Seasons Of Love

Well hello there - thank you so much for joining me today. I talk to clients all the time about how to make decisions that will feel timeless, whether it’s the interior of their home, office, or hotel. Timelessness is an illusive concept that’s often contrasted by the idea of fads or style trends. But it can be challenging for us all to determine when a trend is happening, exactly how long it will remain relevant. This is a conundrum, but it’s an important factor to consider when deciding the aesthetics of your space. Part of it can be tracked and tied to a fairly consistent system of cycles, and we’ll talk about those in depth today; but the other part is highly subjective. I talked about this a little bit in episode 11, way back one year ago, but the idea of understanding trend lifecycles really deserves to be expounded upon. No one wants their home to look cringy in five years, you’ve taken all this time and money to update, renovate, buy new furniture, paint; and all of a sudden it’s like it was all for nothing. You’ve got to refresh again because the look is already dated. I mean, what a nightmare. There’s also the chance that you’ll just get sick of something in your home because you’ve seen it too many places. So today, we are going to take a look at the monstrous force of nature that is the trend cycle, how to read it, predict it, and use it to our advantage to make our homes places we will love for decades.

I was watching an Instagram live of an artist I like named Callen Shaub. He has a really distinct style that’s very colorful and abstract. This live stream he had was a real time production of one of his paintings, and he was speaking with his partner about when to stop and say the piece is finished. He said something that really stuck with me, and I’m certainly paraphrasing when I relay this, but his point was that he had a pretty good looking painting so far in his process, but there were additional techniques he wanted to try out and keep going with it. He could stop where he was and have a nice painting, or he could push the limits of his art practice and try to create something new. This is ultimately what most artists are always trying to do, they want to push boundaries, explore, and discover new things; whether it’s different ways to get paint on a canvas or a new style of performance art. Even when an artist has developed a synonymous look and style, they still want to find little ways to be unexpected and surprise their audience. This drive to discover new ideas, new concepts, new aesthetics, is what ultimately makes the trend wheel go round. 

I have to take a second to address the illusion of timelessness. This word is deceptive, misleading, and the whole concept is just plain misinformed. It is not unusual for me to walk into an interior space, and I can tell just that this space thinks it’s timeless. However, usually these spaces are heavily colored by design trends of the 1980’s and 90’s. A good example of this would be granite countertops. A lot of times I'll see brand new granite countertops in someone's kitchen. They might have high contrasting flex of orange, gold, black, pink, and maybe even some white; and this has a very specific time period associated with it, circa 1995. Yes, granite is a strong stone that has been recommended as a good countertop material for years, but the last decade has brought about a lot of newer products like quartzite and man-made composite surfaces. These products, in many cases, supersede granite because they are more affordable, they are technically more durable (even if only by a margin), and they have more variety to choose from in terms color, texture, and pattern. But if I see someone who has just gotten granite countertops installed, they are usually as proud as a peacock, and will likely use the word timeless or classic when speaking about their space.

Another example would be when an overall design style is used that is considered timeless or classic, but it may be inappropriate to its context or geographical location. So let’s say you really love Mediterranean style and you decide to use that as a source of inspiration, but your home is in upstate New York, away from the water, and in a humid climate (which is basically the opposite of the Mediterranean climate) it will look ridiculously out of place. The materials used are meant for a dry climate and you may actually have issues with maintainice and upkeep. You’ll see this implemented A LOT in many places - look for stucco, split face stone, terra cotta shingles, and lots of pink granite. And you can say it's a classic all you want, but it almost ends up looking like the architectural version of cosplay. Like we've gone to a theme park, and theme parks aren’t timeless. They get updated constantly! They are fantasies, hyper exaggerate caricatures of the world around us, not to say that isn't fun, but it's not timeless. 

In these cases, the design decisions being made are based not on timelessness, but on a personal sense of nostalgia, whether for a bygone era or life in a different part of the world. You may have been really happy in the 1980’s, and you want to build your home as a shrine to that time. But this is a hard thing to admit for a lot of people. So many times we let our fantasies take over when we are designing our homes, whether it’s for a life we’ve never lived or ones we’ve left behind. This in theory could be fine, but instead of addressing the concept directly and working with it, saying “this is my fantasy house,” there is too often avoidance around our true motives, and timelessness becomes a cover-up for the whole thing. This creates a big problem because the home becomes directionless with no true concept. You’ve probably heard me say many times on this podcast that the most important part of creating a space is to have a clear concept that is meaningful to you to help guide you in every decision you’re making. If the motivators behind your decisions are not named, defined, and documented; the end result will feel chaotic, half-hearted, and the worst part is you may not be happy with it after a few years because you haven’t met all your needs. If your goal is to create a home that you’ll sell in a few years and you want to check all the boxes that light up a real estate listing - that is not timelessness. If your goal is to fit in with the way your friend group is decorating their homes, that’s not timelessness. The term timeless is just a song-and-dance, it’s a rationalization, and you deserve to have the truth guiding your design choices. Be honest with yourself about what you’re trying to get out of your home, naming it may shed light in mental, emotional, and spiritual areas you didn’t know existed.

