Scandinavian interiors have dominated the mood boards of British homeowners for nearly 20 years. What explains their appeal? The reasons are more functional than fashionable. By being more thoughtful about light, space, materials, and nature, Scandinavian home design can show us how to do interiors better.

Let’s start with light. In Scandinavia, much of the year is dark, and so their domestic design has been built around that. Windows are larger, more carefully placed, and the interiors have been designed to maximise the use of reflected light: there are fewer black walls and more white. The lighting is layered rather than flat, with pools of warm light rather than cold overheads. For Residential Architects Kensington and Chelsea, visit https://www.rbddesign.com/architects-design/residential-architecture-london/architects-kensington-and-chelsea

This is not a coincidence. Interiors that are designed for a long, dark winter are also those that work well on a cloudy day in January. Britain has the same light as Scandinavia. We have grey days just like theirs, and we have long winters that make our homes colder and darker. When we light our homes, we need to get it right. We also need to be thoughtful about how we furnish them.

We also need to be thoughtful about how we join rooms together. When we leave our homes, we don’t just leave our houses. We also leave our gardens. When we return home, we enter the garden and then the house. For this reason, Scandinavians don’t join their homes to their gardens, as though the garden is an extension of the house. They join the garden to the house. The garden is part of the house. We could learn from this.