Page 11 - Decor and Lifestyle Issue 2 2025

or a long time, interior design
was something you looked at,
Fnot something you felt.

Gloss replaced grain. Screens
replaced surfaces. The visual ruled.

Now, that’s changing. Designers
are rediscovering what our hands
always knew — that the way
something feels is inseparable
from how we experience it.

Touch has become design’s new
language, and texture its grammar.

Touch: The Forgotten Sense
of Design
We live in a visual culture. Every
image is filtered, lit, and flattened
for the scroll. But when the world
turned glossy, it also became
strangely distant.

Smoothness reads as luxury online —
yet in person, it’s alienating. Cold.

When everything looks the same,
touch becomes the differentiator.

The surfaces we reach for — a clay
mug, a linen curtain, a wooden
table edge — reconnect us with
presence. They remind us that
design isn’t just something we see.
It’s something we inhabit.

Touch reintroduces time. It slows
the eye and engages the body.
That’s what today’s interiors are
craving: the sense that they’ve
been made, not manufactured.

Material Honesty: How Surfaces
Shape Emotion
Every surface has psychology.
Natural materials — wood,
stone, fibre, clay — are irregular.
They show variation, small
imperfections, temperature, depth.
The brain reads those cues as
safety and familiarity.

Synthetic uniformity, by contrast,
leaves us slightly disoriented. It’s
visually smooth but emotionally flat.

A polished acrylic countertop can
reflect light perfectly — but it won’t
invite touch. A matte clay wall, softly
textured under the fingertips, will.

9 | DÉCOR & LIFESTYLE Issue 2 2025