Now all that being said, I don’t blame anyone for wanting to create a home that feels timeless, nor do I blame anyone for getting lost in a sea of trend nostalgia in an attempt to create a home that won’t look bad in just a few years. I was raised very spend-conscious and my focus today is on sustainability and minimizing my carbon footprint, so looking at why trends exist, when so many of us would love to just buy one high quality sofa and have it for the rest of our lives, has always been important to me. No one wants to feel out of touch or dated, but most of us don’t want to redecorate every two years either. 

The tricky part is that our perspectives are influenced by trends all the time, and it’s only in hind sight that we can truly see them for what they are. When I look back to the way I dressed in college and my early 20’s, it’s very cringe, but I was having a blast at the time. It felt like I was up on all the hottest styles and fashion and I felt really good. But I didn’t really know why I was doing what I was doing, and that’s the key. I saw someone on the subway or in a fashion magazine that had a shaggy mullet, so I wanted one too. It felt like a fresh departure from the thick, single layer, average length hairstyle I had before. And that’s the thing with trends, a lot of times it’s less about incorporating something we love into our lives, and more about replacing something that has been deemed “out” with something that just seems mysterious and original. I remember when I first started working as an interior designer in 2007, grey was everything, and beige or brown needed to be irradiated at all costs. Same thing with gold or brass - everything needed to be stainless steel. Warm colors were awful, tacky, unsophisticated. Now, here we are replacing grey and silver with warm sandy beiges, saddle color upholsteries, and oil-rubbed bronze is considered the standard. 

Let’s be real - we are talking about neutral colors and materials at the end of the day, there is no color of wood or metal that is actually offensive - it’s just that we get all abroad the train to greytown and then we see a soft beige for the first time in years and feels like a revelation. But this reaction based sway from one trend to the other is ultimately a race to the bottom. So, what should you do about it? First let’s breakdown the trend cycle into its phases and get really clear on what the life of a trend entails.

Part of an interior designer’s job is to stay constantly informed about trends, fun fads, and technology, and help their client understand which ones, if any, are a good fit for them. At their core, most designers are also artists. We too seek to constantly hone and refine our craft, so that means not doing the same thing we did on the previous project, making adjustments, incorporating the latest technology, and utilizing smart design solutions that have become popular. All the while, in the background the trend cycle is churning and burning, scrolling through variations on the same ideas over and over again. Now you may be asking yourself - trend “cycle?” It’s probably more like a trend “ecosystem.” Whatever is popular right now, is having a resurgence from a previous time. It’s just like they say - there’s nothing new under the sun.

I’m going to give you the cliff notes version of the trend cycle. This can be for anything from home interiors to vocabulary to hairstyles. We start at the end and begin again. A trend is out. It’s dead. A few years go by and someone rediscovers it. It’s seems a little taboo, not as stale as it did a few years back. Then is starts reemerging, almost ironically at first. Whether it’s in the art world, an indie music scene, a college town, it’s usually somewhere niche and out of the mainstream. Then, when it’s something great - it catches fire - people love it and everyone in the scene is using it. Eventually someone with mainstream authority notices it, this could be a fashion magazine editor, a popular blog, a pop star on MTV, and it’s projected to the masses. Some trends die at this point, the mainstream sees it and it doesn’t resonate. But if it does, it takes flight, everyone’s doing it - it’s THE thing to do. If you don’t do it, you’re out of the loop. But then, this becomes a problem in itself. It’s oversaturated, too many people are doing it, even people you don’t like. Your work rival, that annoying neighbor. You may see people using it in ways that don’t make sense to you or look wrong, and suddenly this thing does not feel so hot anymore. But the wave of late adapters is still discovering this trend, continuing its prevalence and exacerbating most people’s annoyance with it. At that point it is hated, despised. People can’t look it, and it finally dies. But the cycle always begins again.

