What is Japandi?

Calm, with character

The name is two words run together, Japanese and Scandinavian, and it names a meeting point between them. The Japanese half brings restraint, respect for how a thing is made and a comfort with empty space, while the Scandinavian half brings the ease that makes a room pleasant to live in (the throw over the chair, the lamp switched on at four in the afternoon).

People love it for the calm, but calm on its own is easy to get. An empty white room is calm too, and nobody wants to sit in one for long. What makes Japandi worth the effort is that the calm comes with character, in things that carry a story, like a bowl brought back from a holiday, a chair someone made well or a picture you stop in front of on the way to the kettle.

Get that balance right and the room settles you each time you walk in, with the odd small lift when your eye lands on something you love. Because the story comes from your own things, two Japandi rooms can share the same calm and still look nothing alike, one pale and full of light oak, the other dark and lamplit.

Where Japandi comes from

The two traditions met long before anyone joined their names. Tate dates the Western craze for Japanese art and design to the resumption of trade with Japan in the 1850s, and notes that the term Japonisme is generally said to have been coined by the French critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s.

Shop the printWabi Sabi Objects PrintSave

Denmark felt that pull strongly. Designmuseum Danmark's page for its exhibition Learning from Japan says that in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century the finest Japanese applied art gave ‘a conspicuous boost to Danish arts and crafts’, and the exhibition's curator calls Japanism ‘a major precondition for the modernism’ that made Denmark a design nation over the century that followed. The same page explains why the two felt so close. Neither country had much in the way of minerals, metals or fuel. Japan's forests made wood central to its houses and furniture, Denmark's post-war houses were built of brick, tiles and wood, and in those houses formal interiors gave way to straw mats, rice-paper lamps and low seating.

Underneath the Japanese side sits wabi-sabi. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy translates wabi as ‘subdued, austere beauty’ and sabi as ‘rustic patina’, treats the two in separate sections, and traces wabi in tea from Sen no Rikyū back to the fifteenth-century tea master Murata Shukō.

The Scandinavian side brings hygge, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as a Danish word for ‘a quality of cosiness’ that ‘comes from doing simple things such as lighting candles, baking, or spending time at home with your family’. The name came long after all of this, but the habits it describes were in place a century earlier.

What makes a room feel Japandi

Five things turn up again and again in rooms that feel Japandi, and each one does a particular job:

• Restraint. Fewer things, chosen with more care, so the eye can rest instead of sorting through clutter.
• Visible craft. Wood grain, a glaze that pooled at the base of a pot, a stitched seam. You can see that a person made it, and plain things start to feel warm.
• Space left empty on purpose. A bare stretch of wall beside a frame, a shelf with one thing on it. The emptiness frames whatever is there.
• A few things with a story. The bowl, the chair, the picture. They give the calm something to hold on to.
• Natural light. Bare windows or thin linen by day, low warm lamps by evening, so pale colours look lived in rather than flat.

Restraint is where Japandi gets mixed up with minimalism, and the way we separate them is by what gets left behind.

Minimalism removes things until little remains. Japandi removes things until what remains can be properly seen.

A Japandi shelf can hold a cracked bowl and a stack of well-read books where a minimalist one might hold nothing at all. If the pared-back side is what draws you, our minimalist wall art prints show how much a single shape can carry on an otherwise empty wall.

Colour, and whether Japandi can be dark

There is no Japandi palette to buy. Let light and materials lead and keep the colour tonal. Start from what you're keeping (the floor, the wood of the table, the linen on the bed) and choose wall colours from the same family, a shade or two either way. We find a tonal room, meaning several versions of one colour, reads calm because the eye has no sudden jumps to make.

Light decides more than the paint chart does. Two of the colour rules in Homes & Gardens are to always consider natural light and to test before committing, so paint a large card and look at it in the room itself, in the morning and again at dusk.

The same round-up includes the 60-30-10 split (about 60% of a room in a main colour, 30% in a second and 10% in an accent) and keeping a scheme to a few colours. Both suit Japandi. Let walls and floor take most of the room, wood and textiles the next share, and keep the last tenth for something with more to say, usually a print, a cushion or a single glazed pot.

