170 Interior Design Quotes

Following is our list of interior design quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about interior space.

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Famous Interior Design Quotes

An interior designer must be able to clarify his intent keeping ever in mind that decorating is not a look, it's a point of view. — Albert Hadley

Design is coming to grips with one’s real lifestyle, one’s real place in the world. Rooms should not be put together for show but to nourish one’s wellbeing. — Albert Hadley

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs. — Antonin Scalia

Design... is the integration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Design can have such a positive impact on the way people live and on their relationships and moods. — Genevieve Gorder

Decorating is not about making stage sets, it's not about making pretty pictures for the magazines, it's really about creating a quality of life, a beauty that nourishes the soul. — Albert Hadley

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense. — Bruno Munari

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space. — Peter Zumthor

I've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving. — Jeffrey Veen

It's not hard to make a space that looks good by itself. The trick is to craft a room that's even more attractive when it's occupied. That's when it becomes magical. — Kerry Joyce

Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable. — Donna Karan

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Technology is making design more exciting, with color, wallpaper, textures, fabrics that could never have been created without the technology. — David Bromstad

Yes, design can make you happy. — Stefan Sagmeister

You do design because you feel it inside; you have a moral issue to spread quality in our environment. — Massimo Vignelli

Short Interior Design Quotes

  • Great design is a multi-layered relationship between human life and its environment. — Naoto Fukasawa
  • The difference between good design and great design is INTELLIGENCE — Tibor Kalman
  • Good design is good business. — Thomas J. Watson
  • Design is everything. Everything! — Paul Rand
  • Bold simplicity is the keynote to good design. — Sailor Jerry
  • Design isn't just about making things beautiful; it's also about making things work beautifully. — Roger Martin
  • Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated. — Paul Rand
  • Good design is thorough, down to the last detail. — Dieter Rams
  • Good design doesn't date. — Harry Seidler
  • Great design is serious, not solemn — Paula Scher

Interior Design Image Quotes

There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful. - William Morris quote

There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful. — William Morris

Interior design quote Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.
Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.

Interior Decorating Quotes

You create your own decoration. You choose your color, you choose your mood. ... If you are depressed, you put some bright yellow and suddenly you are happy. — Philippe Starck

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. - Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

There seems to be within all of us an innate yearning to be lifted momentarily out of our own lives into the realm of charm and make believe. — Dorothy Draper

Interior design quote Good design is obvious, great design is transparent.
Good design is obvious, great design is transparent.

Birds are so much wiser than we! A robin builds a nest for robins. A seagull builds a nest for seagulls. They don't copy each other - or build themselves nests as described in The Birds' Decorating Magazine. — Dorothy Draper

Get rid at the outset of the idea that the airplane is only an air-going sort of automobile. It isn't. It may sound like one and smell like one, and it may have been interior decorated to look like one; but the difference is - it goes on wings. — Wolfgang Langewiesche

Music is interior decoration. — Wayne Shorter

Interior design quote Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak
Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak

Even if it's not a style of architecture or period you like, a decorator has to have a feel for a house's personality and try not to fight against it. I like to get the juice out of a house and not spoil it. — Nancy Lancaster

Decoration can be a state of mind, an unusual perception, a ritual whisper. — Ettore Sottsass

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

I deeply believe that a beautiful decor can have a beneficial influence on our lives. — Albert Hadley

Interior Space Quotes

The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live. It is about the realities of what makes for an attractive, civilized, meaningful environment, not about fashion or what's in or what's out. This is not an easy job. — Albert Hadley

Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of water drops in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear becomes a cavity sculpted in the interior of the mind. — Steven Holl

The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live. — Albert Hadley

Interior design quote Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own. — Frank Gehry

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space. — Philip Johnson

America's last pioneers, urban nomads in search of wide open interior spaces — Cathleen McGuigan

Interior design quote If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.

