Home Decor Trends: How to Use Them Without Dating Your Home

Decor trends are for the parts of a home you can carry out the door. A lamp, a fabric, a side table or a paint color can follow fashion at small cost, because each can be changed in an afternoon. What a renovation builds, the layout, the cabinets, the floors and the tile, has to outlast many rounds of fashion. Keep the two apart and you can enjoy every trend without your home ever looking like the year it was done.

Three layers of a room

• The built layer: walls, doors, windows, built-in cabinetry, plumbing and wiring. It is changed by construction and should be chosen to last decades.
• The fixed finishes: floors, tile, counters, moldings. They can be changed without moving walls, but not cheaply or quickly.
• The movable layer: furniture, lamps, rugs, curtains, cushions, art and paint. This is where a trend belongs.

The cost of reversing a choice rises sharply from the third layer to the first. A fashionable lamp that tires you is sold or given away. A fashionable tile that tires you is a demolition job.

Trends that sit well in the movable layer

When we first wrote this piece, these were the ideas in the magazines. Each is still a good example of fashion placed where it does no harm.

Sculptural lamps

Mushroom and dome lamps came back into favor, and vintage models became hard to find as large retailers copied them. Paper lanterns in the manner of Isamu Noguchi’s Akari designs returned the same way. A lamp is the ideal trend purchase: it changes the mood of a room every evening and asks nothing of the walls but an outlet.

Weighty tables

After years of thin-legged Scandinavian furniture, low, solid pieces such as plinth tables arrived to balance it, often in colored marble or other stone. One heavy piece among lighter ones is enough.

Textured fabric

Boucle, the looped, nubby fabric, moved from high-end showrooms to the mass market. On a chair or a few cushions it adds texture; if the taste passes, the chair can be recovered.

Strong color

Deep jewel tones gave way to bolder primary hues: rusty red, indigo, mustard yellow. Paint, a rug or a single upholstered piece is the place to try them.

Curves and collected rooms

Mid-century Italian design brought curved furniture, delicate lines and bold color, and a wider turn away from minimalism encouraged rooms that mix periods. This last idea is the one worth keeping for good. A room furnished with long-lasting things from different times and styles does not date, because it never belonged to one year.

What the built layer should do

The job of the permanent parts is to make the changing parts look good. That argues for quiet floors, restrained tile, well-proportioned doors and moldings, and built-ins designed around what they hold. Bookshelves, a wall unit for the television and concealed storage let you rearrange and replace the decor without clutter. Our pages on entertainment units and custom storage and closets show what we build.

Millwork is the exception to the rule that the built layer should be plain. Paneling, raised-panel cabinetry and good moldings are details people have valued for generations, and wood can be chosen room by room. The right question for a built detail is whether it suits the building, not whether it is in fashion. In a pre-war apartment, restoring the kind of trim the building was made with is rarely a mistake.

When a trend asks to be built in

Sometimes the idea you love is a permanent one: a colored kitchen, a patterned floor, an open plan. That is a different decision, and we set out a way to make it in our piece on judging a remodeling trend before you build it in. For the renovation itself, see home renovation in NYC.

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