A brief history of Minimalist Design (and why it’s still relevant)

Minimalist design is an aesthetic of reduction — stripping objects and spaces to their essentials, guided by “less is more.” It draws on early-20th-century modernism and the Bauhaus, traditional Japanese aesthetics, and the 1960s Minimal Art movement, and was codified by figures like Mies van der Rohe and Dieter Rams. It stays relevant because reduction answers durable human needs: clarity, longevity, and calm.

Minimalism is often mistaken for a recent trend — a look that arrived with white interiors and unboxing videos. In fact it’s more than a century old, and it grew out of serious arguments about how objects should be made and how people should live. Knowing where it came from explains why it keeps coming back.

What is minimalist design?

Minimalist design is a philosophy of reduction: removing everything non-essential from an object or space until only what’s necessary remains. It favours clean lines, simple geometric forms, restraint in colour and ornament, and a focus on function and material quality over decoration.

The principle is usually summed up in two phrases — “less is more,” attributed to architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and “less, but better,” from designer Dieter Rams. Both point at the same idea: clarity comes from subtraction, not addition.

The roots of minimalism

Minimalist design didn’t begin with one movement. It draws on several traditions that converged over the 20th century.

• Traditional Japanese aesthetics. Centuries before the term existed, Japanese design valued simplicity, empty space (ma), natural materials, and restraint. These ideas deeply influenced Western minimalism and still underpin it.
• Early modernism and the Bauhaus. Founded in Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus argued that form should follow function and that ornament was often dishonest. It laid the groundwork for stripped-down, functional design made for everyday life.
• De Stijl and architectural modernism. The Dutch De Stijl movement and architects like Mies van der Rohe reduced design to essential geometry and pure planes, pushing “less is more” into buildings and furniture.

The Minimal Art movement of the 1960s

The word “minimalism” entered common use through art, not design. In 1960s New York, artists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Agnes Martin made works stripped of expression and narrative — plain geometric forms, industrial materials, and repetition, with nothing to “represent.”

This Minimal Art movement gave the aesthetic its name and its intellectual seriousness. When the same sensibility — reduction, geometry, honest materials, no ornament — flowed back into furniture, architecture, and product design, it carried that vocabulary with it.

How minimalism shaped product and furniture design

The most influential bridge from art-world minimalism to everyday objects was Dieter Rams, chief designer at Braun from the 1960s. His products embodied reduction as a working method, and his “ten principles of good design” turned minimalism into something teachable: good design is unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, and “as little design as possible.”

In furniture, minimalism showed up as pieces defined by a single clear form and an honest material — tubular steel chairs, plain timber tables, modular systems with no applied decoration. The object’s quality had to carry it, because there was nothing else to look at. That raised the stakes on proportion, finish, and material, which is exactly the point.

Why minimalist design is still relevant

Minimalism endures because reduction answers needs that don’t go out of style. Three reasons keep it current:

1. Clarity in a cluttered world. As physical and digital environments get busier, the calm of a reduced space becomes more valuable, not less.
2. Longevity over trend. A minimalist object has no decorative details to date it, so it ages slowly and stays usable for decades — a quiet argument against disposable design.
3. Sustainability. “Less, but better” aligns naturally with buying fewer, longer-lasting things and wasting less material — a contemporary concern Rams anticipated with his principle that good design is environmentally friendly.

The persistence is the proof. An aesthetic that resurfaces across a century, through different movements and media, is answering something structural rather than chasing fashion.

Minimalism and steel

Stainless steel is one of minimalism’s natural materials. It needs no finish, no veneer, no covering — the surface is the material itself, which fits minimalism’s demand for honesty. Its strength allows the slim sections and clean planes the aesthetic favours, and its durability serves minimalism’s preference for objects that last.

At NM3, minimalist design isn’t a style applied to steel; it’s the logic the studio works by. A piece is reduced to a single clear form and left to be exactly what it is — solid steel, raw and unpolished, with nothing added that doesn’t need to be there. That’s the century-old principle, built in the present.

Frequently asked questions

Who started minimalist design? There’s no single founder. Minimalist design grew from traditional Japanese aesthetics, the Bauhaus, and architects like Mies van der Rohe, while the term “minimalism” came from the 1960s Minimal Art movement. Dieter Rams later codified its principles for product design.

What does “less is more” actually mean? Coined by architect Mies van der Rohe, “less is more” means that removing the non-essential makes a design clearer, stronger, and more honest. Restraint, not abundance, produces quality — fewer elements, each one doing real work.

Is minimalism the same as modernism? They’re related but not identical. Modernism is a broad early-20th-century movement across art, architecture, and design; minimalism is a strand within and after it that pushes reduction further, stripping away ornament and expression to reach the essentials.

Why is minimalist furniture so popular? Because it’s calm to live with, hard to date, and built around material and form rather than decoration — so it lasts. In busy, cluttered environments, the clarity of minimalist furniture reads as both restful and timeless, which keeps it in demand.

Written by NM3 Studio — a Milan design studio working exclusively in stainless steel, founded by Nicolò Ornaghi, Francesco Zorzi and Delfino Sisto Legnani. Last updated August 2026.