Millennial Minimalism Is Out; Cozy Americana Is In

The words that don’t come to mind? Cozy, warm, colorful, homey. Corporate minimalism feels hollow on purpose. It’s clean and efficient branding for companies, which is why they all ditched bold, fun, wacky colors and idiosyncratic logos years ago for the sophistication of minimalist design. 

The Rise of Modern Minimalism

The rise of Apple in the age of the smartphone in the 2010s resulted in brand mimicry. Just about everything began to copy their sleek, future-oriented design. And their impact was unmatched. Today, the uniformity of corporate design and branding is the only way any respectable company can market itself. But this empty, soulless tech corporation aesthetic has slowly encroached into every facet of our lives and, no thanks to the influence of Marie Kondo and the Kardashians, our homes.

Do I miss the maximalism of the early 2000s with wacky fonts and bold logos? Of course, but I can understand how modern minimalism serves its purpose in communicating respectability as a brand. If it stayed in the realm of graphic design and department stores, I could live with that, even if it does take all the charm out of everything. I’m looking at you, Cracker Barrel. 

But when did it become a flex to drain our homes of color in favor of one-note beige everything: beige walls, toys, baby clothes, even the Christmas tree, with its sad, cheerless ornaments? Many have critiqued the age of “sad beige babies,” which has sparked contentious debates over whether this flat, colorless aesthetic is actually damaging to the cognitive development of babies, who rely on colors, textures, and patterns to explore the world.

Evidently, once Apple infected the corporate world, the leak didn’t stop. Minimalism was equated with high-class luxury and success. The elites quickly adopted this style for their sprawling mansions of cavernous halls and clutterless rooms, selectively decorated with staple pieces of muted-toned furniture. Gray floors and cream walls washed out rooms filled with similar-toned accessories that blended into a fog of sameness. The aesthetic makes houses feel more like empty warehouses than homes.

In 2014, the English translation of Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering hit the ground running in the West, taking American culture by storm. By 2019, Kondo had her own show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” where she popularized the phrase, “Does this spark joy?” as an emotional litmus test for whether or not something was worth keeping. It’s a Japanese approach to decluttering that reframes objects as emotional rather than utilitarian anchors. Perhaps it’s by accident then that Kondo would become synonymous with an approach to interior design that is utterly soulless and unemotional.

Celebrities like Kim Kardashian gave walking tours through their $60 million mansions, described as a “minimal monastery.” The warehouse aesthetic became a symbol of luxe living, but paradoxically, it was adopted by the masses because the design is inexpensive, accessible, and easy to replicate. With the rise of these influences and trending Scandinavian and Muji interior design, suddenly every house felt like an IKEA showroom stripped down to its bare bones.

The People Yearn for Color & Personality

Thankfully, I’m proud to announce Big Warehouse is on its way out, while Cozy is back in. If you yearn for the days of traditional design, where rich colors welcomed you to an inviting room or where items were left out for display, showing a house that’s lived in rather than rented as storage space, or where compelling patterns, textures, and details populate space, engaging your attention and stirring your imagination, then I have great news for you. Everyone is burnt out on modern minimalism. Threads bemoaning the destruction of eccentricity, of detail, and the soul of cities have been going viral for years. 

In 2022, The Cultural Tutor posted a short thread titled “The Danger of Minimalist Design (& the death of detail)” comparing modern minimalism to traditional architecture, interior design, and logos several years ago, which garnered 441k likes and 103k retweets. Clearly, resentment towards modern minimalism had been brewing for years. And it’s no wonder. A quick exploration of the thread exposes how small "m" minimalism (as opposed to capital "M" minimalism, which he considers a conscious design movement) “has become an unconscious social default for seemingly every design choice, whether architectural or corporate or anything else,” and that he finds the trend troubling because of what minimalism represents: “a lack of detail.” 

Side by side, he compares monuments, buildings, landmarks, and so on, noting what these different aesthetic decisions say about identity. Traditional design is detailed and has a distinctive character with bold pops of color, intricate but intentional patterns, and unique ornamentation. The minimalist designs? They so uniformly lack detail that they have no discernible qualities or distinctive character. Though traditional design is not always breathtakingly beautiful like a Gothic cathedral, even a humble traffic pillar tells more of a story in its traditional variation than a modernist one does. 

The modern version merely exists but doesn’t improve upon a space’s eclectic atmosphere, or give it charm or character; it simply blends in to the point of indistinguishability from any other thing. Benches, doorbells, even logos used to have intricate details: unique patterns, contrast of colors, eye-catching shapes. By far the most damning point he makes: “the thing with detail (and, therefore, identity) is that people have different tastes. So, to some extent, it imposes something on a person. Default minimalist design strips all identity away from things. It presents a neutral, clean-slate which imposes nothing.” 

