Would You Move to the Metaverse?

Pro or con, the interiors of the future are coming together nicely. Here's how and why.

- By Kristen Bateman

Picture a world in which you exist only as a digital avatar. Your home is designed with waterfall walls rather than oak. The exterior is surrounded by flames rather than lush green landscape. As for your property's location, please consider the most remote part of the globe, where neither the laws of physics and geography nor permits and budgets exist. It's hard to envision, right?

Enter tech's new obsession: the metaverse. A term coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, it refers to a place where virtual, augmented, and physical realities collide in a fully digital world. It goes beyond non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies and crosses into gaming. If you've ever created a house in Animal Crossing or the Sims, then you've experienced interior design in the metaverse at its most basic level.

"The metaverse offers a sense of 'familiarity' with the physical world but challenges scale, materiality, physics, and function," says architect Luis Fernandez, whose MetaEstates Gallery project put a focus on displaying art in surreal natural settings, juxtaposing elements that don't coexist in the real world. Tiffany Howell, the interior designer behind Night Palm studio in Los Angeles, adds: "You can build spaces that would otherwise be architecturally impossible in locations that one could only dream of it's an opportunity to bring dreamscapes to life."