Interior Design Styles and How to Recognise Them

Most of the style terms we use today are historical borrowings. "Scandinavian design" was coined as an export term after the Second World War, when Nordic design was marketed internationally as functional and democratic. Bauhaus was an actual school in Weimar and later Dessau, founded in 1919, built on the idea that art, craft and industry should meet in simple geometric forms. Boho traces its roots to the 19th-century bohemian circles of Paris and found new life in the counterculture of the 1970s, with patterns and textiles drawn from all over the world.

Japandi and minimalism are more recent constructs – words that describe a feeling rather than a movement with a manifesto. That doesn't make them any less valid, but it explains why the boundaries between them sometimes feel blurred. A style is rarely a pure idea; it's a collection of visual habits that has eventually earned itself a name.

What's usually called Scandinavian style rests on the belief that light and simplicity go hand in hand. Pale wood, untreated surfaces, a colour scale that rarely raises its voice. The furniture has strong form but is rarely showy – the legacy of functionalism still shows in just how much weight is placed on shape itself.

On the walls, that translates into soft abstraction, organic lines and a palette that's muted without being dull. Geometry is welcome, but preferably without hard edges – more suggestion than statement.

If Scandinavian style is about taking away, boho is about adding – layer upon layer of pattern, texture and material that look as though they've been gathered over time rather than ordered all at once. The origins in Parisian bohemian circles live on in the attitude: a suspicion of the too-perfect, a pull towards the handmade.

The colour scale is warm and earthy, often in brown, terracotta and beige, with botanical motifs and patterns borrowed from different cultures and eras. It's a style that allows itself to be a lot, but rarely feels cold.

Minimalism and Japandi are often confused, but the difference lies in temperature. Minimalism is reduction in its purest form – function before decoration, a room where every remaining object must justify its place. Japandi borrows that discipline but blends in a Japanese appreciation for imperfection, wabi-sabi, along with a Scandinavian warmth in materials and light.

The choice of art therefore differs fundamentally. Pure minimalism favours a single motif, often in black and white or greyscale, with plenty of empty space around it. Japandi allows for more texture and a warmer tone, without ever becoming loud.

Bauhaus and art deco share a fascination with form, even though they emerged for different reasons. The Bauhaus school sought a universal, functional design language built on basic shapes and primary colours. Art deco, which developed in parallel through the 1920s and '30s, was more glamorous – symmetrical patterns, sharp lines and a sense of luxury rather than utility.

Both live on today through their visual language: repeated geometric patterns, clear outlines and a drive to organise chaos into structure. In a home, it usually shows up as graphic art with bold shapes, rather than in the silhouettes of the furniture.

Furniture is often chosen through compromise – price, space, what's already in the home. Art is rarely bound in the same way. It's where a person can allow themselves a colour they'd otherwise hesitate over, a pattern that breaks from the rest of the room, a motif with no other purpose than saying something about the eye behind the choice.

That's also why art is often the quickest way to test a direction before fully committing to it in furniture and materials. A bold, colourful print can signal a completely different attitude than the starkest of rooms – and sometimes it's precisely that contrast, the meeting of restraint and boldness, that makes a home interesting to be in.