Why Do We Return to Natural Forms?

What connects Art Nouveau, the 1960s and ’70s, and the interiors of the 2020s?

A changing idea of nature, and what it means to feel at home.

In 2013, I chose white quartz for the kitchen in my house. I liked its even surface, and I liked what was fashionable at the time. That seems like an ordinary enough explanation until I look at the materials attracting attention now: marble with veins that cut across an entire wall, porous travertine, plaster that catches the light unevenly. Furniture has rounded out, too. Sofas turn inward, table legs swell into columns, and doorways rise into arches. The changes extend from the surface of a countertop to the shape of the room around it. Looking at them together, I keep wondering how something that once seemed excessive or dated becomes exactly what we want to live with.

Taste feels personal while we are exercising it. We choose the surface, approve the color, decide that one chair belongs in the room. Yet those decisions take place among images and objects that have already begun to make a particular way of living imaginable. A material can start to look reassuring, sophisticated, or strangely necessary because of what is happening around it. I am interested in the moments when natural forms acquire that kind of pull. Their repeated appearance suggests a recurring desire, although the nature we choose changes considerably: the branching line of a plant, the grain of wood, the internal movement of a stone.

A living line in an industrial world

The late nineteenth century offers a particularly complicated version of this attraction. Industrial production was changing the scale and organization of work, along with the objects entering people’s homes. For William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, the quality of those objects was connected to the conditions under which they were made. An interest in traditional craftsmanship carried a social argument: the maker’s knowledge and satisfaction mattered. Morris’s patterns of leaves, birds, and climbing stems belonged to that larger concern with everyday life. Looking toward the countryside and toward earlier forms of making offered resources for imagining how an industrial society might live differently. The appeal of nature involved both what an object looked like and the human activity contained in its production. [1, 2, 3]

Art Nouveau developed its own fascination with the natural world, drawing on a widening field of observation. Botanical studies and illustrations of marine organisms offered designers structures that could seem almost invented: radiating skeletons, translucent bodies, elaborate symmetries. Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, published in installments beginning in 1899, brought many of these forms into circulation. The microscope had existed for centuries; the expanding visual knowledge of life gave artists new material to work with. Nature could be familiar at the scale of a leaf and disorienting at the scale of a microorganism. What interests me here is that looking toward an origin could also involve discovery. A designer could study an ancient organism and find a shape that looked entirely appropriate to the future. [4, 5]

That attention to living structure became architectural. At Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, completed in 1893, curling lines travel through the mosaic floor, painted walls, and ironwork around the staircase. The eye follows their movement across materials and levels, while daylight enters through glass above. There is a continuity between the smallest decorative decision and the space a person moves through. In Paris, Hector Guimard brought a related vocabulary to the Métro: metal supports take on the posture of stems, marking the entrance to an underground transport system. I find that combination revealing. Industrial materials and modern infrastructure were being given an organic appearance. The city’s technological expansion acquired a visual language that suggested growth, and the curve became part of the daily act of crossing from the street into another space. [6, 7]

Another way to inhabit the present

By the late 1960s, natural forms were circulating through a very different argument about progress. In the United States, the suburban house and its appliances had helped give postwar prosperity a recognizable image. The future also had a material vocabulary: glossy plastics, molded furniture, surfaces that promised convenience. Some of those designs were already remarkably organic, their curves made possible by new manufacturing techniques. Alongside that optimism, the Vietnam War and political violence, civil rights struggles, and demands for greater personal freedom put established versions of American life under pressure. The question of how to live was being argued in public and worked out through intimate decisions about dress, domestic life, and the body. [8, 9, 10, 11]

The psychedelic poster makes one part of that change visible with unusual intensity. In Wes Wilson’s concert posters, lettering swells to occupy nearly every available space. Words become difficult to separate from the shapes surrounding them, and adjacent colors seem to vibrate. Wilson and his contemporaries looked back to Art Nouveau, while their experiences with LSD and the visual culture of rock concerts gave those inherited forms a different purpose. Wilson specifically linked some of his color choices to experiences with the drug. Liquid light shows offered another reference: projected color moving and merging during a performance. On paper, the line could suggest a comparable instability. The vegetal curve had become a way to picture perception in motion, with letters behaving as though they might change shape before the reader finished deciphering them. [12, 13]

That exploration existed alongside practical attempts to bring daily life closer to the natural world. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962; concern about pesticides and industrial pollution helped build the environmental movement that produced the first Earth Day in 1970. The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, circulated tools and information for people interested in making and organizing more of their lives themselves. Communal gardens and food cooperatives gave those ideas a physical setting. In clothing, embroidery and crochet made the work of the hand conspicuous, while long hair and loose garments contributed to an appearance of informality. Within parts of the counterculture, making, wearing, and consuming could express a desire for greater agency over everyday life. [11, 14, 15, 16]

In the domestic images we associate with the 1970s, wood occupies an extraordinary amount of space. It lines walls, frames furniture, and surrounds the objects through which people watch and listen to the world. Knotty pine makes its irregularities visible; woven fibers and dense carpets add other kinds of texture. Avocado green and mustard sit beside rust and brown, bringing something of the forest floor into a manufactured room. IKEA’s archives document the popularity of rustic pine and the informal interiors of the decade. Wood grain also traveled beyond furniture, appearing on electronics and along the sides of station wagons, continuing an automotive tradition established well before the seventies. Some of it was a printed surface. I like the complication of that detail: a family could carry the appearance of a tree through the city on the side of a car. The industry producing modern life could also supply an image of the nature people wanted near them. [8, 17, 18]

