Interior Design – INSIDE, the sister festival of the World Architecture Festival, celebrates the best interior design of the year, worldwide. We rounded up some stunning projects competing for the Best World Interior Design of the Year title. The event reconvenes in Amsterdam from 4-6 December.
The shortlisted jaw-dropping interiors show how designers are growing more and more conscious of how their projects will appear on Instagram. Social media offer a great opportunity for brands, professionals and innovators to reach a larger public. Still, at Archipanic, we believe that digital algorithms can also limit creativity, pushing designers to focus more on the looks rather than on other priorities such as functionality, sustainability or a human-based approach.
In this year’s the Bars & Restaurants category thrives. Bjarke Ingels Group are behind the design of the second incarnation of renowned Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. The unconventional layout, including greenhouses and outhouses, is imagined as an intimate culinary garden village, designed to give diners glimpses into the natural ingredients and fermentation processes behind the restaurant’s New Nordic cuisine.
Over in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, Buro Ole Scheeren’s fast food concept for Dean & DeLuca’s chef-led eatery, ‘Stage’, uses a sculpted high-tech white Corian and steel centre-piece, to celebrate the artistry of food, and to create a stage for those who make and those who consume it. And in the City of London, Universal Design Studio are behind Fortnum & Mason’s new 360-degree bar, shop and restaurant in the Grade I Listed Royal Exchange courtyard, complete with a bespoke curved metal canopy.
Pets-friendly interiors – cats in particular – thrive. E Studio’s Meow Restaurant in Guangzhou, China, embraces cats’ love of heights in its interior design. Zhang Hai’aog has created private home interior in Shanghai, designed to accommodate a family’s high pet ratio, giving freedom for its 4 and 2 legged inhabitants to enjoy the living space freely.
In the Civic, Culture & Transport category, entries range from KTX archiLAB‘s cloud shaped, glass wedding chapel in Japan, to ONG&ONG’s library with an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-themed section in Singapore.
Shortlisted projects from the Health & Education category include PAL Design Group’s pastel-colored pre-school in Gugugram, India, and Creative Crews’ multi-sensory room in Thailand for pre-school children with visual impairments.
Gurugram pre-school by PAL Design Group – Photo by Suryan Dang. 
Classroom Makeover for the Blind by Creative Crews.
Embracing a more organic approach to interior design is the National Museum of Qatar Gift shop by Koichi Takada Architects which features a canyon of curved timber ceilings and walls inspired by the natural Qatari desert-scape, and engineered from 40,000 3D-modelled parts.
St Andrews Beach Villa by Woods Bagot takes the organic approach to interior design to an even greater level, using a mixture of newer elements and old, worn materials from the villa’s previous iterations, to create a deliberate juxtaposition of eroded and resilient surfaces, and mundane and exquisite materials.
