The 2026 Design Manifesto: Paradox, Surface, and the Architecture of Narrative

I’m going to say the quiet part out loud: I’m over Japandi.

Not because it failed. It served its purpose. It gave people permission to exhale, to edit, to quiet the noise, to stop performing taste at full volume. But the longer I practice as an interior designer here in DFW and across East Texas, the more I see that calm drift into something else. Rooms that photograph as serene but live as anonymous. Clean, but curiously absent. As if we perfected the container and forgot to ask what it was meant to hold.

Where my head is for 2026 is both simpler and more demanding: I want spaces that can hold tension without collapsing into chaos. I want materials that refuse to be flattened into a rendering. I want rooms with a point of view, quiet, disciplined, unmistakable.

Three pressures are guiding my work right now: paradox, surface, and narrative. Not as buzzwords. As filters I run everything through, whether I’m designing a restaurant in Dallas or Fort Worth, shaping a residence in Rockwall or Heath, or working on projects that stretch through McKinney, Garland, Tyler, Longview, and back home to Sulphur Springs.

The foundation is always restraint. A palette that reads as new luxury precisely because it doesn’t beg for attention. Crisp off-white as the field. A warm taupe to soften transitions. Deep chocolate to anchor. A moody charcoal-black to sharpen edges and hold shadow. It’s not a mood board. It’s a set of constraints. And constraints are where design stops decorating and starts becoming architecture.

Paradox is the first test of honesty.

Most clients say they want “warm minimalism,” which usually translates to calm, but not boring. Fair. The problem is that calm is easy to fake. You can buy calm. Paint the walls off-white, hide the cords, strip the ornament, and call it done. But real calm, the kind your body registers, requires structure. Rhythm. Compression and release. Silence and accent. A room has to know when to speak and when to hold back.

In a recent commercial project, the plan is disciplined and legible, long sightlines, clean proportions, nothing competing for dominance. Then we allow one moment to carry weight: a deeply textured wall, dimensional and tactile, catching warm pools of light as if it has been there for decades. The order makes the density feel intentional. The density keeps the order from feeling sterile. That tension is where the room finds its pulse.

Surface is where this becomes serious.

We’re living in the age of the perfect image. Any finish can be simulated. Any stone can be matched. That’s precisely why I care less about how something photographs and more about how it behaves. What does it do when the light shifts at 7 a.m.? What happens at 9 p.m. when the sconces are the only illumination? What does it sound like when you set a glass down? Does it age with dignity, or does it simply wear out?

As an interior designer, I’m specifying materials with temporal honesty, plaster that carries the hand of the installer, timber that reveals its grain without apology, metal that earns its patina. In a recent restaurant project, a hand-troweled wall shifts throughout the day, cooler in the morning, warmer by evening. It’s subtle. It’s also the difference between a space that is “nice” and a space that feels alive. Luxury, to me, is not gloss. It’s credibility.

And then there’s narrative.

A room without narrative is just a container for objects. I’m not talking about marketing copy. I’m talking about choreography, the emotional sequence of moving through space.

Hospitality makes this obvious. The entry is a cut. The host stand is a pause. The dining room is the reveal. In one recent project, the brief was “intimate but not cramped, elevated but not pretentious.” That’s not a style directive. It’s a narrative one. So we shaped the sequence: a slightly compressed, dim vestibule to create anticipation, then a release into softer volume and diffused light, then pockets of shadow and warmth at the tables to bring focus. Same palette. Same material family. Different emotional temperature as you move. That’s architecture working on the body before the brain catches up.

The same thinking applies to offices and retail environments. As a commercial interior designer, I’m not arranging furniture, I’m designing behavioral cues. Where do you land when you arrive? Where do you decompress between meetings? Where does collaboration happen without dissolving into noise? If the plan doesn’t read like a sentence, with punctuation and pacing, people feel the confusion even if they can’t articulate it.

So if 2026 has a thesis for me, it’s this: stop outsourcing meaning to trends. Trends can stabilize a room. They can offer shorthand. But the real work, the work I care about as an interior designer, is choosing your contradictions, committing to materials that earn their place, and shaping a narrative people experience physically.

If you’re seeking interior design, whether it’s a restaurant, a commercial environment that has to perform, or a home that should feel deeply lived in, start with a conversation. We’ll talk less about “the look” and more about the why.

That’s where the architecture begins.