INTERIORS
Interior design trends for 2027.
Objects, colour and craft.
A home that feels like you.
About 9 min read
THE 2027 EDIT · UPDATED 30 OCTOBER 2026
The interior design trends I am taking into 2027 have five things in common: objects with a past, art that means something, lighting with presence, expressive colour and details you can almost feel. A room can hold all of them without looking like anyone else's.
There are already useful clues in the year-ahead releases. RAL’s 2027+ colour report explores craft and contrasting colour relationships. Creativeworld’s 2027 themes bring handwork, reused materials and personal memories into everyday rooms.
These forecasts sit alongside the 2026 design coverage that first shaped this story. The connection between them is my reading of where interiors are going. The rooms below show how I would bring those ideas home.
01 /
For 2027, I would keep the pieces with a previous life. Creativeworld’s Bedroom Stories works with memories, vintage elements and second-hand textiles. My own starting point is often something much smaller: the souvenir I still want to see every day.
Not everything in a room needs to belong there.
Sometimes it just needs to belong to you.
I brought this little ceramic pine cone home from Sicily after our summer holiday. It doesn’t really match anything around it — and that’s exactly why I keep it there.
Maybe that’s more important than matching the room.
Some objects are designed to blend in.
Others make absolutely no attempt to.
A coffee maker can be practical, familiar and completely ordinary — or it can become the loudest thing in the kitchen.
Sometimes function deserves a little personality too.
Growing up doesn’t necessarily mean leaving everything playful behind.
A retro arcade machine in a considered interior feels slightly wrong — which might be exactly why it works.
Nostalgia doesn’t have to stay in a box.
Some clothes are too beautiful to disappear behind a closed door.
A vintage kimono on the wall becomes something between fashion, memory and art — changing meaning simply because of where we choose to put it.
The most interesting objects are not always used the way they were intended.
An old leather gym horse becomes an entryway bench — still carrying traces of its first life while becoming part of another one.
That tension is what makes it interesting.
“Call it eclectic. Call it collected.
I think it’s simply personal.”
02 /
The most interesting rooms often have something in them that seems slightly out of place.
Not because it was chosen to match.
Because someone loved it enough to make room for it.
Sometimes your taste changes because someone else brings something into your world.
I painted an anime picture as a birthday present for one of my son’s friends.
Until then, anime had never really been part of my world. But while I was painting it, I started noticing the colours, the movement, the detail — and understanding why younger people find it so fascinating.
By the time I finished, something unexpected had happened.
I wanted one too.
A motel sign belongs beside a road.
Which is probably why it becomes so interesting when it ends up above a beautiful old cabinet.
Taken out of context, something ordinary can suddenly feel like art.
Not every object in a beautiful room needs to have been bought for the room.
Sometimes the things we use, collect and carry through life become part of the interior simply because they belong to us.
A worn surfboard in a city bedroom tells you more about the person who lives there than another perfectly chosen piece of decoration ever could.
An old cinema seat was designed for a completely different room and a completely different purpose.
Move it into a home office and suddenly it becomes something else — functional, strange and full of character.
The best repurposed pieces never completely forget what they used to be.
Maybe the thing that doesn’t belong
is the thing that makes the room yours.
03 /
A good lamp doesn’t just light a room.
Sometimes it becomes the reason you remember it.
This section is about lighting as part of the personality of a home — not something designed to disappear.
Not everything has to speak the same design language.
My hallway is quite simple — clean lines, black, wood, very little decoration.
The obvious choice would be lighting that disappears into it.
But I don’t want it to disappear.
I’ve been looking for two wall lights for either side of the mirror, and instead of something minimal and modern, I keep coming back to glossy orange lamps that feel unmistakably 1980s.
They don’t really belong there.
That’s the point.
Some things enter a room because they are useful.
That doesn’t mean they have to be invisible.
A ceiling fan can be practical and still have enough shape and movement to become part of the architecture of the room.
Here, the curved wooden blades make function feel almost sculptural.
