the macrotendences that will transform our spaces

How will we live tomorrow? What materials will play our houses, what emotions will invite us to stay, what stories will our spaces tell? With this question as a compass, the new trend report of Cosentino, entitled Shaping tomorrow: future design & architecture 2025–2026displays a global, emotional and sensory look on the future of design. His proposal goes beyond passing fashions: it is a cartography of ideas, materials and feelings.

Guided by expert voices such as Judith Van Vliet, color designer with a deep experience in the prediction of trends, and Enric Pastor, a journalist specialized in design, the report presents five great macro -overdeshes: origin, shelter, natura, urban and Wonder. Each responds to a contemporary concern – identity, well -being, planet, city and creativity – and draws a way of aesthetic and ethical transformation. This is the new luxury: design with purpose.

1. The art of returning home: origin

The first trend is a return to the beginning. Origin speaks of authenticity, the recovery of the artisanal, of the need to build from who we are. In an era of global homogenization, this current rises as a form of cultural resistance. Inspired by vernacular techniques, local materials and objects with history, honor memory and bets on regeneration: environmental, social and creative.

The colors of this narrative – cochinilla bourgeois, green moss and warm terracottes – evoke the earth, body and belonging. Surfaces such as Dekton Uber or Avorio, with tactile textures and mineral pigments, make up spaces that feel as old as old. Among the most eloquent examples: the Totomoxtle corn marquetry by Fernando Laposse in Puebla, the wooden pavilion and Chaki Wasi straw in Ecuador, and the redesign of the corporate GO in a seventeenth -century convent in Morelia. All are living evidence that the design can be a bridge between the past and future.

Within the framework of origin, a key microtence is hyperlocal: the rediscovery of what we have closer as a legitimate source of inspiration. It is no longer about looking for exotic materials or foreign solutions, but also looks at what grows, lives and resists in our immediate environment. This idea translates into the use of stones from the region, native wood, traditional textiles, and a deep respect for local cultural ecosystems. The design, thus, becomes an act of belonging. An example of this idea would be the Aesop store in Barcelona, ​​made with stone recovered from Montjuïc, according to a project from the Mesura study.

2. Refuge: Design with and for emotions

If origin talks about identity, refuge speaks of the emotional. This trend answers a key question: how do we feel in our spaces? In a hyperconnected world, saturated with stimuli, design becomes a tool to care for, calm and healing.

Shelter explores the creation of introspective, enveloping and sensory environments. From bathrooms that behave as sanctuaries to rooms where the light is modulated with ritual, the key is to design atmospheres. The approach is almost scenographic: noble materials, emotional lighting, curved shapes and soft palettes create a well -being architecture.

In this area, proposals as a sensory space, a digital installation by Marcos Castro inspired by Arab architecture, or the use of creamy and matte tones that invite the touch and pause, stand out. It is a trend that transforms houses into emotional landscapes, in which to live and dream awake.

A microtence that is intertwined with that of refuge is to explore, understood not as the act of discovering distant territories, but as an introspective trip towards manual processes, everyday rituals and ancestral practices. In this sense, designing is also to relear: how a surface is molded, how a textile is dyed, how light is regulated to favor rest or recollection. Recovering this knowledge is ultimately a form of resistance to contemporary speed.

3. Natura: The environment as a design principle

“Nature has already solved everything. We just have to look carefully.” Under this premise, Natura is articulated, the third great tendency of the report, which places the environment in the center of architecture and interior design. It is not just about “inspiring” yourself in the natural, but about integrating it – once and aesthetically – in our spaces.

In the era of climate emergency, design becomes a regenerative tool. Recycled or biomaterial materials such as plant leather, the use of living interior vegetation, passive air conditioning systems and surfaces that evoke organic – as Dekton Kreta, with the appearance of natural cement – are the protagonists.

