What's going to be the new equivalent of "entirely grey house"?

[SquashMinus]

Mooching on Instagram for paint colour inspiration and noticed the trend for grey walls, grey carpet, grey sofa, grey curtains etc etc definitely seems to be dropping off, but can't see a clear contender rising to replace it yet. Anyone more in touch with interior design have any suggestions for what the next big trend will be??

Well we've just painted our hallway, stairs and landing in bright yellow (F&B Citron) so I'm calling that as the colour of 2022 . I think it's a reaction to house-hunting last year and being faced with a succession of houses top-to-toe in grey or navy.

I agree completely with the pp who yearns for a return to mismatched / secondhand / antique stuff. We (as in, all of us) really need to stop buying new. There is enough furniture in the world already! The only thing 'new' in our new house is a sofabed - the rest is all secondhand / inherited.

I think the fully grey trend where the soft furnishings, accessories and furniture is all grey is bit too much and there are lots of these clone houses on Rightmove.
My aunt has all grey she took a photo of her new sofa and I thought she had sent me a black and white photo

Also greige and pastels and painting the skirting boards the same colour as the walls!

@badg3r

Also greige and pastels and painting the skirting boards the same colour as the walls!

I don’t know if I like this look but at least it’ll be easier, quicker and cheaper to paint etc.

I’m currently redecorating my new house which was left in an awful state by the previous owner and every time I finish painting my heartbreaks at spotting another job to do (mainly skanky / dirty coving, skirting boards and door frames)

I feel like I’m getting nowhere and today I’ve been painting the skirting boards white they still look shite

Well, our look has evolved over time (despite having some supposedly on trend or even out of date!) colours. For example, we have a collection of vintage taxidermy butterflies (used to have 200+ cases, but sold many with a previous house) that we began putting together when we bought our first home in the '90s. Gradually we've added more items in a similar style (lots of vintage bird prints, the odd stuffed bird, jardinieres with plants/bulbs, books) as well as just anything we love, regardless of its current status fashion-wise.

We also started collecting brown furniture ages ago (I fondly recall getting stranded on a carboot field in about 2000 with a huge chest of drawers that wouldn't fit in anyone's car, lol!), which progressed through Art Deco to Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts. These days we still have a few bits of everything, but have also mixed in some Aesthetic and MCM.

However, we also have a couple of Rockett St George things (eg, a gold monkey planter 😉) that fit with our style.

As someone who studied fashion design, I've always liked my textiles, so these feature heavily in our room schemes, with a mix of old and new. Imho, it all looks good together, but nothing really matches per se.

We also early on adopted the idea of painting everything the same colour in a room (including the ceiling in our current hall and family bathroom), from skirting to architrave to walls....but I got this idea from an old book on interiors in much grander old houses than ours. I only realised it was a thing after I spotted similar cropping up regularly on Instagram etc 😂 It's a look I love and will continue to do in any future houses.

I'm also really pleased that buying vintage for our homes is popular again and although I used to consider myself a purist when it came to keeping stuff looking as it was originally intended, I'm now totally not averse to painting a piece that has no intrinsic value and would otherwise be chucked into landfill!

Although we do have new stuff - we have previously even bought/used vintage wallpaper, but obviously that isn't always possible - I'd say 75% of the furniture and decorative items in our home is old (majority from eBay, fleamarkets or carboots) and when we had a larger, easier to furnish house it used to be more. We've had to get a few contemporary pieces as these often fit our smaller space better, but my go-to place when looking to buy something for the home is always eBay.

Not always because of budgetary constraints either. When we arguably had more money than sense, we once paid the cost of a very expensive family holiday for an (eBay) antique furniture item 🙄🙄🙄

Otoh, before we met them people we now know bought a lovely, huge old house with land in the country. They spent at least a further £2 million knocking it about so it looked as someone observed, like a footballer's mansion, ripping out every original feature and burning them along the way 😮☹️

It is grey throughout and - despite being able to afford much better - entirely furnished with what DH calls expensive flat pack from Amazon. They are desperate to create a family estate that looks like it's been handed down through the generations, yet have nothing older than last year in the whole place, lol!

Buying vintage is SO much more fun and satisfying.

Hebee, interesting about the brown furniture. Our local auction house can't give it away - we scored a beautiful walnut dining table and eight chairs for £30. It cost us more to hire the van to get them home!

We also have some beautiful wardrobes and a dressing table which cost peanuts.

BFF has an art deco cocktail cabinet which she bought a few years ago at a car boot. It was £10, she couldn't believe her luck!

Magnolia is back! My flat is fashionable!
I must say I'm glad that the trend for teal/navy is over.

