Kirsty McLuckie: Being unconsciously on-trend with interiors

And so it is with interior design – although for practical reasons you may have to wait a long time before carpeted bathrooms make a re-entry in the style hit parade.

Trying to keep up with changing design trends in your home can be a time-consuming and costly business.

Anyone who lived through the 1960s and ’70s will know that most of the interior work done involved covering original features with MDF, Artex, flock wallpaper, swirly carpets and woodchip, followed by a decade of taking it all off again.

My own generation of homeowners will be familiar with the pernickety business of adding and then subtracting co-ordinating floral borders – why?! – on absolutely every wall.

These days I’m a strong believer in choosing colours and items for your house once and then merely refreshing the bits that get tatty when needed – much like my wardrobe.

So when reading a report by London-based Essential Living detailing the recent interior trends that are now considered outmoded, I worried not.

For those who like to keep up with such things, styles such as “Dark Academia” are out, and even the young are eschewing “Millennial Pink” and “Ultimate Grey”, according to the study.

“Dark Academia”, from what I can gather, is inspired by Greek architecture, European history and Renaissance art. To me, the gist seems to be to try to recreate the aesthetic of Carry On Screaming but it has been very popular, with1.5 billion views on TikTok this year. (How much this has translated into purchases of ornate bookcases, velvet curtains and tarnished mirrors is not reported.)

No matter, it is out of style now, according to the trendsetters. As are pink bathrooms – which garnered two million views not long ago – and Pantone’s colour of the year for 2021, dark grey, which will probably need more than one coat of eggshell to paint over.

I will regret the wane of one interiors movement on its way out however, despite not realising it was ever en vogue.

“Cluttercore” was the anti-minimalist interior trend of 2021 on TikTok. It is described as a craze that celebrates the quirkiness of mismatched belongings and permits us all to fill our interiors with items that celebrate our memories, interests and personalities – think walls crammed with paintings and mantelpieces groaning under the weight of mementoes, postcards and tasteful bric-a-brac.

Leaving aside the descriptions of “tasteful” and “curated” items, rather than things just put there and forgotten, I think this is a design trend I already embrace.

But according to Essential Living, this style movement is already over. Perhaps I’ll just leave the clutter where it is and catch the trend the next time around.

- Kirsty McLuckie is property editor at The Scotsman

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