Within nature, material innovation gives way to a microtence that is gaining strength: the use of regenerative biomaterials, such as plant fibers, fungi, algae or organic waste turned into surfaces or textiles. It is not just about reducing the environmental impact, but about investing the process: to design objects that restore, that return something to the planet. Projects such as cactus leather, Yaré fibers or panels created from Micelio point to a future where sustainability is no longer enough: now we talk about regeneration.

Examples such as housing in Vietnam designed with bamboo and landscaped ceilings or the restaurant in Tokyo that integrates vertical orchards show that the natural is no longer a decoration, but the basis of a new space ethics. Natura is, in short, a circular, conscious and deeply human design manifesto, because, as Tom Dixon says, “our obsession is, in reality, with longevity rather than with recycling”

4. Urban: rethink the city from resilience

The fourth trend, Urban, responds to the most inescapable challenge of this century: how we inhabit the cities. With more than 70% of the world’s population living in urban centers in 2050, architecture has to evolve from individual comfort to collective good. This trend is committed to resilient, sustainable and polypunctional urban designs. The house is no longer a closed capsule, but a connected system. Shared spaces are celebrated, the reuse of industrial buildings, soft mobility, recycled materials and surfaces with high technical performance.

A powerful example is Resilient citya series of illustrations by Javier Navarrete that reimagine cities such as Madrid or Ho Chi Minh with buildings integrated in the ecosystem.

Urban is not just a futuristic vision: it is an invitation to redesign the everyday with intelligence, ethics and poetry. Because the city of the future will not be more spectacular, but more human. In the urban context, microtence reprogram the city responds to an urgent need: adapt existing structures for new uses without erasing its history. Factories such as collective homes, churches such as libraries, stations such as cultural spaces are rehabilitated. This logic of adaptation is not only more sustainable than demolishing and rebuilding, but also creates charged spaces of character and narrative, because, as Tom Dixon says, “when you have been right with your design, you have the good consumer good that exists.” Thus, reprogramming is not just reuse: it is to weave an emotional continuity between what it was and what it will be.

5. Wonder: rediscover the astonishment

The fifth and final macrotence is perhaps the most playful: Wonder. Faced with repetition, he proposes astonishment. Faced with the predictable design, it suggests creating spaces that awaken the imagination. It is about rehabilitating the extraordinary in everyday life, of hugging the theatrical, the unexpected, the sensory.

Wonder is the art of breaking the routine with surprising materials, bold pallets and enveloping narratives. Spaces that arouse complex emotions, which feel as habitable scenographies, such as three -dimensional dreams.

Surfaces such as Dekton Onirika, which emulates the dream marble, or facilities as a surprise factor, where architecture dissolves in the surreal, come into play. The objective is not the immediate utility, but the lasting emotion. In the words of Enric Pastor: “The design should not only serve, it must make you feel.”

Within Wonder, nostalgia microtence emerges. Not as a melancholic gesture, but as a creative mechanism that reinterprets aesthetic codes of the past to give them a new meaning. Curved forms that evoke the 70s, palettes inspired by films of another era, objects that seem out of a memory. This emotional return to the past allows to compose spaces that, far from being imitative, are emotionally familiar and aesthetically novel.

These five macrotendencies do not function as isolated blocks, but as trajectories that intersect in the same direction: that of a more attentive, more conscious, more human design. The Cosentino report suggests that each trend each trend can be lived as a different layer of the design: the soul (origin), the body (refuge), the environment (nature), the community (urban) and the imagination (Wonder).

Far from a merely functional vision, this approach proposes a way of designing that does not separate the aesthetics of the emotion or the materials of the stories that support them. An countertop can talk about geology and tradition; A soil, climate and culture. Contemporary materials, such as the ultracompacts or recycled, are understood here not only for their technical qualities, but also by the story they allow to build.

More than anticipating fashions, the report raises a broader question: how do we live? And, through your answers, it suggests that design – when you think from consciousness – can be a way of looking, remembering and relating to the world in another way.