The shape and weight of things now

The current return has a different outline. Across a recognizable strand of contemporary interiors, the curve has spread from individual pieces of furniture into the room itself. Arched doorways and recessed niches repeat the rounded tops of mirrors and cabinets. A sofa bends around a seating area; a stone table has the compact volume of something worn smooth. Furniture fairs were documenting renewed interest in curves and natural materials by 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic and the recent expansion of generative AI. Arches have a much longer architectural history, of course. Their presence here matters through repetition: when openings, furniture, and smaller objects share rounded contours, that vocabulary begins to organize the whole interior. The room acquires a particular visual rhythm before anyone chooses the objects that will fill it. [19, 20, 21]

The part I find especially interesting is the prominence of minerals. Alongside the woods and earth colors, there are greens that recall jade, pale pinks like quartz, translucent stone, and marble whose veining becomes the main event. A wall can hold the branching movement of a slab at a scale that allows the eye to follow it from across the room. Recent design reports describe this appetite for expressive stone, including applications in furniture and lighting. To me, this is a particular version of nature: we are looking inside matter. We notice the differences within it, the marks produced by processes that began long before someone measured a kitchen or drew an elevation. The stone has been cut and polished for a contemporary interior, while its pattern retains evidence of a history that exceeds the project. [22, 23]

I wonder whether the duration suggested by these materials is part of their appeal. Much of contemporary visual life happens on surfaces that refresh constantly. Images can be edited, circulated, and now generated at a speed that makes their apparent substance difficult to judge. Against that experience, I can imagine why a material with a particular weight and internal variation might acquire emotional value. A vein continues around an edge; a porous surface changes as the light moves across it. The encounter lasts beyond a glance at a screen. My reading is that these qualities can offer a sense of continuity, especially when technological change makes familiar ways of seeing feel provisional. The earlier emergence of this aesthetic matters: its history stretches across the gradual expansion of digital life, with AI adding a more recent layer to that experience.

The word “return” becomes useful here, although it contains several kinds of longing. Research on nostalgia has examined how recalling meaningful experiences can strengthen the connection people feel between their past and present, often through relationships and belonging. It gives some psychological substance to the idea of finding one’s bearings during change. Applying that work to a preference for stone requires another step, and that step belongs to interpretation. A person can encounter an unfamiliar material and still find reassurance in what it seems to represent. Something older than us may suggest that our own moment exists within a longer sequence. When I think about returning to nature as a kind of coming home, I mean that possibility of feeling located again, of having something near us whose existence extends beyond the pace of the present. [24, 25]

There are other forces in the room. Dramatic stone can signal expense and access to a singular piece of material. A curved sofa becomes desirable partly through the interiors in which we repeatedly see it. Designers and manufacturers interpret an appetite, develop it into products, and give it further visibility. The appearance of nature travels through this process as readily as any other aesthetic language. A manufactured surface can reproduce a mineral pattern, just as a printed panel can reproduce wood grain. I would keep that fact inside the argument. It suggests that the desired connection may be carried through resemblance as well as through the material itself, and that our search for something reassuring remains entangled with the culture selling us a particular image of home.

I suspect disappointment plays a role in some of these returns: a sense that the newest way of living has brought consequences we had barely begun to imagine. The forms we reach for then depend on what we feel we have lost, and on what becomes newly visible to us. The curve of a stem, the grain of a board, and the movement within a stone offer very different experiences of the natural world. Looking back at my white quartz, I recognize how easily a preference can feel complete and self-evident while I am making it. A few years later, a surface full of variation begins to look right. Following that change in the eye is one way of asking what kind of life has started to feel desirable, and why we are looking toward nature to help us picture it. //SC

Sources and references

Numbers in the essay refer to the sources below. Original source titles are retained in English. Psychological interpretations about contemporary materials are the author’s hypotheses.

[1] Victoria and Albert Museum. Arts and Crafts

[2] Victoria and Albert Museum. William Morris and historical design

[3] Victoria and Albert Museum. William Morris and wallpaper design

[4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Nouveau

[5] Victoria and Albert Museum. Art Forms in Nature

[6] UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Major Town Houses of the Architect Victor Horta in Brussels

[7] The Museum of Modern Art. Hector Guimard — Entrance Gate to Paris Subway Station, c. 1900

[8] National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 1955 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon

[9] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Design, 1950–75

[10] National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Earth Day and Spaceflight

[11] Museum of Arts and Design. Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture

[12] Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Deliberately Disorienting

[13] Smithsonian American Art Museum. Wes Wilson

[14] United States Environmental Protection Agency. The Origins of EPA

[15] Smithsonian Institution. Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, Fall 1968

[16] National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Collective and Communal

[17] IKEA Museum. Life at home in the 1970s

[18] National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Dynabyte DB 8/4

[19] Houzz. 5 Decorating Trends at the 2019 Atlanta Furnishings Show

[20] Houzz. At ICFF, New Furnishings Show Off Curves and Versatility

[21] Houzz. 34 Home Design Trends That Will Define 2025

[22] Houzz. 2025 U.S. Houzz Fall Design Trends Report

[23] Houzz. 2026 U.S. Houzz Fall Design Trends Report

[24] Sedikides, C., et al. (2016). Emotion, 16(4), 524–539. Nostalgia fosters self-continuity: Uncovering the mechanism (social connectedness) and consequence (eudaimonic well-being)

[25] Hong, E. K., Sedikides, C., and Wildschut, T. (2022). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(5), 735–749. How Does Nostalgia Conduce to Global Self-Continuity? The Roles of Identity Narrative, Associative Links, and Stability