The level of detail on the final surfaces or surface types of a design project.

Reference

*Mohsen Mostafavi, David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering The Life of Buildings in Time (MIT Press, 1993).

Finishes are everywhere in an interior—whether it is the touch of a door upon entering a room, the softness of a carpet underfoot, or the glare of a mirror in the daylight. We experience and determine the appropriate finishes for a design through our senses of touch, vision, hearing, and smell, and each layers upon the last to create our experience of a space.

Finishes are also temporal, in that they are affected by wear and tear, and use over time—metallic elements gain patina, railings register the oils of a hand’s touch, leather softens. The British post–World War II architects Alison and Peter Smithson referred to this as “the art of inhabitation,” in which finishes and occupants age simultaneously. Or, as the critics Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow say in their book On Weathering The Life of Buildings in Time*, “finishing ends construction, weather constructs finishes.”

For interiors, weather is less of a factor in the maturation of finish, but through use, wear, and the microclimates of spaces that change with heat and moisture, finishes adapt and change. In essence, the aging of interior finishes gives character to a space. At a certain point, the effects of aging on finishes indicate when a space needs an intervention in the form of renovation and renewal.