Why We Don't Chase Trends

I get asked fairly often what is "in" right now. What colour everyone wants this year. What everyone is ripping out and replacing. And I understand the question. But it is not really how I think about a home.

There is a particular kind of interior that has become very familiar over the last few years. Designed for the photograph. Built around a single feature wall, a viral colour, a shape that will look extraordinary for exactly one season before it starts to feel dated. It is not that these spaces are without skill. Many of them are beautifully executed. But they are built to be looked at, not lived in. And a home is not a stage set. It is not something you visit once and admire. It is where you make your coffee at seven in the morning, half asleep, and where you end up at eleven at night, still talking, long after you meant to go to bed.

That is the space I am interested in designing.

So when a trend comes through my door, I ask a different question than "is this popular right now." I ask whether it will still feel true to the people living there in five years. Whether it is a texture or a material with some honesty to it, or whether it is simply loud for the sake of being seen. Some trends pass that test. Natural materials, worn textures, things with a bit of age and story in them, tend to hold up well because they were never really trends to begin with. They are just good, considered choices that happen to be having a moment.

Others do not pass, and I will say so, even when a client has fallen for something on their feed. Not because I think their taste is wrong, but because my job is to help build something that lasts longer than an algorithm's attention span.

I would rather design a room that quietly gets better with age than one that peaks the day the photos go up. That is not a rejection of what is current. It is a different question altogether - not "what is everyone doing," but "what will still feel like you."