DESIGNING FOR LONGEVITY: THE INTERIOR TRENDS SHAPING 2026
Warmer minimalism, tactile materials and wellness focused layouts are redefining luxury interiors as homeowners design for comfort, connection and lasting appeal.
4 min
Luxury interiors are entering a more thoughtful era. In 2026, design is shifting beyond aesthetics alone, with homeowners increasingly prioritising spaces that support wellbeing, longevity and personal expression.
As lifestyle expectations evolve and more owners choose to renovate rather than relocate, interiors are being shaped by a desire for homes that feel deeply restorative while maintaining timeless sophistication.
The result is a move away from stark minimalism toward what designers describe as “warm minimalism,” where softer palettes, layered textures, and natural materials create spaces that feel both refined and liveable.
Homes continue to play a central role in everyday life, influencing mood, productivity and overall health. According to CSR General Manager Marketing Renee McGinty, the growing focus on comfort and emotional connection is driving a major shift in design choices.
“While creating a sanctuary at home is still key, the way we shape our homes is evolving, with homeowners prioritising spaces that feel warmer, more personal and better aligned with long-term living,” McGinty says.
“This shift is reflected in the finishes homeowners are choosing, with a growing focus on materials that feel restorative and grounding.”
Material expression takes centre stage
Walls are emerging as a defining feature in modern interiors, evolving from passive surfaces into expressive design elements that add architectural depth and personality.
Smooth plasterboard finishes are increasingly used as a foundation for textural layering, integrated shelving, and subtle zoning that enhance both function and visual interest. At the same time, natural materials such as stone and timber are gaining prominence for their tactile and authentic qualities.
“Natural materials immediately bring us closer to nature,” McGinty explains. “Evoking the wabi-sabi aesthetic they bring variation, imperfection and warmth, characteristics that are increasingly valued in homes designed for long-term living.”
Stone feature walls and timber applications are being used to introduce weight and texture while maintaining a calm, neutral aesthetic. These materials are often paired with soft colour palettes and pared back finishes to create interiors that feel grounded and quietly luxurious.
Comfort meets performance
Beyond visual appeal, functionality and acoustic comfort are becoming central to high-end residential design. Homeowners are embracing intimate, cocooning spaces designed to enhance relaxation and reduce noise within increasingly multi-functional homes.
Acoustic wall panelling is gaining popularity as part of this evolution, delivering both performance benefits and architectural interest across living areas, bedrooms, home offices and media rooms.
“As interiors move toward warmer, more emotive spaces, we’re seeing greater emphasis on texture and materiality on our walls,” McGinty says. “Acoustic wall panelling allows homeowners and designers to add depth and tactility while also creating calmer, more comfortable environments that support the way people live today.”
Paired with moody colour palettes and woven finishes, acoustic materials are helping to elevate interiors while enhancing everyday comfort.
The return of architectural detailing
Subtle architectural detailing is also enjoying a resurgence, reflecting a broader movement toward craftsmanship and considered design.
Softly curved wall niches are emerging as a key feature, introducing sculptural forms that transform walls into focal design elements. Using flexible plasterboard solutions, these recessed features offer homeowners an accessible way to add individuality and sophistication.
“Architectural details like curved wall niches allow walls to take on a more expressive role within the home,” McGinty says. “Using flexible plasterboard to introduce subtle curves and recessed forms creates a timeless look for an achievable investment.”
Cornices are also being reinterpreted for contemporary homes. Rather than purely decorative, modern profiles are being used to soften transitions between walls and ceilings, delivering cohesion and balance throughout interior spaces.
Harnessing natural light
Light remains one of the most powerful tools in interior design, with natural light playing a vital role in enhancing mood, sleep, and overall well-being.
Skylights are increasingly incorporated into residential design to bring daylight into kitchens, living areas, and transitional spaces, helping interiors feel brighter, more spacious, and more connected to the outdoors.
“Natural light has a profound impact on the way a space feels,” McGinty says. “Skylights brighten darker areas, add visual interest and create a softer, more ambient glow that brings the outdoors in.”
As light moves throughout the day, it highlights architectural features and materials, adding depth and subtle visual movement within the home.
To maximise these benefits, premium plasterboard finishes are being selected to create smooth, even surfaces that help diffuse light and reduce glare. This allows natural materials such as timber, stone and soft furnishings to deliver warmth without overwhelming the overall design.
Designing with the future in mind
Ultimately, 2026 interior design trends reflect a broader shift toward intentional living. Rather than chasing short-lived style moments, homeowners are making considered investments in materials, layouts and architectural details that will remain relevant for years to come.
“2026 is also about investing wisely in the home, making changes that are sustainable and can last the distance, rather than becoming outdated quickly,” McGinty says.
The result is a new luxury aesthetic defined not by excess but by comfort, authenticity, and thoughtful design that supports how people want to live now and into the future.
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All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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