Interior Design Trends

Every January the paint companies announce a colour of the year, and by March it’s on cushions in shop windows from Lisbon to London. By the following January most of those cushions are in a cupboard, which is fine, because a cushion was the right place for it.

That’s most of how we’d follow interior design trends in an Algarve house. Let them loose on the things that are cheap to change and keep them away from the expensive ones, and check each one against the light here before buying, since a colour that works in a London flat can look quite different on a white wall in Albufeira.

Interior design trends and the two speeds of a room

The fast layer of a room is the soft part, cushions and throws, plus paint if you’re feeling brave. A trend costs very little there. If this year’s colour turns out to be a mistake, it’s forty euros and a Saturday afternoon to put right.

The slow layer is everything that needs a van: the sofa, the dining table, the bed, the wardrobes built into the wall. We’d buy these against a different clock. The useful question is whether you’ll still be glad of a piece once it stops being current, which tends to happen at about the time the receipt fades.

Trouble starts when the layers swap. A sofa in this year’s colour ties you to somebody else’s taste for a decade, while a timid beige cushion on a good classic armchair wastes the one place where a bit of risk was free.

Trends that keep coming back

Every few years the magazines rediscover natural materials and craftsmanship and announce them as news. They’ve been rediscovered so often that the safest bet in decorating is probably whatever got rediscovered last time.

Curves are the current swing: curved sofas and round tables. We like them, though a curve ought to earn its place by how people move around it rather than by the date on the magazine. Made-to-measure gets similar treatment, written up as a luxury revival, when Portuguese workshops never stopped doing it. We’re biased on that point, admittedly.

Sustainability went the same way. Once people started asking where the wood came from before they asked the price, it stopped being a trend and became an ordinary question, which is more or less why we wrote about sustainable decoration.

Filtering trends through Algarve light

Most trend reports are written in London and New York, for grey skies and a lot of artificial light. Then they arrive somewhere the sun does a good part of the decorating whether you ask it to or not.

Saturated colours that look rich in a north-facing flat in Copenhagen can turn shrill against a white wall here in July. The earthy palettes the reports keep “discovering”, sage green and terracotta, are roughly what the hills behind the coast already look like in August, and that’s probably why they keep working indoors. When a trend and the light disagree, we side with the light; choosing wall colours explains how to test a sample before you commit a whole wall.

Interior design trends worth a look this year

This is the part of the article we’ll rewrite every year. For now, the reports agree on a few things. Curves are holding steady rather than fading. Bouclé is still everywhere, which on a sofa near the beach deserves a second thought, because sand works its way into a looped weave quickly. Lighting that changes warmth through the day is turning from a gadget into something people simply expect. And mixing inherited or vintage pieces with new ones keeps gaining ground, a subject we have opinions about.

Both H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms, in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra, have pieces from the slow layer you can sit on. Bring the magazine page if you have one; it’s easier to argue about with the actual sofa in front of you.