Megatrend: Sustainable and healthy living

There are many dif­fer­ent tastes when it comes to design­ing your own four walls: wheth­er loud and flashy col­ors or subtle nat­ur­al tones, wheth­er wood, nat­ur­al stone or plastered sur­faces – any­thing goes. But regard­less of the chosen mater­i­al, design and style, today’s build­ing own­ers and occu­pants pay more atten­tion to an interi­or design that is both envir­on­ment­ally friendly and good for their own health.

Hous­ing is a fun­da­ment­al human need. Most people there­fore attach great import­ance to indi­vidu­al, cozy and healthy fur­nish­ings in their home envir­on­ment. Corona has intens­i­fied the crav­ing for home com­fort. “Cocoon­ing”, i.e. the desire to stay “nes­ted up at home”, com­bined with Scand­inavi­an “hygge” design, which stands for a warm and cozy liv­ing atmo­sphere, con­tin­ue to determ­ine the fur­nish­ing style even after the pan­dem­ic has sub­sided. With more and more employ­ees work­ing from home, people are spend­ing even more time with­in their own four walls than before. Wheth­er build­ing mater­i­als, sur­faces or fur­nish­ings – con­sumers are pla­cing a high­er value on the care­ful selec­tion of products. Sus­tain­ab­il­ity has estab­lished itself as a mega­trend of our times: Buy­ers are increas­ingly inter­ested in sup­ply chains and are eager to know, for example, where the wood for the par­quet floor­ing was sourced or wheth­er the fur­niture was pro­duced in a cli­mate-neut­ral way.

In view of people’s heightened envir­on­ment­al aware­ness and the new desire for cozi­ness, it is not sur­pris­ing that wood is a much-favored mater­i­al. Clas­sic par­quet floor­ing is still in high demand, espe­cially when firmly glued to the sub­floor. For years now, oak has been the wood of choice for many house­own­ers. Apart from its dis­tinct­ive grain, they appre­ci­ate its robust­ness, which also allows it to be used in areas pre­vi­ously con­sidered unsuit­able for par­quet such as kit­chens, bath­rooms and hall­ways. Oth­er pop­u­lar types of wood for par­quet include beech, ash, maple, cherry, wal­nut and birch. Fea­tur­ing a long ser­vice life, nat­ur­al stone tiles are also quite pop­u­lar, espe­cially in high-traffic areas such as cor­ridors, hall­ways, cloak­rooms and guest toi­lets. Ceram­ic tiles, recently also avail­able in cool shades of blue and green, are mainly installed on bath­room walls and floors.

Wood is still the mater­i­al of choice for indoor fur­niture. Espe­cially sol­id oak and wal­nut are among the favored wood spe­cies. Mod­ern kit­chen design has been char­ac­ter­ized for quite some time by dark tones and sur­faces with a groove struc­ture and ver­tic­al wood slats. Now, this style is also very much in vogue for din­ing and liv­ing rooms. It is accom­pan­ied by fur­niture with dark lacquered sur­faces. As far as home tex­tiles are con­cerned, there are two con­trast­ing trends: nat­ur­al tones such as earth or cof­fee brown on the one hand, fab­rics in flashy shades of rose, pink and purple on the oth­er.

These days, plaster sur­faces dom­in­ate the walls of liv­ing rooms and indi­vidu­al rooms. Apart from smooth fin­ishes, con­sumers now also fancy plasters with a strik­ing tex­ture. In addi­tion to clas­sic white, there is an increas­ing num­ber of oth­er plaster col­ors, ran­ging from muted shades of beige to bold col­ors.