1919–1933 · Germany
Bauhaus Interior
Also known as Bauhaus style, New Objectivity interior, International Style interior
The functional, machine-age interior of the German Bauhaus — open plan, white walls, tubular-steel furniture and primary-colour accents, form following function.
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Across disciplines
- Architecture: Bauhaus
- Industrial Design: Bauhaus Product
About the style
The Bauhaus interior expressed the school's drive to unite art, craft and industry into a rational design for the modern age. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and led later by Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus rejected applied ornament and historical revival in favour of clarity, function and honest industrial materials. Rooms were conceived as open, light-filled and flexible, with white or neutral walls, large windows, smooth plaster and exposed practical surfaces. The era's revolutionary tubular-steel furniture — Marcel Breuer's Wassily and cantilever chairs, Mies's Barcelona chair — brought chrome, leather and bent steel into the home, prized for being mass-producible. De Stijl's primary red, yellow and blue accented otherwise neutral schemes, and geometric textiles from the weaving workshop added pattern. Everything was reduced to essential form and tested for use. The result is spare, bright, geometric and forward-looking — the seedbed of mid-century modern interiors.
Notable examples
- ▸Masters' Houses interiors, Dessau (Walter Gropius, 1925–1926)
- ▸Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel furnished rooms at the Dessau Bauhaus (1926)
- ▸Haus am Horn experimental house, Weimar (Georg Muche, 1923)
Anatomy of Bauhaus Interior
The numbered markers call out the design elements that define this style. Hover or tap a marker to see its breakdown.
Bjs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weimar%2C_Haus_am_Horn%2C_2019-09_CN-10.jpg
A cantilever or Wassily chair of bent chrome tube and leather sits as the room's icon of mass-producible modern furniture.
Smooth white walls free of moulding or ornament let space, light and furniture speak, expressing function over decoration.
A single block of red, yellow or blue — a rug, panel or textile — punctuates the neutral scheme in the De Stijl manner.
Living and dining flow together in one light-filled volume with large windows, replacing the closed Victorian box of rooms.
How Bauhaus Interior connects
Styles form a network, not a tree. Explore the direct neighbours below — click any to travel the map one hop at a time.
- Parallel / cross-current
- Influenced by
Parallel / cross-current Bauhaus — the Bauhaus architecture and school
Parallel / cross-current Bauhaus Product — shares the tubular-steel furniture and objects
Influenced by Mid-Century Modern Interior — its functional spaces shaped postwar modern interiors
Describe it like this
Prompt-ready vocabulary for describing or re-creating the Bauhaus Interior look.