Material Honesty in Contemporary Interiors

For most of the twentieth century, the interior finish was a layer of concealment. Plasterboard hid the structure. Carpet concealed the slab. Suspended ceilings swallowed the services. The logic was both practical and ideological: finish could be standardised, mass-produced, and applied in any space regardless of what lay beneath it. The result was a generation of interiors that could have been anywhere — because, in a real sense, they were.

The current appetite for raw and honest materials — exposed concrete, bare brick, untreated timber, visible steel — is sometimes dismissed as fashionable rusticity, a reaction against the sanitised spaces of the late twentieth century. But the best examples of material honesty are driven by something more than fashion. They reflect a genuine understanding of what buildings are made of and why that matters.

A material can only be honest when it is doing the work it is designed to do.

Material honesty, in the sense we use it, does not mean that everything must be left raw. It means that the relationship between a material's appearance and its performance should be legible. Concrete that is expressed as concrete should be load-bearing concrete, or at least should be in the same structural family. A timber beam that reads as structure should be a structural element, not a cladding board applied to a hidden steel section. The distinction matters because it shapes how occupants understand and trust the buildings they inhabit.

This is not a new idea. Ruskin wrote about it in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, condemning what he called 'the lamp of deception' — the use of one material to simulate the properties of another. The Victorian Gothic Revival, at its best, was a movement driven by this ethical conviction: buildings should show what they are made of. At its worst, it became its own form of fakery — terracotta moulded to look like carved stone, machine-made brickwork pretending to hand-laying.

The same risks attend the contemporary raw-materials movement. We see it in the prevalence of applied concrete tiles — thin veneers that simulate the appearance of board-formed concrete without its thermal mass or structural role. We see it in timber cladding applied over conventional light-steel-frame construction, creating an appearance of warmth and mass that the building does not possess. There is nothing inherently wrong with these approaches, but they require honesty about what they are: decorative choices, not material expression.

At FORMA, our material strategy always begins with the question: what is this building actually made of, and how can that become the interior? In our own studio in Clerkenwell, the concrete slab is the floor. The brick walls are the walls. The steel structure is visible in the ceiling. There was no budget for applied finishes, but more importantly, there was no need for them — the building's own material logic was sufficient, and richer for its honesty.

The Kohl Residence offers a different case study: here, the local limestone of the walls is genuinely load-bearing, but the rooms it creates needed warmth. Our answer was not to conceal the stone but to plaster it with a fine lime coat that softens its texture while leaving its depth and weight legible. The material is modified, not disguised. The wall still reads as stone; the plaster acknowledges that human habitation requires softness.

This, perhaps, is the most nuanced aspect of material honesty: it is not about the refusal to modify or finish, but about the transparency of the relationship between the material and its treatment. When we beeswax an oak floor, we are not pretending the floor is something other than oak — we are acknowledging that oak in domestic use requires protection, and choosing a protection that enhances rather than conceals the wood's own qualities. When we paint a plaster wall white, we are making a chromatic choice, not a deceptive one, provided the plaster itself is genuinely plastered and not foam board with a skim coat.

The question that always clarifies this for us is: if you peeled back the surface, what would you find? In a building of genuine material honesty, the answer is: more of the same. The surface is continuous with the structure. The finish is an enhancement of the material's own character. The building knows what it is made of, and it is not ashamed of it.