In the Aude, the housing stock mixes thick-walled village houses, suburban homes from recent decades and new-build properties. Interior renovation here often answers the same wishes: more light, spaces that breathe, healthy materials that are easy to live with. Current trends point in exactly that direction.
The underlying trend is a return to natural materials: pale timber, cork, hemp, terracotta. They bring warmth and texture, age well and sit comfortably with the older buildings so common in the department.
Set against that, a more contemporary register remains much in demand: polished concrete on floors or in bathrooms, glass to let light travel, touches of metal. The two worlds are in fact combining better and better, with a mineral floor softened by timber furniture, for example.
The right reflex: choose materials to suit how the rooms are actually used, in terms of damp, traffic and upkeep, rather than for visual effect alone. An attractive but fragile finish goes out of fashion faster than it wears out.
Open-plan kitchens, living rooms running from front to back, steel-framed internal glazed screens, movable partitions: current layouts favour light and multi-purpose spaces that can serve as a study, a guest room or a playroom depending on the time of day.
This is where decoration meets structural work: taking down a partition means first checking whether it is load-bearing. Forming an opening in a load-bearing wall is a genuine masonry job, involving a preliminary assessment, transferring the load and fitting a lintel or a beam, and it cannot be improvised.
Done well, an opening turns a compartmented house into a light-filled home without adding a square metre. Done badly, it weakens the structure. This is the kind of work to entrust to a company that does it for a living.
On colour, natural tones dominate: beige, sand, olive green, grey-blue. These calm bases show materials off well and cope with the strong light of the Midi.
Bright accents such as terracotta, deep blue and ochre appear in small doses: one wall, textiles, light fittings. The advantage is that you can change them without redoing the room.
Trends pass; the quality of the work remains. It is better to invest in what lasts, such as a sound structure, well-formed openings and services properly redone, and to keep the passing fashions for the decoration, which is easy to change.
For work involving walls, floors or openings, MCI Construction, whose own teams carry out the structural work, will assess your project and draw up a free quote. The company works in Narbonne and throughout the area, from the Corbières to the Aude coast, as far as Béziers.