I've been obsessed with monochrome interiors for about fifteen years now. It started in 2009 when I moved into a 400 square foot studio in Toronto. I had no money for furniture. I bought a white IKEA bed frame, a black desk from a thrift store, and that was it. The place looked empty. My mother visited and asked if I had just been robbed.
But I liked it.
That empty feeling turned into something else after a few weeks. I could think in that space. I could breathe. I didn't know it had a name back then. I just thought I was too broke to decorate.
The space to breathe
Years later I found out people were paying designers thousands of dollars to achieve what I had stumbled into by accident. There's an entire industry around making spaces look empty on purpose. The irony isn't lost on me.
I run a small design consultation practice now (since 2017), and about 60% of my clients come to me asking for some version of "that clean look." They've seen it on Pinterest. They've seen it in magazines. They want their living room to look like a photo shoot location. Most of them don't actually want to live that way. They just think they do.
I've learned to ask one question before taking on any minimalist project: "How many things are currently on your kitchen counter?" If the answer is more than eight, we need to have a longer conversation.
The Trend That Won't Die
Minimalism in interior design has been declared dead approximately every two years since 2012. I've read at least thirty articles with titles like "Maximalism is Back" or "The End of the All-White Interior." The articles keep coming. The trend keeps not dying.
Small spaces, intentional choices
Part of this is practical. Small apartments in expensive cities (Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, Sydney) make minimalism less of an aesthetic choice and more of a survival strategy. You can't fit a Victorian parlor's worth of furniture in 500 square feet. You just can't.
Part of it is also generational. People my age (I'm 41) watched our parents accumulate stuff for decades. Basements full of boxes. Garages you couldn't park in. Storage units costing $200 a month to hold things nobody remembered buying. We grew up drowning in objects. Some of us developed an allergic reaction to clutter.
The monochrome aspect is a separate thing. You can be minimalist with color. Lots of people are. But there's something about restricting your palette to black, white, and grey that appeals to a certain type of brain. My brain, apparently.
What Monochrome Actually Means
I should clarify something. When I say monochrome, I don't mean fifty shades of grey (heh). I mean a conscious decision to eliminate color as a variable in your space.
This doesn't mean everything has to be white. I've done projects with charcoal walls, black ceilings, concrete floors. One client wanted everything in her apartment to be within three shades of warm grey. We spent four months on that project. She's still happy with it, six years later. Most of my clients who go full color-restricted stay that way.
The ones who add "just a pop of color" (a phrase I've come to dread) usually end up repainting everything within two years.
Warm grey: subtle, timeless
Cool neutrals: crisp, modern
I'm not saying color is bad. I have a bright orange chair in my own office. I bought it in 2019 because I was tired of looking at grey all day. But that's one object in one room. The rest of my home is still aggressively neutral.
The Real Cost
Here's something the design magazines won't tell you. True minimalism costs more than maximalism. Way more.
When you only have ten pieces of furniture in a room, each piece has to be perfect. You can't hide a cheap coffee table behind a pile of books and throw pillows. Every flaw shows. Every corner is visible. Every surface is exposed.
A $2,000 sofa in a minimalist room will look like a $2,000 sofa. There's nowhere to hide.
I learned this the hard way in 2014. I had just finished a project where we stripped a client's living room down to a sofa, two chairs, a side table, and a floor lamp. Five pieces total. The room looked incredible for about two weeks. Then the sofa started sagging. The leather on the chairs developed a weird sheen. The cheap side table wobbled.
We had to replace everything. The client wasn't happy. I ate about $3,000 in costs to make it right. Lesson learned.
Now I tell clients upfront: if you want the minimalist look, budget 40% more per item than you would for a traditional interior. Buy fewer things, but buy them better. A $2,000 sofa in a minimalist room will look like a $2,000 sofa. There's nowhere to hide.
Materials Matter More
In a monochrome space, texture becomes everything.
Without color to create visual interest, you need variation in surfaces. Smooth plaster walls against a rough linen sofa. Polished concrete floors with a wool rug. Matte black fixtures next to glossy white tile.
Texture creates depth when color is absent
I keep a materials library in my office. About 400 samples at this point. Fabrics, woods, stones, metals, papers. When I'm working on a monochrome project, I'll spend hours just putting samples next to each other. Seeing how they interact. How light hits them differently.
