History of Minimalism in Interior Design

Minimalism is often treated as a recent fashion — white walls, a grey sofa, nothing on the shelves, photographed for social media. In reality it is one of the oldest and most persistent ideas in design, and it has been reinvented many times: by Japanese builders who ordered houses around a straw mat, by a religious community in America that made furniture as an act of devotion, by a Viennese architect who declared war on ornament, by the teachers of a German art school, by a handful of artists in 1960s New York, and by a product designer who summed it all up as less, but better.

Indian homes have their own long tradition of simplicity: rooms with very little furniture, floor seating, bedding rolled away by day and objects kept in wall niches. That is why the style, when it is done well, feels familiar in India rather than imported. When it is done badly — glossy white surfaces, no storage, nothing personal — it fails quickly, because it fights the climate, the dust and the way Indian families actually live.

This article traces the history of minimalism in interior design from its roots to the present, explains what each generation added, and turns those lessons into practical dimensions and rules for a minimalist interior today. It goes deeper into the history than this site's guide to minimalist interior design for Indian homes, which focuses on planning, storage and costs.

Before the word existed: three traditions of simplicity

The word minimalism was attached to art and design only in the twentieth century, but three older traditions supplied most of its ideas. Each arrived at simplicity for a different reason — religion, craft, climate or social custom — and each still shapes how designers think.

Japan: the tatami room and the tea house

The traditional Japanese house was organised on a modular grid set by the tatami, a rice-straw mat roughly twice as long as it is wide. Room sizes were described by the number of mats, sliding screens of paper and timber replaced fixed walls, and most belongings were kept in built-in cupboards so that rooms could change use during the day: bedding was unfolded at night and folded away in the morning. A single alcove, the tokonoma, held one scroll or one flower arrangement, changed with the seasons. The tiny tea rooms associated with the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyu took this further, reducing a room to a few mats, rough plaster, natural timber and a low entrance that made every guest bow. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi — beauty in the simple, the imperfect and the aged — came from this world.

In the seventeenth century the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto brought these ideas to a refined scale, and in the twentieth century it became a pilgrimage site for European modernists. The German architect Bruno Taut, who visited Japan in 1933, wrote admiringly about Katsura's restraint, and the idea that a traditional Japanese house was already modern in spirit spread through Western architectural circles.

The Shakers: simplicity as devotion

In America, the Shakers — a religious community that formed its settlements from the late eighteenth century — made furniture and buildings of remarkable plainness. Their chairs, tables and built-in cupboards had no carving or applied decoration; quality lay in proportion, joinery and finish. A continuous peg rail around the room let chairs, clothes and tools be hung off the floor, so rooms could be swept and kept clear. Shaker design is often cited as a precursor of modern minimalism because it proved that ordinary household objects could be beautiful through use and proportion alone.

India: floor-living, niches and the empty centre

Traditional Indian homes were sparse in furniture by modern standards. People sat on the floor, on a durrie or a low platform; bedding was rolled and stored by day; and everyday objects lived in wall niches, built-in shelves and storerooms rather than on free-standing furniture. One room might be a sitting room by day and a bedroom by night. In courtyard houses the centre stayed open, used for work, rituals and light. In the twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi's way of living at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad — a simple house, a spinning wheel, a few possessions — made simplicity a moral and political statement as well as a domestic habit. Many Indian families still remember homes like these, which is why minimalism can feel like a return rather than an import.

Ornament on trial: Adolf Loos and the Viennese break

At the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class European interiors were crowded with pattern: carved furniture, heavy drapery, wallpapers, fringes and collections of ornaments. The reaction began in several places at once. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain argued for honest materials and handwork; the Vienna Secession simplified decoration into geometry. The most radical voice was the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose essay Ornament and Crime, written around 1910, argued that applied ornament was a waste of labour and material and that a modern culture should leave it behind.

Loos's own interiors were not empty. They used rich materials — veined marble, polished timber, mirrors — and arranged rooms at different levels according to their importance, an approach later called the Raumplan. His lesson for interiors was not that rooms should be bare, but that richness should come from the material itself and from the way spaces are composed, not from decoration added on top. That idea — let the marble be the ornament — is still the basis of every good minimalist interior.

