Why Burgundy Is the Color of Winter Interiors This Year

The reasoning behind winter's richest color, and a first look at what's coming

Last week we wrote about what happens to a home when the days get shorter, the turn toward lower light, richer color, rooms that hold you rather than rooms you pass through. We said the thinking behind that shift had a name coming. It does now.

Laurel is the collection built around that idea.

Why Burgundy Specifically

Of everything that could carry "richer color" as an idea, burgundy is doing most of the work this year, and it is worth asking why, rather than just following it.

Burgundy sits in an unusual place on the color wheel for a home. It reads as warm, the way red always does, but it carries none of red's urgency. One designer this year described it as the color of wine in candlelight, which gets at something real: burgundy only looks like itself under warm, low light. Under bright daylight it can read almost brown. Under a lamp or a candle, it deepens into something genuinely rich. That is not a coincidence, it is exactly the quality that makes it the right color for a season people spend mostly indoors, in evening light, rather than under the sun.

There is also a quieter reason burgundy is having a moment. The flattest, most repeated version of "quiet luxury," beige on beige, all the way down, has genuinely worn thin this year, a point several designers have made independently of each other. Burgundy is one of the ways rooms are getting their color back without swinging into anything loud or trend-chasing. It is still restrained. It is just no longer afraid of being seen.

Why a Canyon Name This Time

Every collection this year has carried a Los Angeles place name, Calabasas in spring, Malibu in summer, Palisades in fall, each one a neighborhood standing in for a mood. Laurel breaks from the coastline on purpose.

Laurel Canyon has its own, specific character, wood-paneled rooms, a fire going, things gathered slowly rather than bought all at once. Structured comfort remains part of the story, the same seating logic that ran through Palisades still applies here, but the material world around it has shifted toward something a little more collected, a little more lived-in.

A First Look

The gray and antiqued brass velvet tufted armchair is the clearest single expression of what this collection is doing, velvet for the plushness we have been talking about, aged brass instead of anything polished. The beige velvet sofa carries the same idea at full scale.

For a piece with real character, the reclaimed wood trunk coffee table looks like it has already lived a few winters somewhere else before landing in your living room, which is exactly the quality we were after.

And for the smaller, easier additions, the set of antiqued brass pillar candle holders and the bronze botanical hurricane candle holder are worth having on hand regardless of what else you add, since low, warm candlelight is doing a lot of the emotional work this whole collection is built around.

Browse Laurel →

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes burgundy different from other red tones in interior design? Burgundy carries a deep, almost brown undertone that keeps it from reading as bright or urgent the way true red does. It responds strongly to warm, low light, appearing richer under lamplight or candlelight than it does under bright daylight, which makes it particularly suited to rooms used mostly in the evening.

Is aged or antiqued brass better than polished brass for a warm room? Antiqued and aged brass finishes tend to sit more quietly in a warm-toned room, since the texture and unevenness of the finish absorbs light rather than reflecting it sharply. Polished brass can look sharper and more formal, which suits some spaces but works against the settled, collected feeling a lot of winter interiors are going for this year.

Why are designers moving away from all-neutral "quiet luxury" interiors? Several designers have pointed to the same issue independently this year: an all-neutral palette, repeated without variation, stops communicating anything distinct after a while. The response has generally been to reintroduce real color, often through deep, rich tones like burgundy, rather than abandoning restraint altogether.