I used to think minimalism was just about getting rid of stuff.
Then I spent three weeks in Valparaíso, staying in this ridiculous apartment that had maybe six pieces of furniture total, and I realized—wait, this isn’t emptiness, this is something else entirely. The place had these massive windows facing the Pacific, and the owner, a ceramicist named Claudia, had left exactly three objects on the windowsill: a chunk of volcanic rock, a piece of driftwood that looked like it had been underwater for a century, and one of her own bowls, this deep charcoal thing with a rough exterior. That was it. But here’s the thing—it didn’t feel sparse, it felt full somehow, like every object was doing the emotional labor of ten. Chilean minimalism, turns out, isn’t about subtraction at all; it’s about this weird calibration between the Andes and the ocean, between stone that refuses to move and water that never stops moving, and somehow designers have figured out how to make rooms feel like that tension.
How Mountain Geology Accidentally Became an Interior Design Philosophy
The Andes aren’t subtle. They’re these massive, almost confrontational peaks that dominate like half the country’s eastern edge, and if you spend any time in Chilean homes—especially in Santiago or further south—you’ll notice this thing where materials seem almost aggressively tactile. I’m talking about walls that aren’t painted but left as raw concrete, sometimes with the formwork marks still visible. Timber that’s been weathered or charred, not polished into oblivion. Stone that looks like it was pulled from a riverbed yesterday.
Architects like Smiljan Radić and Alejandro Aravena have been working with this language for decades now, though it’s not like they invented it—they just articulated what was already happening in vernacular Chilean buildings, those rural structures where nobody bothered to hide the construction process because, honestly, why would you? The mountains don’t apologize for being mountains. So Chilean interiors don’t apologize for being interiors. You see exposed beams, unfinished edges, furniture that looks like it might’ve been designed by someone who was also thinking about how to build a bridge.
I guess it makes sense that a country squeezed between geological extremes would develop an aesthetic that’s basically about materiality as honesty.
Coastal Light and the Unfinished Conversation Between Inside and Outside
But then there’s the coast, which operates on completely different principles. The light on the Chilean coast is this pale, diffused thing—especially around Zapallar or Pichilemu—that makes everything look slightly overexposed, like an old photograph that’s been sitting in a drawer for thirty years. And coastal homes lean into that. They use whites and off-whites and these sandy beiges that would probably feel boring anywhere else, but here they just let the light do whatever it wants. Windows are huge, often floor-to-ceiling, sometimes without curtains because the whole point is to not interrupt the relationship between the room and the sea.
I’ve seen houses where entire walls slide away—literally disappear into pockets—so the living room becomes a covered terrace becomes the beach, depending on the weather and your mood. It’s not minimalism as restraint; it’s minimalism as permeability, this idea that inside and outside aren’t really separate categories. Which sounds kind of precious when I write it out, but when you’re actually standing in one of those spaces, with the wind coming through and the sound of waves doing their repetitive thing, it feels less like a design choice and more like an inevitability.
There’s also this texture thing happening with textiles—chunky wool throws, linen that’s been washed so many times it’s gone soft and irregular, sheepskin rugs that still have some wildness to them. Not the Scandinavian hygge version, which always feels a little too curated, but something rougher, more lived-in. Maybe it’s because Chilean wool comes from sheep that actually spend their lives on mountains, not in some pastoral fantasy, so the material carries that history.
Anyway, the whole thing—the stone and concrete from the mountains, the light and openness from the coast—ends up creating these interiors that feel weirdly unfinished, like they’re still in conversation with the landscape. Which I think is the point. Minimalism in Chile isn’t about control or perfection; it’s about leaving enough space for geology and weather to have a say. And honestly, that feels like a better definition than most of the sterile, Instagram-ready versions you see everywhere else. It’s messier. It’s better.