Browns and neutral colours. Keep seeing Dulux Egyptian cotton everywhere. And panelling

I’m going to place a bet on Victorian Boudoir being the next trend, dark wood, lots of deep reds & canopy beds

@setthecontrols

Magnolia is back! My flat is fashionable! I must say I'm glad that the trend for teal/navy is over.

I was going to say 'what's wrong with magnolia?'

Light and airy, then use accent colours.

My exH liked brown and beige. Every freakin' room in the house was $h!t brown and beige. He was also obsessed with dado rails. Never again.

Magnolia is not a catch all term for off white. It's a specific colour. It's a pale beige with a distinct peachy tinge to it.

When people talk about 'Magnolia' they don't usually mean Magnolia at all - they just mean any shade of generic off white or cream.

Definitely those crittall doors in open plan spaces used as “room dividers” but also a feature.
Having that typical painted devol like kitchen often in navy with white granite like worktops and an island as the epicentre of the home.
See this in slot if the Netflix dramas- it’s clearly already a thing but seen a few show homes doing this now.

Ohhh I forgot all about terracotta! We painted our walls that in our very first house - bottom half, below the dado rail!

And egyptian cotton on the top! I knew that poat way back rang a bell. Expensive magnolia

I used to love Dulux Timeless! Are we saying that would be acceptable again? I think I've still got a pot somewhere!

Fake panelling, beige, plants, framed line print artwork, odd shaped vases
See H&M/Zara home section

@SeeMyLanyardAndWeepBitch

Magnolia is not a catch all term for off white. It's a specific colour. It's a pale beige with a distinct peachy tinge to it.

When people talk about 'Magnolia' they don't usually mean Magnolia at all - they just mean any shade of generic off white or cream.

All look the same to me. Cream/white/magnolia. Landlord colours.

Most people, if they’ve an interest in it or just have room that needs repainted, look around for inspiration, so can’t avoid seeing those unrealistic, aspirational magazine covers, Ikea room sets, the window displays of interior design boutiques, noticing what friends and neighbours have, etc. So end up massively influenced by trends. Even if we think “ooh, I’ve always wanted a navy blue kitchen” it’s more that we’ve been bombarded with these aspirational images without even realising it.

WhTs next. I think earthy warm colours, and brights (coral, turquoise, lemon etc). With safe neutral ,was porridge coloured, then grey) will go back to creamy colours.

Scandi/Beige/Cream. I won’t lie, my house is heavily influenced by what I enjoy looking at on Insta. And that is hugely what I see coming through. My walls are F&B white & it is scandi to the max. I’m all about minimal, bright, clean. Curiously, I’ve recently gone for a navy kitchen but I do have white units 😂 I recently had my hall & office decorated & the painter looked miserable when I told him I wanted it all white 😂 he said that’s all he does these days. Various shades of white 🙈

Landlord colours.

It’s why, after renting soulless boxes for years, I won’t have a lick of magnolia in my house ever again. Developed a sheer hatred for it.

I’m still seeing lots of grey, also pale or dusky pink.

I like garish wall paper, I have garish wallpaper and navy walls with lots of pictures hung, also brightly coloured cushions and rugs, it’s a bit of a mixture and some things clash, I don’t like a room that’s based on one/two colours.

@Hebeee

We've always chosen deeper colours and painted the hall of our Victorian house grey (and yellow, with print room decoupage 😮) in the early 1990s! Back then it wasn't a thing - my dad described it as battleship grey, lol - so we had to have it mixed.

Our current house (400 years old) was a bland magnolia box with splashes of Barney purple when we purchased it four years ago. All original features ripped out.

Gradually we've been adding the period character back in and yes, that includes some panelling (constructed in timber by DH) 🙄

We liked the maximalist look long before it was on trend - loads of antiques and vintage stuff collected over the years here - pattern and colour everywhere! We do have bird wallpaper, but it's either William Morris (again we've been into the Arts and Crafts movement for twenty years, not just because it's fashionable.... again!) or Voysey. Our living room is olive green with an original art nouveau velvet sofa (and a modern cream linen one) with books everywhere.

We also have gallery walls - not photos but prints and some - cheap or done by me - original art. And a dark blue hall and millennial pink bathroom! The main bedroom has a mural that I painted myself. All this will probably look dates very soon, but it won't be going as we chose it because we love the look 😁

Our kitchen is probably the least on trend room in the house - we have a red range cooker, oval room blue cabinets and the worktops are a mix of iroko and anthracite microcement......oh and a second hand teal velvet sofa.

I definitely won't be painting anything peri because it's the latest thing, lol! I had a bedroom that colour in the nineties and hated it 😂

Sounds like a beautiful house!

F&B Hague blue seems to have been everywhere for ages and still going strong.

We’re about to redecorate the whole house, which is all currently very neutral white/cream/off-white-grey tones but I’m very undecided on how and where to inject some colour.