Designing Against the Trend
Somewhere between the limewash walls and the boucle chairs, home design started moving at the speed of social media. What is everywhere in January feels overexposed by June and by December June designs are three cycles removed. Designing a home around that cycle is a quick road to both heartbreak and poor investment.
I have worked with two kinds of clients over the course of my career, and the difference between them has nothing to do with budget or taste level or how clearly they can articulate what they want.
The first kind walks into a design conversation asking: is this in style? Is this too outdated? Will people think this looks dated? They might be designing for an audience that does not live in their home, and are seeking permission from a standard that shifts every season. The second kind asks something different: I love this. Is it too much for the room? They are starting from what they feel and filtering from there. They are designing from the inside out rather than the outside in.
The first kind is rarely content. Their home always feels like it is missing something because it is missing their specific point of view.
The Fast Fashion Problem
Home design has followed the same trajectory as fast fashion, and the consequences are just as costly. Design elements are rendered slightly exhausting by the speed at which they saturate every feed, every showroom, every new build spec sheet.
Designing a home around what is everywhere right now is a quick road to heartbreak and poor investment. Not because the things themselves are wrong, but because a home designed to reflect a moment will always feel the passage of time more acutely than one designed to reflect a person. Trends move but the people living in the home evolve slowly over time.
I worked with a client once who could never quite get their home finished. We would be most of the way there, the rooms coming together, the design finding its footing, and then something would appear on Instagram. A space they had not seen before or an aesthetic they had not considered. And we would begin again, or something just slightly removed from our initial directive. It was not a design problem but a disconnect between the client and the idea of what their home should look like. Their ideal home kept changing because it was being borrowed from somewhere else rather than built from within. The home never quite settled because it was never quite theirs.
Ubiquity Is Not a Verdict
In my opinion, something being everywhere is information. It should not be taken as a recommendation and nor a disqualifier. The question of whether something belongs in your home has nothing to do with how many other homes it appears in and everything to do with whether it resonates with you specifically, in this room, for the life you you want to live around it.
A color that is having a moment can still be exactly right for your dining room if it is a color you have been drawn to for years and will still love when it is no longer discussed in design publications. A piece of furniture that appears on every mood board can still be the right piece for your living room if it is the piece that makes you feel most at home when you sit in it. Equally, something that has never appeared on any Instagram account you follow can be entirely wrong for your home if it does not resonate with you regardless of its obscurity.
The only meaningful question is whether you love it. Not whether you love it because you saw it somewhere, or because someone whose taste you admire has it, or because it feels current and safe and approved. Whether you love it for what it is, in your home, for your life.
What Timeless Actually Means
Timeless is a word that gets used often in design and means something more specific than it is usually given credit for. To me, timeless does not exclusively mean traditional or neutral. It should not mean the absence of personality or risk or color. It means that the choices made in a room were made from a place of genuine conviction rather than borrowed approval, and that conviction does not expire.
A room full of things you genuinely love will not feel dated in ten years because it was never trying to be current. Its entire goal is to mark who you were at a certain moment in time, and that is the kind of personality the passage of time cannot diminish.
The homes I find most extraordinary are ones that feel most inhabited, most specific, and most like the people who lives in them. They are full of things have a quality of settledness, of having arrived at themselves, that no amount of trend alignment can produce.
How to Design for Your Own Eye
Start with what you love before you consult anyone else. Before the Pinterest boards and the Instagram saves and the showroom visits, sit with what already moves you. The objects you have kept across every apartment and every move. The colors that make you feel most like yourself. The rooms you have walked into and never wanted to leave, and what specifically about them felt right.
Bring those things to the design conversation rather than arriving with a mood board of the most recent homes you’ve seen. A designer who knows what you genuinely love, not what you think you should love, is a designer who can build something that will feel true to you years from now.
When you find yourself asking whether something is in style, pause and ask instead whether you love it. If the answer is that you think you should love it, or that everyone seems to love it, keep looking. The room you are building will hold everything you put into it for a long time. It deserves to hold things you actually chose.
The Only Standard Worth Designing To
The design world will always have an opinion about what is in and what is out. Those opinions will change, differ, and change again. The home you build around trends will feel the churn of change every time it happens.
A home built around your own eye is immune to that because it was never asking for permission to be in style in the first place. It was asking something more interesting: what do I love, and how do I live with it well?
That is the question worth designing around. Everything else is noise.
Nubuor Designs is an interior design studio based in Beacon Hill, Boston, working with homeowners across the country who believe that a well-curated space is one of life's great pleasures. If you're ready to make yours one of them, we'd love to hear more about you and your home. Let's Talk.