The modern movement: De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Mies

Between the two world wars, simplicity became a programme. In the Netherlands, the De Stijl group, formed in 1917 around Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, reduced art and design to straight lines, rectangles and primary colours. The furniture maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld built the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht in 1924, with sliding partitions that let the upper floor open into one space or close into rooms — a direct ancestor of today's flexible apartments. The house is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In Germany, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 under Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in the mid-1920s, and closed in 1933 under political pressure. Its teachers and students designed furniture, lamps, textiles and buildings for industrial production: tubular steel chairs, plain metal lamps, flat-roofed buildings with large windows. They taught that form should follow function and that materials should be used honestly. The Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

In France, Le Corbusier set out his Five Points of a New Architecture in the 1920s — columns lifting the building, a free plan, a free facade, horizontal windows and a roof garden — and built them most completely in the Villa Savoye near Paris, completed in 1931. The free plan was the decisive idea for interiors: once a concrete or steel frame carries the building, walls no longer have to carry loads, and rooms can flow into one another.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made the free plan into art. His German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona had almost no rooms at all: freestanding walls of onyx, marble and glass slid past each other under a flat roof held by slender steel columns. The original pavilion was dismantled after the exhibition and a reconstruction was built in the 1980s on the same site. Mies's Farnsworth House in Illinois, completed in 1951, reduced a house to a glass box with a single service core. The phrase less is more, which he made famous, became the shorthand for the whole movement.

Mid-century: Scandinavia and the softening of modernism

After the Second World War, Scandinavian designers such as Alvar Aalto in Finland and Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner in Denmark showed that modern simplicity did not have to be cold. They used bent and solid timber, wool, leather and soft curves; their furniture was simple in form but warm to touch. Touring exhibitions in the 1950s introduced Scandinavian design to a wide international audience, and the idea of a light, practical, uncluttered home — what later generations would call Scandinavian style — became part of mainstream taste. In the United States, designers such as Charles and Ray Eames brought moulded plywood and fibreglass into furniture and showed that industrial production could be friendly and personal.

This softening is the most important correction in minimalism's history, and it was learned again later. Pure modernist rooms of glass, steel and white plaster looked superb in photographs but were often hard to live in: noisy, glaring and impersonal. Every successful later version of minimalism — Japandi, warm minimalism, Indian modern — has added natural texture back without adding clutter.

Minimal art and less, but better: the 1960s and 1970s

The word minimal itself came from art. In the 1960s, artists working mainly in New York — among them Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Agnes Martin — made work of simple repeated forms, industrial materials and plain colour, and critics began calling it minimal art in the middle of the decade. Judd also designed furniture of plain timber boxes and planes, and the gallery spaces created for this art — white walls, concrete or timber floors, even light — became the model for a certain kind of minimalist interior.

In product design, Dieter Rams, head of design at the German company Braun, set out his ten principles of good design, which include the ideas that good design is unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting and as little design as possible. His own phrase, less, but better, is a useful correction to less is more: the point is not to own nothing, but to own fewer things of higher quality. In Japan, the retailer Muji was founded in 1980 around plain, unbranded, useful everyday products — another expression of the same idea.

The 1980s to 2000s: architectural minimalism and the white interior

From the 1980s, a group of architects made minimalism a recognisable architectural style. In Japan, Tadao Ando built in smooth, precise concrete with carefully controlled daylight; his Church of the Light near Osaka, completed in 1989, cuts a cross of light into a concrete wall and uses almost nothing else. In London, John Pawson designed houses, shops and later monasteries and churches of extreme restraint, and his book Minimum, published in 1996, gathered the history of simplicity from Shaker rooms to Japanese gardens. The look spread into fashion boutiques, galleries, hotels and apartments: white walls, pale stone floors, concealed storage, flush doors and very few objects.

In India, the 1990s and 2000s saw a popular version of this style arrive through magazines and builder show flats: white or grey high-gloss laminates, chrome, glass and false ceilings with many downlights. It rarely aged well. Gloss showed fingerprints and dust; glass and chrome glared under strong light; and the absence of planned storage meant that within a year the family's belongings were back on every surface. The lesson, again, was that minimalism depends on storage and on warm, forgiving materials, not just on empty surfaces.