And what happens when small "m" minimalism becomes the social default for everything from benches and bollards to skyscrapers and national assemblies? “We have a reduction ad absurdum of cultural aesthetics: Somebody might not like a detail (read: character), so there can be no details.” The result is a blanket neutral aesthetic that says nothing because it is nothing. Everything looks the same, so we’re in a state of constant underwhelm. It might not offend the eyes, but it doesn’t inspire either. It’s like a cultural sedative walking us into silent mediocrity through apathy, lack of imagination, a lack of daring. I would rather a space be offensive to my tastes than to be nothing at all. 

Even graphic design artists admit modern minimalism leaves them creatively depressed. “Colors have been set aside in favor of blacks, whites, and greys. Details and nuanced characteristics have been dumbed down in the name of ‘sleek and sophisticated.’ Corporate logos are pushing the limit on how simple you can possibly make them.” And Nathan J. Robinson has similarly prescient takes on the crisis of modern minimalism, writing in Current Affairs that he doesn’t "necessarily think Marie Kondo is the Antichrist” but does dare to stake a bold claim: that clutter has its place. “It can be a sign that a place is truly lived in and enjoyed, that it hasn’t been artificially cleansed of its most human qualities.” 

This, I believe, is modern minimalism’s most regrettable side effect: its feeling of inhumanity. Perhaps this is why it’s the interior design of choice for futuristic dystopian thrillers like Ex Machina (the house from that movie is a real hotel, by the way), a movie fundamentally about machines outwitting man. The reliance on architecture alone for expression without virtually any inclusion of ornamentation or personality makes it feel almost brutalist in design, like I’m trapped in an oppressive prison-like environment stripped of all human qualities. He laments that minimalist design is almost entirely without ornamentation, a blight on society he ascribes to the influence of Adolf Loos, who declared “ornament is crime” and that lack of ornament is “a sign of intellectual power.” 

But when it comes to turning a house into a home, do we turn to the brute force nature of an army cadet, who looks at architecture and interior as entirely functional and utilitarian, or do we turn to the wife and mother, whose eye for details brightens up spaces, whose thoughtful additions warm the atmosphere with a thoughtfulness that touches the heart? Loos’ conception of what makes for “good taste” has been entirely rebutted through a meme genre memorialized on Know Your Meme as “Guys Live in Apartment Like This,” spearheaded by a 2018 tweet posted by Kat Hasty, who observed of a sparse room in dire need of some interior decorating, “guys really live in apartments like this and don’t see any issue.” 

The caption was accompanied by a photo of a room that had nothing but a TV and a chair, bare walls, no ornamentation or other furniture; just entirely functional but lacking heart, taste, or character. Compare this to the signature comfiness of the interiors featured in a show like Gilmore Girls, where homes are warm, inviting, nostalgic, and quirky. The observation started an online trend, sparking other noticers of the dire living conditions men are willing to live in; how it’s usually a woman’s touch that turns a space into a place beyond worth living in, but one you delight to be in. Of course, some men do have a knack for design and an eye for detail. But it’s the brute force functionalism that degrades a space into “male college dorm” vibes, of which most agree is an aesthetic hellscape. 

“What’s wonderful to me about well-placed ornamentation,” Robinson writes, “is that it gives viewers an endless number of things to look at.” Walking through the French Quarter, he says he’s constantly noticing small details he’d never seen before. That’s the joy of creativity, of painstaking design. Robinson adds, “Ornamentation makes the world more interesting. It stimulates the imagination, it means that you can look at something twice, three times, four times, and still not notice things.” Minimalism, by contrast, “pares down to the bare essentials and sometimes even the essentials themselves (like a door on your shower) get pared down.”

We intuitively know that beauty is valuable in itself, even if we can’t always find a way to quantify that value economically (as Robinson protests in his article, attributing this to a blind spot of capitalism). The great travesty of modern architecture and interior design, shaped by what Roger Scruton called the “cult of utility,” is that it amounts to a crime against beauty. We resurrect buildings to meet the demands of office space or economic incentive, but we no longer create awe-inspiring cathedrals. These relics of beauty may seem ornamental, but their lack pays a heavy toll on our spirit.

I can’t think of a better symbolic representation of this dread than that iconic scene from The Sopranos, when the gang all return from Italy only to be re-welcomed by the concrete jungle of New Jersey. The architectural and cultural whiplash is brutal. That’s because there’s no awe-inspiring beauty in New Jersey. No culturally and historically significant sights that draw millions of visitors per year to marvel at their creation and endurance through time. 

But why does the beauty of our surroundings matter so much? Scruton explains, “Ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful and satisfy our need for harmony. In a strange way, they make us feel at home. They remind us that we have more than practical needs. We are not just governed by animal appetites like eating and sleeping. We have spiritual and moral needs too, and if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we.”

