serve as a translation tool: helping us feel the urgency through material experience.
This is the rise of the rewilded interior—not a jungle-themed wall print, but design that embraces entropy, decay, renewal. The Dutch collective Formafantasma explores this with algae-based materials and light that shifts like cloud. Space10 imagines living rooms that monitor soil health. Paola Antonelli advocates for “design as interface,” where every object teaches care.
This is not Earth as theme. It is Earth as ethic.
The New Luxury: Slowness, Stillness, Soil
In the coming decade, luxury will be defined by stillness. The most valuable interiors will not be the flashiest—they will be the most grounded, the most sensory, the most elemental. As Tyler Brûlé writes in Monocle, “The new penthouse is a walled garden. The new premium is silence.”
Key signals include:
Earthen wellness spaces in hotels (salt, clay, sand rituals).
Soil-inspired ceramics and textiles in gallery-retail hybrids.
Residences with “mud rooms” reimagined as sacred antechambers.
A growing preference for design that disappears into landscape, rather than dominates it.
“We are not above the Earth. We are of it,” wrote Wendell Berry. This is the future’s quiet anthem.
Conclusion: To Live Closer to the Ground
The future of interior design is not upward, but downward—into the sediment, the shadow, the silence of earth. It is a design language spoken in chalk and rust, in grain and crumb, in the quiet comfort of dust.
To design with the Earth is not to regress. It is to remember. That we are animals first, that our nervous systems know more than our algorithms, and that beauty is not clean—it is alive.