Indian modernism: simplicity with climate

India had already produced a more convincing version of modern simplicity in its architecture. Le Corbusier's work in Chandigarh in the 1950s, and his buildings in Ahmedabad such as the Mill Owners' Association Building, used raw concrete, deep shading and very few materials. Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, built through the 1960s and early 1970s, used exposed brick and concrete in great geometric walls and openings. Charles Correa's Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at the Sabarmati Ashram, opened in the 1960s, is a calm field of brick and tiled pavilions around open courts, in the spirit of the ashram itself. B. V. Doshi's studio Sangath in Ahmedabad, from the early 1980s, combined simple vaults, local materials and water. Each of these used few materials and little ornament, but none was cold: they were designed for shade, breeze and Indian light, and that remains the best model for a minimalist Indian interior.

The 2010s and 2020s: decluttering, Japandi and warm minimalism

In the 2010s, minimalism became a lifestyle as much as an interior style. Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, published in English in 2014, made decluttering a global conversation, and online communities promoted owning less. At the same time, the cold white interior gave way to warmer versions: Japandi, which combines Japanese restraint with Scandinavian comfort, and warm minimalism, which keeps clean lines and hidden storage but adds natural wood, linen, cane, stone, lime plaster and plants, with low, warm evening light.

This warmer minimalism suits Indian homes better than any earlier version. It allows the handcrafted objects most Indian families want to keep — a brass lamp, a block-printed textile, a terracotta pot, a family photograph — as long as they are few and chosen. And it accepts the reality of Indian daily life: pooja spaces, storage for festival items and guest bedding, kitchens with many appliances. The history teaches that minimalism works only when storage is planned first.

The details minimalism has always depended on

From Loos's marble to Mies's steel joints to Pawson's flush plaster, minimalism has always lived in a few precise details. With no ornament to hide a poor joint, the quality of the line becomes the design. The details below are the modern descendants of those historic ones; the dimensions are the ones commonly used in Indian practice and match this site's minimalist interior guide.

Where minimalism goes next

The next chapter of minimalism is likely to be shaped by three pressures. Smaller urban apartments make built-in, multi-use storage and flexible rooms — the oldest ideas from the Japanese house and the Rietveld Schröder House — more valuable than ever. Sustainability shifts the argument from appearance to consumption: buying fewer, longer-lasting, repairable things and choosing natural, low-emission materials. And factory-made joinery with precise machining makes the fine joints minimalism demands easier and cheaper to achieve, while smart controls hide switches, wires and devices. There is also a counter-movement — maximalism and eclectic interiors that celebrate collections and colour — and that tension is healthy. History suggests minimalism will survive by staying warm, practical and personal, not by becoming emptier.

Seven lessons from history for a minimalist interior today

• Plan storage before choosing any finish — every successful minimalist tradition hid belongings in built-in storage.
• Let materials be the ornament: one good stone, one timber, one plaster finish, used well.
• Keep the palette to two or three colours plus natural materials.
• Use a free plan where structure allows: sliding screens and open zones, not more walls.
• Choose fewer, better pieces of furniture, in the spirit of less, but better.
• Draw the joints: 10 mm shadow gaps, 2–3 mm shutter gaps, 25–30 mm finger grips, recessed plinths.
• Add warmth back — timber, textiles, plants, warm light — so the room is calm rather than cold.

Frequently asked questions

Who started minimalism in interior design?

No single person started it. Its roots lie in traditional Japanese houses, Shaker furniture and other vernacular traditions. As a modern movement it was shaped by Adolf Loos, the De Stijl group, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and especially Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose phrase less is more became its motto.

Who said less is more?

The phrase is most closely associated with the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who made it famous as a summary of his approach. The designer Dieter Rams later offered a refinement, less, but better, which emphasises quality rather than emptiness.

What is the difference between minimalism and Japandi?

Minimalism is the broad principle of reducing a space to what is necessary. Japandi is one recent variant that combines Japanese restraint — empty space, natural materials, darker accents — with Scandinavian comfort — light wood, soft textiles and practicality. Japandi is always minimalist; minimalism is not always Japandi.

Is minimalism suitable for Indian homes?

Yes, when it is warm and storage-led. Traditional Indian homes were sparse and multi-use, so the idea is familiar. It fails when it relies on high-gloss white surfaces and lacks storage. Plan closed storage for festival items, guest bedding and kitchen appliances first, then keep surfaces clear and materials natural.

When did minimalism become popular?

Modernist simplicity spread from the 1920s; the term minimal art appeared in the 1960s; architectural minimalism became a recognisable interior style in the 1980s and 1990s; and the decluttering movement and Japandi made it mainstream worldwide in the 2010s.