By Bed Threads Interiors 05.09.2026

These Are the Interior Trends That Defined the Last Nine Years

A look back at the styles that have dominated our homes and moodboards from 2017 to now.

Cast your mind back to 2017, imagine a living room. Is every detail carefully placed just so? Is the only hint of colour some variation of beige? You may have lived in this place. Your friends may have lived in this place. Everyone has lived in this place.

Looking around you now, we’d bet there’s a lot more colour where you’re sitting.

From Millennial Grey to Disco Brutalism, we asked two designers to talk us through the trends that rose and fell over the last nine years: Madeline Minogue, who describes her work as the meeting point between interiors and architecture, and Dominique Hage, founder of D.Hage Designs and writer of A Little Much, a monthly dispatch with occasional peeks into the workings of her industry and creative process.

1. Millennial Grey

Minogue's account of this trend is sympathetic to the generation it’s been affixed to since its absorption into common vernacular. This particular shade of grey was foisted on millennials, it kinda came with the lease. Housing designed for utility (investment) tends toward conservatism in interiors, which means mass-produced, uniform décor that’s cheap for landlords to maintain over the years. One need only look at the grey-ification of AirBnBs to see a microcosm of this phenomenon play out.

Hage characterises the palette with a droll observation: 'It was kind of like this get out of jail free card to be tasteful without saying much.'

When it comes to grey, an accent here and there adds an air of calm and practicality. After all, every room needs a neutral shade to anchor the space. Millennial grey, however, was a phenomenon all of its own.

2. Pastels and Curves

Perhaps something about the austerity of grey left us wanting a little less max security prison aesthetic. Thus we tipped into a slight over-correction, all things round and soft: a pink pastel rug you could sink three inches into, ample archways and blob-shaped furniture for days.

Hage puts it down to a particularly Australian sweetness, windswept beachiness – 'pastel pinks and arches and a round circle' – and to a design language in which nothing was permitted a hard line. More Bouba, less kiki. Naturally, too much of the same thing produces boredom after a while, although boredom can produce inventive combinations...

3. Japandi

The great composite trend of the era, and the one Minogue acknowledges is slightly paradoxical, given that Japanese design reveres wabi-sabi (imperfection, ephemerality) while Scandinavian design is, in her words, 'much more uniform, rigid.' Ritual and ceremony are the real overlap between these design approaches.

What Japandi came to mean in practice was minimal, light and clean; design contingent on spatial efficiency.

The trend is still around; it just has a different colour scheme: a little more espresso and a little less birch, but still Japandi.

4. Lockdown Decorating

No trend forecaster saw 2020 coming, but it served as a compression sock for our aesthetic circulatory systems.

The greys and beiges that were pleasingly neutral when you first inspected your place, became drab and under-stimulating when they’re all you looked at, fourteen hours a day.

Building sites closed, but Minogue recalls interior work going through the roof; people wanted their houses 'more homey,' she says. The spare room crammed full of boxes since moving day was suddenly a place of endless, sparkling potential. It could be an office, a rumpus room, whatever you wanted. Y’know, since you couldn’t go anywhere.

5. Maximalism

After a decade of restraint, patterns returned with a plummy accent: skirted furniture, valances, stripes, chintz, fringing. Maximalist and unabashed. The minimalist years weren't only about looking like you had everything figured out, being so well put together and all. A minimalist space let you dodge accusations of bad taste – by its very nature, minimalism allowed fewer opportunities to be gauche, or look gaudy, and gaudy meant colour, frills, anything with a whiff of ostentation.

As we’ve covered, however, lockdown suspended us. People get bored, and boredom yields a restlessness that was likely responsible for kicking minimalism out the proverbial window, and for the boldness to be aesthetically unhinged. Literally, unhinge those cabinets and replace them with little curtains. How could you care about what people may think of your décor? Nobody’s coming over! The house is your oyster!

6. Australian Design Takes Itself Seriously (The Blank-Slate Advantage)

Hage was pleasantly surprised, working in European practices post-pandemic, to find they referenced Australian and New Zealand design with reverence – we are, she says, in many ways on the cutting edge of this kind of creative work.

Her theory is that we're unburdened by tradition and are thus free to expand and create. She illustrated the point by describing canal houses in Amsterdam, explaining that they are of a particular lineage and so have standardised ingredients: chevron floors, parquetry; an entire (inherited) instruction manual. 'There's a lot of definitelys that you've inherited in places like that through history,' Hage says. 'And we don't really have that here at all.’

7. Colour Saturation

In 2017, a pop of colour had the subtlety of a gunshot, but in 2026, colour is both base and basis. There’s no need for a feature wall as there’s much less restraint left to tug against, thus colour is everywhere: walls, ceilings, skirtings, joinery and furnishings. Somewhere in the last nine years we left Pleasantville for Moulin Rouge.

Earthy tones are still in vogue, but with a temperature change. Beige, taupe and cool greys have been replaced by terracotta, ochre, olive, and brown. Hage and Minogue both describe pastels and whites giving way to richer, brawnier colouring.

There’s a psychology to this too. People retreat into earthy tones, and textures creep across every surface at home whenever things aren't going so great in the world at large.

8. Mid-Century, Apparently Forever

It's easy to call this timeless, but what’s more interesting is why this aesthetic has such staying power. The ergonomics are overlooked, as ‘ergonomic’ is a term more associated with pleather office chairs than a teak dining chair from 1960. But ergonomic they are. The pieces are well considered, they weren’t carelessly pumped out of an assembly line.

Mid-Century furniture was designed for people, it was not at all designed for a statistical compromise wherein one size must fit all. The magic of it is in reverse. A Danish dining chair can sit happily in the grey rental, under the pink arch, against the florals; and it will sit just as happily in a room painted floor-to-ceiling in neon ochre.

9. Warm Minimalism, or Disco Brutalism

Our two designers part ways here (in form, at least).

Minogue sees the maximalist phase burning out and warm minimalism emerging from its ashes: 'a 90s kind of Donald Judd-esque space.'

Hage’s pick is disco brutalism: 'two thirds brutalist, minimalist, a bit more barren, honest materiality, little ornamentation,' and then a final third of disco ball, sparkle and surprise, the friction generates the style.

Nine years ago, we were more concerned with the perception of our spaces than we were with our lived experience of them, resulting in dependably homogenous aesthetic trends, until the pandemic interrupted and forced us to live in the moment. And in that odd stasis, we developed a more considered, more tactile, more questioning relationship with our environments. Both Hage and Minogue agree that expression of the self, and experiential, kinetic relationships to our spaces are the trend forerunners, as of 2026.