Show Notes
Fourteen episodes reporting what's in and what's out, and we have never once asked who decides. This is the one where we turn round and look at our own sources. A colour of the year is part trend forecasting, part sales data, and part a committee deciding what to sell. Pantone have been doing theirs since 1999 and Dulux since about 2004, and it started as a signal to manufacturers and retailers roughly eighteen months ahead of anything reaching a shop. By the time it's reported as news, the p...
More from Interior Design Clinic
Seventeen percent of British homeowners put more storage on their improvement list this year, which puts it level with a garden makeover and above a home office, an outdoor entertaining space and smart home technology. Nobody wants storage. That's what makes the number interesting. It's on the list because there's a problem, not because there's a want. Why we haven't got any is structural rather than aesthetic. Victorian houses were built for people who owned fewer things, so there are no fit...
Blue got three colours of the year and a launch campaign. Pantone got an off-white. Green went up 22 percent year on year across the paint brands while nobody was looking, with no colour of the year, no theme and no name. Marcus's argument for why is that green is the only colour that's simultaneously a colour and a neutral. Paint a room blue and everybody registers blue. Paint it a muted olive and people register that the room has been decorated, without coming away thinking of it as the gre...
British houses are among the smallest in Western Europe, and the new ones are smaller than the old ones. So most of the trends we've spent eleven episodes on were designed and photographed in rooms almost nobody listening has. This one starts with the advice everybody has absorbed and why it doesn't work. Paint it white isn't wrong exactly, it's incomplete: a small room painted white with white woodwork and a white ceiling reads as a small white room, because you can still see every edge and ...
Ten episodes of colour advice have all ended the same way: it depends on your light. This one is about the light itself. The constraint is latitude. London sits level with Newfoundland and Edinburgh not far off Moscow, and in December parts of this country get seven hours of daylight, most of it overcast. Overcast light is diffuse and cool, so everything under it reads cooler than the paint chart promised. That, rather than fashion, is why cool grey went wrong here and warm neutrals are comin...
The median UK kitchen spend rose 34 percent in a single year, to £17,500. Ten to twenty thousand is the normal range and the high end passes fifty thousand without much trouble. What did people get for the extra four and a half thousand? Mostly the same kitchen at a higher price, because materials and labour moved at once. On colour the sources contradict each other and we say so. Ideal Home has colour quietening to warm neutrals and, two paragraphs later, earthy spice tones dominating. Pinte...