Are Our Homes Starting to Look More...Holy?

In 2020, Ye, previously known as Kanye West, referred to the now infamous monochromatic, Axel Vervoordt–designed mansion where he lived with Kim Kardashian (and where she still resides) as a "futuristic Belgian monastery." Some might’ve just called it minimalist, but what makes Ye’s description of the Hidden Hills mansion feel particularly apt is that the design actually does reference many tenets of modern religious architecture. Its imposing, arched hallways, for one, evoke the landmark Gothic Expressionist-style Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen, completed in 1940. Its bare plaster walls, window cutouts, hunks of stone, and sparse, sculptural settings feel like spaces to pray or meditate; they could easily fit in alongside the light-filled atrium of Alvar Aalto’s late-1970s Riola Parish Church, or the concrete-and-glass Church of Light by Tadao Ando, built in 1989. (West and Kardashian have also both worked with Ando on home designs, though West famously left his in ruins.) Whether Ye’s declaration of the home’s look was trendsetting or trendspotting, one thing is clear: religious aesthetics are in the zeitgeist.

Though Americans are becoming less religious, moving toward other forms of faith and spirituality (while also growing increasingly socially conservative), churches are being readapted as housing, hotels, and even restaurants and nightclubs. Catholic symbolism and religious aesthetics are en vogue in the traditionally secular worlds of art and fashion. Last year, a pared-down bedding style had a moment as a microtrend dubbed "monastic bed-making."

You don’t have to look far to find other examples of everyday homes that incorporate major aesthetic elements of modern ecclesiastical architecture. A California garage conversion by ADU builder Modern Granny Flat with white walls, curving ceilings, and wooden details, for example, and a Sydney terrace house by Stafford Architecture with a similar palette—plus a slender skylight that creates a holy light-beam effect—are equally reminiscent of the Riola Parish Church interiors. Meanwhile, the geometric cutouts and Tetris-like layout of a concrete cabin in Mexico designed by architect Ludwig Godefroy bring Bristol’s brutalist-style Clifton Cathedral to mind.

Architecture organized around channeling the divine is not a new concept; in fact, for millennia, creating sacred space, like Greek temples or Islamic mosques and European cathedrals and synagogues, was one of the field’s main concerns. But the desire for visual simplicity in these spaces—swooping, bare surfaces, raw materials, open interiors, and strategically placed openings to capture sunlight—started to take shape in the early 20th century. The (problematic) Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner’s Goethenaum in Switzerland, for example, was pioneering for its curvilinear, exposed-concrete form when it opened in 1920. The massive domed temple mixed elements of Expressionism and organic architecture; stained-glass windows and skylights flood the pared-down interior with light so as to join its congregation with the divine.