Japandi can be dark, too. Charcoal walls, deep stained wood and inky blue work when the same thinking holds, with one family of colour, natural textures to catch the light and enough space around things, and a dark room built that way feels like an evening by a lamp.

Colour is also how we tell Japandi from Scandi in practice. Scandi is happier with white walls, brighter accents and a busier shelf of collected things, while Japandi keeps its colours closer together and its surfaces emptier.

The materials it's made of

Natural materials carry most of the look, and each one keeps the calm from tipping into cold:

• Wood. Light or dark, the grain keeps it from feeling clinical, because no two boards are alike.
• Paper. Paper lanterns, paper blinds, a print on matte paper. Paper softens light instead of bouncing it back, so a room lit through it doesn't glare.
• Stone. A slate tray, a pebble on the windowsill, a stone basin. It's cool to the touch, but an uneven surface keeps it from looking hard.
• Linen. Creased linen on a bed or at a window is the fabric we find easiest to live with, because the creases are part of the look and nobody expects it pressed flat.
• Ceramic. Studio pottery with an uneven glaze is where we'd look first for patina, since every drip and thin patch records how the piece was fired.

A mounted row above the bed

Four prints hang in a single row above this bed, every one the same size, in the same black frame with the same white mount. Fixing those three things is what makes the wall calm, because once the edges stop changing the eye goes straight to the pictures and reads four images as one line instead of four interruptions.

White Lotus PrintView print

Japanese Heron PrintView print

Plum Blossom Branch PrintView print

Iris Flowers PrintView printSave

Colour does the joining. Blues and teals run through the lotus leaves, the blossom and the irises. The one warm note is the peach sun behind the heron, so the row reads as one quiet line with a single glow in it. Every subject comes from the garden or the water's edge.

The white mounts are the empty space Japandi asks for, built into each frame, and above a bed they give the eye somewhere soft to land at the end of the day. If you'd rather hang flowers alone, botanical prints follow the same rule well, as long as frame, mount and size stay identical across the row.

A blue-green trio above the sofa

Three prints in light wood frames sit above this sofa, all from one blue-green family, with clear wall left at either end. The light wood brings the Scandinavian warmth and the blue-green the Japanese quiet, so both halves of the style are there in three frames.

Bamboo Bird PrintView print

Water Ripples PrintView print

Layered Mountains PrintView printSave

The character comes from how different the subjects are, a bird among bamboo, water just disturbed and a long view of mountains, held together by colour. The only warm note is the peach sky behind the mountains at the right, just enough to stop the blues and greens feeling cold.

The space either side does as much work as the prints. A trio with room to breathe reads as a decision, while one stretched out to the arms of the sofa looks like filling, which is why we always leave a clear margin at each end and let the bare wall become part of the composition.

How to bring Japandi into your home

None of this asks for new furniture. Start by editing before you buy anything, clearing one shelf, one surface and one wall, and living with the gap for a week, which shows you quickly which things you missed and which you didn't.

Keep one or two things with a story on show, somewhere you'll see them every day. A bowl from a trip or a chair you inherited gives the room more than anything new, and the quickest way to flatten a room is a matching set bought from one shop in one afternoon, tidy but with nothing to look at.

Repeat a material rather than a colour. Wood on the floor, the frames and a tray, or linen at the window and on the bed, ties a room together more gently than matching paint, because grain and weave vary even when the material stays the same.

Then let light do the rest. Take down heavy curtains if you can, swap a bright overhead bulb for a low lamp in the evening, and choose one picture you would still stop in front of a year from now, from our Japanese wall art prints or anywhere else, rather than a set bought to fill the wall.

How we know

The history comes from Tate, Designmuseum Danmark and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with the Cambridge Dictionary for hygge and Homes & Gardens for designers' colour rules. The two walls are layouts from our Japanese range, chosen by us and mocked up in real rooms. The views on colour, materials and space are our own, formed while choosing and mocking up walls of these prints.