How create a material boards ?

What material boards teach us before we've touched a thing

A new interior design project is underway at Tiny Studio. And before ordering a single sample, before setting foot in a showroom, we went through a step that's often underestimated: the material board.

For this project, we discovered Mattoboard, an online tool that lets you compose material palettes directly on screen, colours, textures, finishes, all coexisting flat in the same space.

Laying out materials is already a way of reading the space

The exercise seems simple. It isn't. When you start arranging tones and textures together, something reveals itself fairly quickly: materials don't lie. The coherence of an atmosphere becomes legible right there, flat on the screen, long before the first sample arrives in the post.

What we observe while working on these boards is that two distinct directions emerge naturally from the project. The first is graphic, luminous, high-contrast, materials that assert themselves, that carve up the space. The second is deep, dense, almost sensory, textures that absorb light, that invite you to linger.

These two directions aren't resolved yet. And that's precisely where the material board becomes a decision-making tool rather than a simple presentation tool. It makes a tension visible, a hesitation, a question the project is still posing to the team.

Why this step isn't decorative

It would be tempting to see the material board as an aesthetic step, almost superficial. We think the opposite. It's one of the most honest phases in the design process.

At this stage, no budget has been committed. No supplier has been contacted. Everything can be questioned without consequence. It's total freedom, and that's exactly why the choices made here reveal something real about the project's direction.

What you see breathing together on a board, or clashing, for that matter, is already design information. Not a definitive promise, but a clear signal.

Next: leaving the screen and touching things

The next step for this project is to seek out suppliers and put these visual choices up against the physical reality of the materials. Because a texture on screen and a texture under your fingers are not the same experience. A colour in Mattoboard and that same colour under a specific natural light are not the same thing either.

The material board prepares that moment. It doesn't replace it. And maybe that's the tool's real value: arriving at suppliers with precise questions rather than a vague intuition.

We'll document the next steps here, as the project unfolds.