Venus [Williams] has an amazing line; I love her collection. I'm always at her office. She has an interior design company and her EleVen company. They have a wonderful office space and I'm always there for the interior part and get to see what she's doing with EleVen. — Serena Williams

The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space. — Gunter Brus

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain. — St. Lucia

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space. — Gilles Deleuze

Interior Quotes

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. - Peter York

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. — Peter York

Beige is atmosphere. It's bisque, it's ivory, it's cream, it's stone, it's toast, it's cappuccino. It;s well, it's magic. — Albert Hadley

I have come to the conviction that once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message. — Eero Saarinen

Interior design quote Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs.
Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. — Carl Sagan

I am going to design, in a great hurry, and I believe to build a station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc. etc. It is at Paddington, in cutting, and admitting of no exterior, all interior and all roofed in. — Isambard Kingdom Brunel

I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life. — Elsie De Wolfe

Interior design quote Good design is as little design as possible.
Good design is as little design as possible.

You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place. — Ken Wilber

One sits more comfortably on a colour that one likes. — Verner Panton

It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something. — Tadao Ando

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well. — Dale Chihuly

Architectural Design Quotes

A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body. — Christian Dior

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again. — Renzo Piano

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. - Frank Gehry

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. — Frank Gehry

The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made. - Louis Kahn

The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made. — Louis Kahn

Nothing in this world is more simple and more cheap than making cities that provide better for people. — Jan Gehl

The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. - El Lissitzky

The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. — El Lissitzky

Interior design quote Design is where science and art break even.
Design is where science and art break even.

I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing. — Tadao Ando

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities. — Walter Gropius

If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture And Design Quotes

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity. — Renzo Piano

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth — Frank Lloyd Wright

Interior design quote Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.
Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

Minimalism is not defined by what is not there but by the rightness of what is and the richness with which this is experienced. — John Pawson

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it. — Daniel Libeskind

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. — Massimo Vignelli

Interior design quote Design is thinking made visual.
Design is thinking made visual.

I make no special difference between architecture and design, they are two different stages of invention. — Ettore Sottsass

When I see beautiful clothes, I want to keep them, preserve them... Clothes, like architecture and art, reflect an era. — Azzedine Alaia

Architecture is not about designing somehting from a free, fanciful idea. It is about discovering and establishing one's own principle, some kind of regularity - finding an individual formula to apply to one's buildings. — Shigeru Ban

An object should be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use. — Bruno Munari

Design And Art Quotes

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist - Francis of Assisi

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist — Francis of Assisi

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli

The Jiu Jitsu I created was designed to give the weak ones a chance to face the heavy and strong. — Helio Gracie

Interior design quote Luck is the residue of design.
Luck is the residue of design.

The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people. — El Lissitzky

For me fashion is an expression of art that is very closely related both to me and to my body. I see it as an expression of identity combined with desire, moods and a cultural setting. — Iris van Herpen

The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). — Robert Hooke

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design. — Stefan Sagmeister

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. — Bruno Munari

Having no purpose is the function of art, so somebody else can look at it and ask a question. Design is different - you're supposed to understand what's going on. You can be delighted by it, intrigued by it, but you're supposed to know it's a hot dog stand. — Paula Scher

Home Decor Quotes

When I entertain at home, I take time and pleasure in the small details that make all the difference. Entertaining is about giving to people and sharing with them. — Valentino Garavani

Make your home as comfortable and attractive as possible and then get on with living. There's more to life than decorating. — Albert Hadley

Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people. — George Monbiot

A 'school-at-home' approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home. I always tried to make my home like my mother's, because Mom was magnificent at stretching a buck when it came to decorating and food. Like a true Italian, she valued beautification in every area of her life, and I try to do the same. — Rachael Ray

Decorating is like music. Harmony is what we constantly strive for. At home, we want a peaceful atmosphere where the objects are the notes and nothing is off-key. — Charlotte Moss

I wanted to be a decorator. I wanted to interior design homes and do everything myself. — Ursula Andress

You don't have to paint your walls lime green just to try to have your home feel decorated. If you're a classic dresser or preppy dresser or a modern dresser, you wear a lot of black - whatever it is - your home should reflect that as well. — Nate Berkus

Beauty is my heritage, but home decor is very much my passion. — Aerin Lauder

Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is. — Charles M. Schulz

Garden Design Quotes

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. — James Whistler

The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration. — Claude Monet

A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape. — William Shenstone

I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values. — Luis Barragan

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden — Stephen Gardiner

Poet: gardener of epitaphs. — Octavio Paz

Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream. — Christopher Alexander