A good example of this is with color. From a high level, looking at the past few decades, there’s an alternating rhythm between brighter colors and muted tones. This does tie into what is going on in the state of the world, but there’s still a pretty clear pattern of one decade to the next, that is to say each decade is usually a reaction to the one that came before it. Starting all the way back in the 1940’s, at least in the United States, we were recovering from the Great Depression, we were fighting a war, and the popular colors were pretty muted, with the exception of patriotic reds and blues. By the 1950’s the middle class was expanding, there was tons of economic growth, and focus on the home and home-makers. Pastels were everywhere - soft, cheery, optimistic. The 1960’s were super eventful and brought more war, counter-culture movements, and intense psychedelic colors in fashion and home decor. The 1970’s brought economic stagnation and social instability, and an obsession with muted earth tones like harvest gold and avocado green. The 80’s brought the rise of yuppies, digital technology like video games, along with bright colors of all varieties including pastels, neons, primary colors, and jewel tones. This carried on into the early 90’s, but by 1994 the Seattle grunge trend had taken hold. The cloudy city’s art scene brought a seriousness and rebellion from the cheesiness of the 80’s, and a love affair with denim blues and all things gray and muted. By the new millennium, our obsession with technology was reflected in the fashion world’s obsession with metallics. Gold, platinum, silver, bronze - as long as it was reflective it was welcome, even when it came to fabric. Lame clothing and accessories were everywhere. Muted, but glamourous. We had entered a new era after all, so everyone was doing their best attempt at futuristic minimalism. Pretty much the opposite of a plaid flannel. By 2010, society was ready for nostalgia again, bringing back the colorful styles we saw in the 50’s. Color was everywhere, emerald green sofas were all of sudden a norm, pink was expectable and loved again. This is a little outside the realm of color but the farmhouse decor trend, that got so popular in 2015, was the perfect rebuke to the minimalism we had been going through in the previous ten years. It felt distinctly American, with fun detailing and a sentimentality that was completely magnetic. It can be hard to pin point exactly what the over arching trends of the current time are when we are going through them, but in 2020 there was a clear swing back to warm neutrals, with saddle being the sofa color dujour and everyone cuddling up to beige.

Now that we’ve gone through the entire history of the modern America, we can zoom in a little closer on the micro cycles that happen each year and over the course of a few seasons. Colors trends change with the seasons, and each season tends to have a featured color. These colors tend to cycle through in order of the color wheel each season. Red in some shade will be popular for fall or winter, then a warm neutral like camel will be in for spring, by summer blue is all the rage, and the following autumn eggplant is the must have. It’s doesn’t go perfectly through the ROYGBIV color wheel, you’ll notice yellow gets skipped a lot (but when yellow is big, it’s everywhere), but you can bet if green is hot, blue is sure to follow a few months later.

But what about when it’s something more complex than color? Just like the way artists are always trying to find a new layer of their craft, humans in general are always drawn to the idea of freshness. It can be challenging to determine if a new idea will become classic or fall into the fad dumpster, but one thing I find helpful is to consider saturation. Like I mentioned with the trend cycle, the downfall of any fad is overexposure. If a specific item, style, motif, color, or idea is so popular that it becomes literally everywhere, almost to the point of being iconic, it can often be a signal it’s on its way out. When a particular trend really blows up, everyone starts using it. It loses any element of exclusivity, scarcity, and in some cases it loses its perceived value (think designer purse knock-offs at TJ Maxx). For instance, I just saw a knock off of the Primrose mirror available at Hobby Lobby, so RIP to the Instagram influencer mirror that some people spent over a thousand dollars on. If you aren’t familiar with this piece by name, it’s likely you’ve seen the oversized gold framed arched mirror with elaborate floral detailing leaning against the living room wall of every cool girl selfie of the past three years. Now, it’s knocked off and available for $175 in the same store that sells model fighter planes. It’s great that’s the style is available to more people, but the scarcity and the cool factor evaporate. 

But at the same time, now that you know the trend cycle, everything comes back into style eventually. It may not be the same variation, and details may be updated and modernized, but rest assured the thing you wouldn’t be caught dead having in your house today will be back on shelves again in the future. With that in mind, what really matters isn’t how trendy or how timeless any element in your space is - what matters is what it means to you. If you love farmhouse kitchens, and your family has many generations of farmers, and you grew up on farmland with a big kitchen sink and barn, it won’t matter that the farmhouse kitchen is out. What matters in what’s in your heart, what these objects say and mean to you. Timelessness is a personal concept. When you know your own personal brand well enough, if something is in style or not won’t matter. So the next time you’re trying to decide if you want to participate in a home decor or design trend, ask yourself how this fits into your story of who you are and how that’s expressed in your space. The answer might surprise you.

Thank you so much for joining me today, you know I love talking about this stuff with you and I appreciate you tuning in. Until next time, I’m sending you so much love, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.