Iceland Didn't Care About Trends — and That's Exactly the Point
5 design lessons from a place that answers to no one
There’s a reason we named our company Global Home Interiors.
Before we ever designed a single room, we spent eighteen months traveling across six continents — not as tourists, but as students. Students of color, texture, material, and the way different cultures solve the universal challenge of making a space feel like home. That journey became the foundation of our entire design philosophy.
In this series, Dispatches from the Beautiful, we give examples of how travel can be the greatest teacher as seen through our discerning eye.
One summer, we brought the whole family to Iceland. We came home with five design lessons we’re still thinking about.
1. Commit to Color — Completely
Design Takeaway: Color, when fully committed to, stops being risky and starts being remarkable.
Reykjavík doesn’t do timid.
Walking its streets is like flipping through the world’s most confident paint deck — at architectural scale. Corrugated iron buildings painted cobalt blue with yellow window boxes. A lime green facade beside a mauve one beside a chalk white. The city’s famous main street, Skólavörðustígur, painted in full rainbow stripes that draw your eye all the way up to Hallgrímskirkja church at the top of the hill.
The lesson isn’t “be bold for the sake of it.” It’s that color, when you commit to it completely, stops being risky and starts being remarkable. We say this to clients constantly — the saturated library, the emerald kitchen, the cobalt bedroom that makes you feel like you’re inside a jewel. Reykjavík proves the argument better than we ever could.
2. Nature Is the World’s Greatest Mood Board
Design Takeaway: Commit to a palette — and trust it completely.
Stand at the base of Skógafoss — one of Iceland’s great waterfalls — and you’re looking at one of the most perfectly calibrated palettes we’ve ever seen. Dramatic, majestic, yet serene. Thundering white water. Dark basalt cliffs. Black sand beaches. Moss so intensely green it reads almost as a pop of color. Three elements, three values, infinite drama.
Then there was the moment that stopped all of us completely: hiking to the edge of an active volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula, watching lava fountain orange and red against a landscape of dark grey basalt, while smoke curled into a silver sky.
Here’s what a designer sees in that scene: the most daring accent color in existence, placed with total confidence against the most restrained possible backdrop. One color. One moment. Complete commitment.
We think about this every time a client hesitates over a bold sofa, a lacquered red fireplace surround, or a single wall of show-stopping wallpaper. Nature doesn’t hedge. Neither should your home.
3. Architecture That Belongs to Its Place
Design Takeaway: The best interiors, like the best buildings, could only exist somewhere specific.
Iceland has two buildings that every designer should see in person. They couldn’t be more different — and they teach the same lesson.
Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík’s famous church, was designed to evoke Iceland’s basalt lava columns — those extraordinary hexagonal formations of cooled volcanic rock found all over the island. The stepped concrete wings, the vertical ribbed tower, even the two-tone granite pavement at its feet — all of it is in conversation with the geology beneath it. Stand close enough and you can see the rough texture of the concrete, almost geological to the touch.
Harpa Concert Hall, at the harbor’s edge, takes the same idea in a radically different direction. Its entire facade is a tessellated grid of quasi-hexagonal glass panels that shift from deep teal to iridescent aqua to warm gold depending on where you stand and what the sky is doing. It is a building that changes color the way water does.
The lesson: great surfaces are never static. Choose your materials for how they live across light conditions — not just how they photograph at noon.
Both buildings say the same thing: the best design belongs somewhere specific. It couldn’t exist anywhere else.
4. The Most Interesting Design Lives in Unexpected Places
Design Takeaway: Every room deserves intention — even the ones you rush through.
Iceland’s design intelligence doesn’t save itself for the landmark buildings. It shows up everywhere — and that, we’d argue, is what a truly design-forward culture looks like.
On the Westman Islands, we found a historic stave church painted entirely black — matte black timber cladding, diamond-scale roof tiles, arched door, all of it — set against a vivid green hillside. Not dark grey. Black. And it is one of the most commanding, confident buildings we’ve ever seen. Total commitment to a single dramatic choice: the all-black room, at architectural scale.
In Reykjavík, a locker room at a local community pool stopped us in our tracks. Reykjavíkers usually start their days early with a visit to the community center where there will be a pool, an outdoor cold plunge, various temperatures of hot tubs, saunas, and steam rooms. In this one, we found bright yellow locker doors with red leather pull-tab keys. White drum ottomans lit from beneath with a warm LED halo. Deep charcoal terrazzo floors. A locker room — designed with the same intention as the finest hotel suite. Wellness for the body and the eyes.
And then there was a transparent bubble hotel pod nestled in the Icelandic pines: a spherical bedroom with no walls between you and the forest, designed so that the interior and the landscape become the same thing. A magical experience to sleep outside where the evening does not go dark, so eye masks are imperative.
These three spaces — a church, a locker room, a bubble in the woods — all ask the same question we ask in every project: How do we elevate design in “mundane” places to beyond the expected?
5. Great Design Cultures Treat Every Surface as a Canvas
Design Takeaway: Art is not an afterthought — it’s a foundational design decision.
Perhaps the thing that struck us most about Iceland — and Reykjavík in particular — is how completely art is woven into daily life. Not just art in museums. Art on the street, in the café, on the playground, in the window. We love expressions of creativity that are shared with the public.
A bakery, Brauð & Co, with its entire facade covered in a swirling cosmic mural — volcanic mountains, celestial spheres, botanical swirls in every color. A wine bar with a window graphic so sharply designed you’d want it framed. A café interior where the feature wall is a bold black-and-white illustrated crowd of characters. A city playground designed like a piece of public sculpture — organic blue rubber surface, yellow cube seating, hot pink hoop. And even the trash cans: hand-painted by local artists, signed, site-specific.
The iconic Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur hotdog stand has been operating since 1937. It is a legendary, affordable, must-visit spot known for its unique lamb-based sausages served with a mix of raw and fried onions, ketchup, sweet mustard, and remoulade — showing that good branding and design will never get dated.
Reykjavík believes that creativity belongs in everyday life — not reserved for special occasions or impressive spaces. This is exactly the standard we hold ourselves to at Global Home. Art is not an afterthought. It is a foundational design decision. It’s what makes a room feel like a personality rather than a project.
The Thread That Connects All Five Lessons
Iceland teaches the same thing in every landscape, every building, every street corner: show up fully, or don’t show up at all.
The waterfall commits to its palette. The black church commits to its color. The rainbow street commits to joy. Harpa commits to glass. The Blue Lagoon commits to designing even the room you’re supposed to rush through.
This is the design philosophy we’ve carried since that first eighteen-month journey around the world — and it’s why we keep traveling. Because the world keeps teaching, if you know how to look.
Iceland filled our file folder to the brim.