Sometimes a lamp takes up enough visual space to become almost another piece of furniture.
It changes the silhouette of the room even when the light is switched off.
This is lighting you choose to notice.
Bathroom lighting is usually expected to be practical, quiet and easy to ignore.
But why should it be?
A slender pendant in hand-blown opaline glass feels more like something you would expect beside a sofa or above a dining table.
That unexpectedness is exactly what makes it work.
Light the room.
But give us something to look at too.
04 /
More colour. More pattern.
More personality.
After years of interiors designed to be quiet, rooms are becoming expressive again.
Not through one perfect palette — but through combinations that feel instinctive, layered and personal.
The 2027 colour releases give this direction a tangible palette. Behr’s Grounded is an earthy olive; Graham & Brown’s Rose Earth draws on Italian clay. I would use either as an anchor, then add the colours already living in the room.
Deep colour changes the mood of a room immediately.
Green, burgundy, aubergine, old wood, patterned textiles and art can all live together without the room becoming heavy.
The secret isn’t restraint.
It’s confidence.
Wallpaper doesn’t need quiet furniture.
A patterned chair doesn’t need a plain rug.
The old rule was to choose one and let everything else calm down.
The more interesting idea is to let them talk to each other.
Stripes, florals, checks and unexpected prints can coexist when the room feels collected rather than coordinated.
Some combinations make sense immediately.
Others become interesting because they don’t.
Aubergine, powder blue and mustard shouldn’t need a reason to sit together.
Sometimes the slightly uncomfortable combination is the one that gives a room its energy.
A colourful room doesn’t necessarily need colourful walls.
Sometimes the architecture can stay almost silent while the things inside it do all the talking.
A green sofa. A rust-coloured chair.
Art, textiles, objects, a rug.
Colour becomes something accumulated rather than applied.
And perhaps that is why it feels more personal.
A room doesn’t need a colour scheme.
It needs a point of view.
05 /
After years of smooth, quiet surfaces, the details are becoming interesting again.
A handle can become jewellery.
A tile can look hand-painted.
A fringe can completely change a piece of furniture.
The smallest decisions are starting to have personality again.
Graham & Brown’s Roselle Grove, its 2027 Design of the Year, begins with hand-painted gouache and references Indian chintz. RAL’s Envision + Craft also puts making at the centre. For me, that means looking more closely at a painted tile, a woven edge or a ceramic handle.
Perfect repetition is easy.
The more interesting surface is the one where you can almost see the hand that made it.
Colour, small imperfections and painted details turn something functional into part of the character of a room.
A handle might be one of the smallest decisions in a room.
Which makes it a very good place to do something unnecessary.
Two tiny brass faces meeting across a cabinet door turn hardware into something closer to jewellery.
For a long time, decoration was something we learned to remove.
Now the unnecessary detail feels interesting again.
Fringe moves.
It catches light.
It gives a perfectly functional piece of furniture a little drama.
And sometimes a little drama is exactly what was missing.
Art doesn’t always need a frame.
Textile brings something a print or painting cannot: weight, softness, texture and movement.
The wall stops being just a background and becomes part of the material story of the room.
Not every object needs to be elegant.
Some can be funny.
A little strange.
Even slightly ridiculous.
The handmade object becomes more interesting when you can sense the person behind it.
We spend so much time deciding what goes on the walls that it is easy to forget what is underneath us.
A floor can be quiet.
Or it can become one of the biggest patterns in the room.
Sometimes the detail isn’t small at all.
The details don’t have to match.
They just have to be worth noticing.
MY EDIT
A memory I brought home.
Something I never expected to love.
I like calm rooms.
I just don’t want everything in them to behave.
Olive. Rust. Burgundy.
Powder blue. Mustard.
Apparently, I’m not very interested in choosing just one.
Proof that the smallest detail
can have the biggest personality.
THE TAKEAWAY
Less polished. More personality.
Maybe good taste isn't about knowing
what belongs together.
Maybe it's knowing
what belongs to you.