This is the part of my job that's impossible to explain to clients. They want to see renderings. Computer images. They don't understand why I need to touch things before I can design a room.
The worst projects I've done were the ones where clients picked everything from photos online. Everything looked fine on screen. Nothing worked in the actual space. A grey fabric that photographed as warm read cold in northern light. A black marble that looked sophisticated in the showroom looked like a funeral home in a small bathroom.
You have to see materials in context. There's no shortcut.
Common Mistakes
Over the years I've developed a mental list of things that ruin monochrome interiors. I'm going to share it because I'm tired of fixing these problems.
All-white rooms look sterile. They show every speck of dust. They give people headaches. I don't know why this look became aspirational. It's a nightmare to maintain and uncomfortable to inhabit. I once visited a client's all-white apartment and couldn't find the bathroom door because it was the same white as the wall with no visible hardware. I'm not joking.
If your black fixtures, black furniture, and black accessories are all the same shade of black, the room looks fake. Real spaces accumulate objects over time. Different blacks. Different greys. Slight variations. When everything matches perfectly, it looks like a showroom, not a home.
Grey is not just grey. There's warm grey (with brown or yellow undertones) and cool grey (with blue or green undertones). Mixing them makes a room feel chaotic even though the colors "match." I've had to repaint entire apartments because someone chose a cool grey wall color and warm grey furniture.
A monochrome room needs life. Wood. Plants. Linen. Something that was once alive. Without these elements, the space feels dead. I visited a trendy hotel in Los Angeles last year that was all concrete, metal, and plastic. Everything grey and black. I lasted two hours before I had to leave. My chest felt tight the entire time. That's what happens when you remove all organic materials from an interior.
A minimalist room should feel complete, not unfinished. Every object should seem intentional. If your space looks like you're still waiting for furniture to arrive, you've gone too far.
Finding Good Advice
The internet has made interior design information more accessible and more useless at the same time. Everyone has a design blog now. Most of them are garbage.
I can spot the bad ones immediately. They use stock photography exclusively. They recommend products without ever mentioning that they're affiliate links (or they are all affiliate links). They publish "Top 10 Minimalist Products" lists that are clearly auto-generated by Amazon's API. The text reads like it was written by a robot because it probably was.
Real spaces, real imperfections
The good ones are harder to find. They're usually written by people who actually work in design. They include personal projects, client projects with permission, their own photography. They admit when something didn't work. They have opinions that might be unpopular.
I follow maybe six design blogs consistently. Three of them are written by designers I know personally. The others I found through recommendations from people whose taste I trust. That's it. Six sources I actually read out of thousands that exist.
Social media is even worse. Instagram destroyed design discourse. Everything is optimized for the photograph, not for living. Spaces that look incredible in a square crop and are miserable to actually spend time in. I stopped posting my work on Instagram in 2021. The engagement game was making me design for likes instead of clients.
What I Actually Recommend
If you want to try monochrome minimalism, start small. One room. Probably the bedroom since that's where most people can tolerate less stuff.
Paint the walls a warm white (not bright white, never bright white). Get white or grey bedding in natural fibers. Remove everything from the surfaces except what you actually use every day. Live with it for a month before buying any new furniture.
Most people can't do it. They add things back within two weeks. A colorful throw pillow. A stack of books. A plant in a bright pot. That's fine. Minimalism isn't for everyone. Better to find that out with a can of paint than after spending $20,000 on furniture.
Start with one room. Live with it. See how you feel.
For the ones who make it past the month, we can start talking about real changes. Built-in storage to hide the chaos. Quality furniture to replace the stuff you removed. A proper lighting plan because nothing ruins a minimal interior faster than bad lighting.
I've been doing this long enough to know that about one in five people who think they want minimalism actually want minimalism. The rest want their current life but tidier. That's a different service. I recommend Marie Kondo's book and a trip to the Container Store.
For the true believers, the ones whose shoulders drop when they walk into an empty room, monochrome minimalism is worth the effort. Worth the cost. Worth the maintenance.
I've lived this way for fifteen years. I'm not going back to clutter. My mother still thinks my apartment looks sad. I think it looks like peace.