Trending now in our homes

Trending NOW

in our homes

We have always heard that there is no place like home – and last year, many of us truly felt it! What home trends might we expect to see this year?

These are suggestions borrowed from a range of interior designers and home stylists.

• Faced with the global perspective seems to have got us more focussed on sustainable style.

Modern décor and furniture, in its production, has been associated with waste and excess, so we are now looking to recycling and alternative technologies. People are experimenting with natural materials like seagrass and corn as well as new bioplastics. High style, low environmental impact is the way forward. • Locally crafted items of high quality are making a comeback, such as customised dining settings. • Look for more evidence of rich natural textures and handmade crafts - embroidery, linen upholsteries, thick wool boucle, hemp curtains, jute, cork, wicker, stone – over sleek surfaces and digital prints, and natural elements paired with crisp white interiors. • If you are not familiar with abstract face line art – an expressive artistic style where faces and figures are depicted using few continuous lines – you may well be by the end of 2021 as it is predicted to prolifically grace our walls. • Colours might reflect different shades of optimism, with blushing peaches, pale pinks and soft pistachios said to appear and deep ochre yellow used to brighten things up.

Dark navy blue may be the elegant statement in contemporary spaces. Pantone Colour of the Year 2021 comes as a pairing of two independent colours ‘that highlight how different elements come together to support one another’. They are the enduring PANTONE Ultimate Gray and the bright and cheerful yellow of PANTONE Illuminating.

• White or beige rendered interior walls, especially in the main living areas and bathrooms are a suggestion. • The word is that curves and arches could become popular again, with new builds even having arched doorways and windows as key design features. • Recycled timber beams are likely to be used internally and externally. • And another look that was popular in the 80s is set to return - broken stone and crazy paving. In the US, Zillow’s 2021 home trends forecast that homebuyers’ and homeowners’ priorities will extend beyond home offices and entertainment spaces to pet-friendly spaces, gourmet kitchens, smart home tech that provides health and safety solutions, and ‘vacation-home’ amenities.

And it’s not just the 2020 pandemic that has had an impact on home design.

Are you familiar with sleepouts and sunrooms? It is said that these spaces gained popularity in the early 1900s as tuberculosis made its deadly march across America. Doctors thought fresh air and sunshine was the best cure for the disease and spaces were built or screened in and called ‘sleeping rooms’ for sick family members.

Homeowners at the turn of the 20th century relied on an armoire, a tall cupboard with shelving, to store their clothes. That changed during the 1920s as people believed dust was a dangerous incubator for germs. They ditched the armoires and created bigger and bigger wardrobes for easier cleaning and maintenance.

Powder rooms, or half bathrooms, were an important part of preventing families from falling ill during past epidemics and pandemics as they kept visitors from potentially exposing families. Workers and guests were asked to wash their hands in the half bathroom before walking further into the home.

And white tiles first became popular in the early 1900s when scientists began to gain a better understanding of how infectious diseases spread. Builders started using them to make hospitals and other public places, and the trend made its way into the home kitchen.