The Covid-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home and with that, brought a transformation in the way that we interact with our homes and the demands that we make of home spaces. Remote work, homeschooling, and home exercise have led to a greater importance of home offices, spaces for homeschooling, and home gym areas. With this has come a decline and fading away of certain home design trends. When designing a new home, or renovating a current one, it is important to make stylistic choices that reflect an aesthetic that is current enough to allow the home to be resold at fair value, and which reflects the demands that the modern house faces. It is certainly clear that there are trends which will vanish in 2021.
Modern Farmhouse
The modern farmhouse look seems set to go in 2021. The driving reason why this look is on its way out is that it was usually implemented in areas in which it was not organic. The modern farmhouse look is beautiful, but barn doors, shiplap wall treatments, and other aspects of the style, look out of place in urban apartments and in suburbia. Even so, there are those who feel the pull of the style and to them we say, pair your rustic pieces with the decor of the space you are designing.
White Kitchens
White kitchens have been a staple of kitchen design for a very long time. We are seeing a shift away from that, at least in the high-end market, where all-whites have been replaced by rare stones and intricate patterns in keeping with a longer history of luxury tiles and stones. Bringing colour into the kitchen through the use of onyxes, richly veined marbles, and breccias, among other items, brings history into your kitchen and adds a touch of sumptuous luxuriousness into your design.
Though items such as the carrara marble countertop are not going away, a different aesthetic can be achieved by using other materials. For example, Caitlin Scanlon recommends engineered stone, like quartzite. For those who are set on a marble backsplash, ceramic marble tiles are a good alternative.
Open Floor Plans
Open floor plans were on the wane even prior to the pandemic’s emergence. With the pandemic and lockdowns, people saw that open floor plans disrupted productivity at home. WHen there are no walls between the office, playroom, kitchen and living room, functions tend to spill over. That is okay when working from home is not a big part of your life, but when remote working defines how you work, it becomes a problem.
If your home is already open floor, you can add room dividers, or add doors or find some other solution to the problem of achieving optimum function.
Fast Furniture
Inexpensive furniture that is simply not durable because it is not well made, has been in decline. People are increasingly using better pieces, not simply for purposes of durability, but also because it is easier to connect deeply with quality pieces than it is with badly made pieces. A lot of memories are made and lived on furniture such as Wellington’s Fine Leather Furniture, and it becomes paramount to select quality pieces.
