Interior Architecture and Design with Foundation Year

Interior architecture is concerned with the spaces people inhabit rather than the shells that contain them. It asks how a room, a building interior or a commercial environment can be designed to serve human needs, shape experience and carry meaning. The discipline draws on architectural thinking, spatial theory, materials knowledge and visual culture, but its focus is always on the relationship between people and the spaces around them.

At Nottingham Trent University, this four-year programme includes a foundation year that builds the creative and technical groundwork you need before the degree proper begins.

You will develop skills across drawing, model-making, digital design tools and spatial analysis. You will study the history of interior design and its connections to broader movements in art and architecture, and you will explore how light, material, colour and proportion work together to produce specific effects. Projects will ask you to work at different scales, from the intimate detail of a piece of furniture to the overall flow and atmosphere of a large interior.

You will also engage with questions of sustainability, accessibility and the social function of designed spaces, all of which are central concerns for practitioners working today. The programme is structured to build your independence as a designer, with later years giving you increasing scope to develop a personal design voice.

Graduates from interior architecture and design work across a wide range of contexts. Many go on to practice as interior designers or interior architects in residential, retail, hospitality and workplace environments. Others move into set design, exhibition design, spatial branding or furniture design.

The programme also prepares you well for postgraduate study in architecture, design research or urban design. The skills you develop, including spatial reasoning, visual communication and the ability to translate a brief into a resolved design proposition, are valued well beyond the interior design sector itself.