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. — Mirabel Osler

Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden. — Joshua Reynolds

A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb. — Joseph Beach

Web Design Quotes

It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. — Paula Scher

Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries. — Neville Brody

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another. — Chip Kidd

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy. — Tim Berners-Lee

Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that. — Paul Cookson

Our weavings in the cosmic web are not self-contained. Rather, they are part of the design of our collective humanity. — Lisa Hunt

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores. — Chip Kidd

Good Web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer. — Jeffrey Zeldman

I love the fact that I work with everything that has to do with the brand, the product, the environment, the online, the architecture, the web design, because I am somebody that loves making things, making experiences, creating things that people love to engage with. — Christopher Bailey

The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web. — Jakob Nielsen

Graphic Design Quotes

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. — Massimo Vignelli

Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay. — Adrian Frutiger

An electrician isn't an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That's our job. — Neville Brody

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. - David Carson

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. — David Carson

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography. — Herb Lubalin

If you can design one thing, you can design everything. - Massimo Vignelli

If you can design one thing, you can design everything. — Massimo Vignelli

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable. — Massimo Vignelli

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy. — Jan Tschichold

Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of funtional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry. — Jan Tschichold

Creating is about sharing ideas, sharing aesthetics, sharing what you believe in with other people. — Shepard Fairey

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More Interior Design Quotes

The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting. — Verner Panton

Luxury starts where functionality ends and where the true value is personal and so has no price or reason. — Marcel Wanders

It is important to realize that whatever we do or design has iconographic references, it comes from somewhere; any form is always metaphorical, never totally metaphysical; it is never a 'destiny' but always a fact with some kind of historical reference. To put an object on a base means to monumentalize it, to make everyone aware it exists. — Ettore Sottsass

Just as a picture is created by adding a dab of paint at a time, the best arrangements are created a step at a time, with pauses so you can step back and see the overall effect. — Charlotte Moss

Rooms should be timeless. — Sister Parish

How obvious it is that color has its various connotations-hue, value, and intensity - and without the basic understanding of these three determining factors, we are somewhat limited in the proper use of color in rooms. — Van Day Truex

Innovation is often the ability to reach into the past and bring back what is good, what is beautiful, what is useful, what is lasting. — Sister Parish

No pattern should be without some sort of meaning. — William Morris

It is just as disastrous to have the wrong accessories in your room, as it is to wear sport shoes with an evening dress. — Dorothy Draper

For a house to be successful, the objects in it must communicate with one another, respond to and balance one another — Andree Putman

My business is to preach to you the beauty of suitability. — Elsie De Wolfe

When a man's home is born out of his heart and developed through his labor and perfected through his sense of beauty, it is the very cornerstone of life. — Gustav Stickley

Simplicity, suitability and proportion. — Elsie De Wolfe

You don't sell a commodity, you sell joy, gaiety, excitement. You aim at people's hearts, not their minds. — Dorothy Draper

I believe in doing the thing you feel is right. If it looks right, it is right. — Dorothy Draper

Ceilings must always be considered. They are the most neglected surface in a room. — Albert Hadley

Good dressing is largely a question of detail and accessories. — Elsie De Wolfe

We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and to adapt them to our uses. — Elsie De Wolfe

You don't have to know anything about a subject as long as you use common sense and imagination, plus enthusiasm! I use all periods of design in my work, for, after all, decorative styles are simply indications of a manner of living. — Dorothy Draper

Do not be afraid of large patterns, if properly designed they are more restful to the eye than small ones: on the whole, a pattern where the structure is large and the details much broken up is the most useful...very small rooms, as well as very large ones, look better ornamented with large patterns. — William Morris

Design is defined by light and shade, and appropriate lighting is enormously important. — Albert Hadley

Minimalism in interior design has become a caricature. Everywhere you find shops or hotels with an ambience that makes you feel like you are in a refrigerator. — Andree Putman

I am going in now for interior decoration. By that I mean supplying objets d'art and giving advice regarding the decoration of their houses to wealthy persons who do not have the time, inclination, nor culture to do such work for themselves. It is nothing new. Women have done the same thing before. — Elsie De Wolfe

My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another. — William Morris

In Conclusion

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