What minimal interior design websites are made of: 16 studios measured

Few typefaces, one weight, a white page and one large photograph. That is what we found when we measured the home pages of 16 well-known interior design studios on 8 November 2026. 9 use a single typeface and none uses more than two. 10 set all their text in one weight. None uses a gradient. 11 of the 15 we could read open on one photograph or film that fills the screen.

We wanted to know what "minimal" actually consists of on the sites studios admire, measured rather than described. Here is what we found, and what a studio can take from it.

Which studios did we measure?

Sixteen well-known studios in Europe and the US. Eleven are the studios in The best interior designer websites in 2026, timed on a phone. We added five more.

Axel Vervoordt¹, Kelly Wearstler², Rose Uniacke³, Joseph Dirand⁴, Studio KO⁵, Dimore Studio⁶, Beata Heuman⁷, Laura Gonzalez⁸, Commune Design⁹, Vincenzo De Cotiis¹⁰, Pierre Yovanovitch¹¹, India Mahdavi¹², Vincent Van Duysen¹³, John Pawson¹⁴, Faye Toogood¹⁵ and Studio Mellone¹⁶.

We have no connection with any of them, and this is not a ranking. We measured only the home page.

How many typefaces do they use?

One or two. 9 of the 16 home pages set every word in a single typeface, and the other 7 use two. Joseph Dirand's two are both Helvetica. Not one uses three or more.

Some are rare and some are everyday. Axel Vervoordt's typeface is loaded under the house's own name, while Studio KO and Dimore Studio set their home pages in Arial.

Where a studio uses two, the second usually has one job. Kelly Wearstler pairs a classic serif, Adobe Caslon, with a wide display face for its headings. India Mahdavi pairs Helvetica Neue with a typewriter face.

How many sizes and weights?

Few. Counting every visible piece of text on the home page at desktop width, the studios use between 1 and 9 font sizes. The median is 4. On a phone the median is 3.

10 of the 16 set all their text in one weight, a regular. Six use a second or third weight: Dimore Studio, Commune and Laura Gonzalez use bold, Beata Heuman and Rose Uniacke a medium, and Studio Mellone a light.

Some pages use one size because they carry almost no text at all. John Pawson's home page shows his name and a photograph. Vincent Van Duysen's carries 18 characters of text.

What colour is the page?

White, mostly. 11 of the 16 use white or a white with a hint of warmth: Pierre Yovanovitch's is a warm off-white, and Kelly Wearstler's and Beata Heuman's are almost white with a touch of yellow.

Three go another way. Joseph Dirand uses a light grey, Studio KO black and Studio Mellone a dark grey. Axel Vervoordt and Commune set no page colour of their own, so the browser's white shows behind their content.

What fills the first screen?

A picture. On 11 of the 15 home pages we could read, the first screen is one photograph or film that fills it: a room, a house, a piece of furniture. Kelly Wearstler and Studio KO open on film. Three studios, Commune, Vincenzo De Cotiis and Joseph Dirand, set one picture beside a column of text. Axel Vervoordt opens on two panels, one for each part of the business.

India Mahdavi's home page showed no picture in our browser, even after 12 seconds, so we left it out of this count.

The words are few. Counting the name and the menu, the first screen at desktop width carries a median of 9 words. Pierre Yovanovitch's shows none at all: the name is drawn as an image. The most is Commune's, at 51, a list of its four businesses.

Do they use shadows, rounded corners or gradients?

Hardly. None of the 16 uses a gradient. 12 have no shadow anywhere on the home page, and the other four have one or two. 13 have no rounded boxes; the exceptions are a few round buttons, such as Axel Vervoordt's menu button.

How do they show the menu?

In words, mostly. At desktop width, 10 of the 16 show their sections as words: a row along the top, or a short list at the side. Axel Vervoordt and India Mahdavi use a menu icon. Four show no menu at all on the first screen: Pierre Yovanovitch, Studio KO, John Pawson and Vincent Van Duysen.

What gets in the way?

The cookie notice. 7 of the 16 showed one on our first visit, and on some it covered the bottom of the photograph. Dimore Studio also opened a newsletter box over its first picture. A visitor in Europe may see more of these than we did, since we read the pages from outside Europe.

What can a studio take from this?

These are choices, not rules. Laura Gonzalez and Beata Heuman design rooms full of colour and pattern, and their sites still use a white page and two typefaces. The restraint is in the frame, not in the work.

1. One typeface, or two with clear jobs. If your site uses three or four, it is worth asking what each one is for.
2. Few sizes, one weight. A size for reading, a size for the menu and captions, and one or two for headings is enough for most studios.
3. A plain page. White, warm white or one quiet colour, with no gradients or shadows, lets the photographs set the mood.
4. One strong picture first. Choose the photograph that says most about your work, at full quality, and order the rest of the project behind it.
5. A few words, but the right ones. Pierre Yovanovitch can open with no words because people already know the name. A studio that clients don't know yet needs one plain sentence on who it is, where it works and what kind of projects it does. We wrote about that in A bold interior design website beats a pretty one.
6. Keep the cookie notice small. If you need one, make sure it doesn't cover your first photograph on a phone.

Minimal doesn't mean slow. The eleven fastest sites in our phone timing showed their first photograph in about 2 seconds or less, and all eleven are in this list.

How we measured

On 8 November 2026 we opened each home page once in Google Chrome at 1440 pixels wide and once in Safari's engine, WebKit, at 390 pixels, the width of a phone. We waited for the page to settle, then read the text a visitor could see: the typeface, size, weight and colour of every word, and the colour of the page. A word or picture counted for the first screen only when it was on top, not hidden behind a layer, and words in a cookie notice did not count. We counted shadows, rounded boxes and gradients on every visible element.

Typefaces are the names the sites themselves declare; where a site loads its typeface under a coded name, we say so in the table. Pages change, and one visit is one visit. We read the pages from outside Europe, so cookie notices and language may differ for visitors in Europe. Vincent Van Duysen's and India Mahdavi's pages were read again with a 12-second wait, because their first load showed an empty screen.

Where does fioel stand?

We are a studio in Amsterdam that designs websites for interior designers and interior architects, worldwide. We like this kind of restraint, so read this knowing where we stand. If you want to talk about your own site, book 15 minutes.