How Traditional Design Is Making a Comeback

Interior designers on the frontlines of trends are riding through the streets on horseback like a modern Paul Revere to break the good news: modern minimalism is on the way out. Naturally, more traditional, cozy design alternatives are taking their place. Interior designer and design influencer Hans Lorei says “everyone is ditching sleek and going cozy” and opting for traditional designs over the IKEA of it all. What does that entail? Lorei cites “oil painting, stripes, ships, lace, gallery walls with an assortment of art, maps, photos, and nostalgia,” adding that this harkens to an era before the advent of modern minimalism and the takeover by Big Storage. 

As opposed to the emptiness of minimalist design, the resurgence of traditional design involves the coziness of things left out to display: “stacks of books and bookshelves, themselves a marker of the analog age, dark wood floors and carved furniture, plates on the wall, buttery creams, blues, greens, and reds." And then the intricacies of thoughtful details: "a little skirting on the upholstered pieces, chinoiseries and subtle florals, the popularity of Delft tile, and maybe even some fly fishing accessories.”

Last year, Good Housekeeping noted that more and more interior designers were veering away from minimalist design in favor of joyful, bright, and personalized styles, reportedly due to the unemotional, cold, or museum-like feeling that minimalist interiors create within homes and the lack of versatility in creating different zones and spaces. They noted there was a real craving for old-world charm through many of the sorts of design details Lorei cited, like antique, reupholstery, and handcrafted decor, as well as spaces saturated with color, texture, and unique details. Homeowners reportedly are embracing a variety of styles, such as maximalist, eclectic, and vintage, all of which have their own idiosyncrasies, like mismatched furniture sets, moody paint colors, natural woods, and vibrant patterns. We’re also seeing a resurging reverence for the 2000s suburban Tuscan style home and Ralph Lauren-esque interiors.

But whatever design aesthetic you choose, you’re in good company when it comes to reverting back to a cozier, more traditional interior that shows evidence of being lived in. In another Instagram reel, Lorei foreshadows modern minimalism’s fading relevance, noting it’s starting to feel dated and stripping the personality out of everything. He offers a few simple ways you can do what modern minimalism certainly doesn’t with your space: tell a story. One obvious tool is color. But don’t be thoughtless with these aspects of your living space; make it your own. Lorei asks, “What’s a sentimental color to you?” This simple framing already ensures you use color in a more thoughtful way. Find inventive ways to incorporate that color. He suggests painting a picture frame or a small table with a color that reminds you of where you went on vacation when you were a kid, for example. 

Don’t be generic. “Who’s an artist that you like? Could you buy some of their work? Could you blow up and print out a photo of somewhere you love?” Lorei’s questions are personal, specific, and sentimental, nurturing intentionality by putting a bit of you into every decision. I never want to see another generic coffee table book I know you’ve never read, or a boring stock photo parading as “art” again. 

Display things that mean something to you, that provoke a reaction, that you actually fawn over, or that stir something in you. The next lesson Lorei touches on is the inventive mixture of old and new pieces, which he insists all the best spaces do. Incorporate vintage chairs into your new apartment or choose something from a furniture period that speaks to you. This prevents your space from becoming one-note. What’s architecturally interesting about your space, and how can you embellish these details? Most importantly, Lorei advises you to get in touch with your inner child, find what lights you up, and piques your curiosity. 

Lorei points out that these shifts in aesthetic preferences don’t happen in a vacuum. They ebb and flow in tandem with technological and societal evolution. The rise of the Apple Store aesthetic, as he calls it, the blank sterility of modern minimalism, marked a clear shift away from the analog age (think the cozy, autumnal offline world of Gilmore Girls) to the digital age. But now that we’re burning out on the great experiment of infinite scroll social media, excessive screen time, the consequences of individualized feeds and AI, the reversion backwards is no coincidence. “Now that we’re fully in the digital age, we’re longing for the IRL over the URL, the handcrafted over the dropshipped, and richness over uniformity.” In trying to cling to our humanity, we can start by making our surroundings feel like reflections of us, not the other way around. 

Cozy Americana gives me hope, not just for more beautiful interiors, but for a more human era of expression. We’ve mistaken sterility for sophistication for too long. It’s time to bring back signs of life: color, texture, and objects not staged like showroom props, but chosen because they reflect our genuine interests and passions. If our spaces are reflections of our values, then the resurgence of traditional, cozy aesthetics suggests we’re done with inhuman optimization and emptiness. We’re yearning for warmth, personality, individuality; even the humble charm of those early-2000s Tuscan homes over the blank sterility of storage containers. Sayonara, modern minimalism, you will not be missed.