NAHB’s Best in American Living Awards highlight top design trends for 2026

The BALA Gold winners feature some of the residential construction industry’s best in home and community design, interior design and remodeling.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) received nearly 650 application submissions for the 2025 Best in American Living™ Awards, sponsored by Smeg. The winners — 66 Gold winners who took home top honors and 159 Silver winners — were announced last week at the NAHB International Builders’ Show in Orlando.

The BALA Gold winners feature some of the residential construction industry’s best in home and community design, interior design and remodeling, and showcase top design trends that home buyers can expect to see on the market in the months ahead.

“For the past several years, stark white homes — from exteriors to interiors — have saturated the market,” said Jim Sattler, president of Jim Sattler Custom Homes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and chair of the 2025 BALA Subcommittee. “Now, we’re starting to see more pops of accent color with jewel tones inside the home and darker hues for exteriors.”

Notable trends from the 2025 Best in American Living Awards include:

• Nature-focused elements: Design features that connect people to nature — natural light, plants, warm wood materials and indoor-outdoor flow — help homes feel calmer, healthier and more grounded, said Tiffany George, a 2025 BALA judge - Production Team. “We’re seeing home owners gravitate toward spaces that feel like a natural extension of the outdoors.”
• Flex spaces: Builders are designing homes with multifunctional spaces that can easily pivot between uses. “Home buyers want homes that adapt to how they really live — with an emphasis on combining work, wellness and play — to elevate their living experience,” George added.
• Dark colors/finishes for exteriors: Exterior finishes, such as paneling, wood and stone brick, in deeper, richer tones (think: black, gray or dark walnut) are starting to replace the once-popular stark white home exteriors most common with farmhouse-style homes.
• Warm, neutral colors for interiors: The transition to earth tones, natural wood finishes, shades of cream/brown and the like provide “more of a comfortable cottage feel [versus] a minimalist black-and-white,” said Richard Gephardt, a 2025 BALA judge - Custom Homes. Opting for neutral tones in a living space provides a simple way to elevate home interiors.
• Elevated interior and exterior doors: Doors with intricate or unexpected details is a design trend that will be prevalent in 2026 and beyond, Sattler noted. This includes doors with black metal framing or black wood, bifold doors, swinging doors and large glass doors with paneling.
• Dimensional features: Design elements that add depth and dimension to the home interior, such as arched doorways and ceiling applications (i.e., vaulted- or cathedral-style ceilings) have been mainstays in offsite construction housing — and that trend continues, according to John Harding, Tifanee McCall and Thomas Coronato, 2025 BALA judges - Offsite Construction.

This also includes ceiling beams, which were prevalent among many BALA applicants across categories, Sattler noted. In addition to elevating a room’s aesthetic, ceiling beams can help to better define the use of space — particularly with open floorplans.

About NAHB

The National Association of Home Builders is a Washington-based trade association representing more than 140,000 members involved in home building, remodeling, multifamily construction, property management, subcontracting, design, housing finance, building product manufacturing and other aspects of residential and light commercial construction. NAHB is affiliated with 700 state and local home builders associations around the country. NAHB's builder members will construct about 80% of the new housing units projected for this year.