Show Notes
The last episode of the series, and it's the list nobody publishes in January: what's leaving. Out, according to the designers Livingetc asked: the all-white bathroom, matt black taps, matchy-matchy suites, gloss vanity units, feature walls, crisp white hotel bedding, and the separate formal dining room. Bi-folds are losing to sliders. Quartz worktops have plateaued as porcelain composite takes share. Hana pushes back on some of it. There's a difference between a trend ending and your bathroo...
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The last one for now, and it's the opposite of everything else we've done. Not what's changing, but what doesn't, and how you go about buying it. Median UK renovation spend is £20,000 and planned spend for this year halved to £10,000, so this isn't an episode about buying expensive things. It's about where a smaller budget should go, which is a different and more useful question. The trade answer is buy less, buy better, and the word doing the work is craftsmanship, which means nothing becaus...
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...
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 ...