A narrow street, reeking and dark. Buildings packed so tight you can barely see the sky.
Then, the cathedral.
Light, colour, brilliance. The scent of myrrh and incense. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires. Gold on the altars. Coloured light pouring through the stained glass.
God is light. God is colour.
A sense of the mystical takes hold. That was luxury in a medieval city.
Luxury doesn’t emerge from nowhere. With each turn in history, it answers a specific lack — whatever was missing for people at that particular moment.
Let’s trace the journey.
The cathedral: when luxury meant light
In the twelfth century, Abbot Suger rebuilt the basilica of Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It wasn’t a whim. He wanted the space to elevate the soul of anyone who entered, and to achieve this he developed one precise idea: the lux nova, the new light.
The stained glass, the gems, the gold — all the materials we would call luxurious today — had a theological function. They filtered and reflected exterior light and transformed it into something almost physical: a coloured light that represented the divine.
The luxury of the medieval cathedral was not ostentation. It was an instrument. Its purpose was to give a public living in darkness and squalor an experience their daily life could never offer.
Luxury was contrast.
The palace: when luxury meant power
A few centuries later, the same elements — gold, precious stones, marble, great halls — but a different context.
The palace.
Kings and nobles used it to project authority. Versailles was not built for comfortable living. It was built so that any ambassador crossing the Hall of Mirrors would know, without being told, exactly who they were dealing with.
The function changed, but the principle held. Luxury still generated an atmosphere that everyday life couldn’t produce. Only now the elevation wasn’t towards God — it was towards human power.
Stimulation of the senses, complexity, emotion — all still present. The point was to concentrate, to distil, every sensation that ordinary existence could not produce.
The factory and the garden: when luxury meant lost nature
The Industrial Revolution changed the equation.
Cities filled with factories, smoke, and grey, identical workers’ housing. Life moved further from nature, with all the consequences that followed.
And architecture adapted.
Great glazed winter gardens appeared, attached to townhouses, where exotic species were cultivated beneath domes of iron and glass.
In Barcelona, the Modernisme català of Gaudí, Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch brought nature back into the building itself: flowers on facades, wrought-iron tendrils, stained glass imitating leaves, ceramics that recalled water.
Ornament no longer represented God or the king. It gave back to the city-dweller what industrial life had taken away.
The screen: when luxury meant silence
The twentieth century arrived, and with it a new lack.
Everyday life filled with stimuli: posters, advertisements, shop windows, constant visual noise. The dominant sensation was no longer darkness or grey. It was saturation.
Architecture tried, once again, to address the deficiency.
Adolf Loos had anticipated it in a lecture in Vienna in 1910: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.” Mies van der Rohe crystallised it in the phrase you can now read on tourists’ T-shirts: less is more.
Minimalism didn’t emerge as aesthetic poverty. It emerged as sensory rest. Luxury, at that moment, was silence.
The pendulum today
But minimalism, misunderstood, produced the opposite of what it promised. White empty boxes. Cold materials. Spaces that photograph beautifully and feel desolate when you actually live in them.
The human body needs stimulation.
Which is why today we find two simultaneous reactions, apparently opposed:
- The return to classicism and ornament: mouldings, veined marble, wallpapers, furniture with a history.
- Maximalism: layers, colour, a deliberate mixing of periods, textures and materials.
Both respond to the same feeling: that architecture and interiors lack emotion, stimulus and their connection to the past.
If taken to an extreme — as it has been so many times — we will tip into another cycle. Back to soulless austerity.
This pendulum is nothing new. In Barcelona, around 1910, the Noucentisme of Eugeni d’Ors emerged as a direct reaction to the ornamental excess of the Modernisme català, defending the classical Mediterranean line — sober and serene.
A hundred years later, the story might repeat with different players.
A path without an expiry date
Between austerity and excess there is a third way — one that doesn’t need to wait for fashion to change in order to make sense.
It lies in reinterpreting the complexity of traditional architecture — its layering, symbolism, materials, sensory richness — through the discipline of a contemporary language.
Not minimalism. But not unchecked excess either.
Materials, textural complexity, richness of detail and sensation — coexisting with a cleaner order and form.
Our approach
At Archtree Studio we don’t defend a style. We defend a vision.
Each client arrives with a different need — sometimes explicit, almost always intuited. Some are looking for warm, tranquil atmospheres. Others want a house immersed in nature, in stimulation.
What we try to do is identify what need lies beneath each project — and respond to it, without being pulled along by whatever trend happens to be passing through.
If you have a project in mind and you need help — write to us.
