2013 trends

Carol O’Callaghan looks forward to warm woollens and bright copper kettles — amongst other homey styles.

IT’S funny how pared back clean lines and lack of colour dominated interiors in the boom years, and in recession we can’t get enough of comfort and joyful colour.

This probably explains why we’re embracing textiles which reflect the home made look, why we’re joining knitting circles, obliterating our white walls, (orange and brown anyone?), and embracing a new found love of nostalgia from the ‘50s to the ‘70s.

So a huge and personal prayer of thanksgiving goes to the design Gods for having inspired designers to bring back modular furniture. Not seen since the ‘70s, and maligned by the interiors’ fashion police in the intervening forty years, it is the most practical construction for a sofa.

Just imagine if you could take a unit bought to accommodate four people and which is bulky in position and break it into components — that’s modular furniture. Modular resolves the problem of single blocks of furniture and divides to spread around the space, if not the house, coming back together again only when you need it.

While we didn’t see that one coming, it’s easy to predict what colours will be hitting the interiors shops in the next year, so whatever you spotted on the fashion catwalks over the last few months will soon be crashing into our homes.

But when it comes to other trends that will roll out over the next two to three years, the very ones you want to start considering now if you have a long-term interiors plan in mind, then the overwhelming theme is optimism.

Show after show is emphasising all that is sunny, bright, curvy, fun, imaginative and hopeful. Long gone are the cold metals of stainless steel kitchens we coveted in the Noughties; of high reflective chrome, and black cast iron pots posing with menace on the worktop.

Now it’s all about warm and sunny copper, a metal normally confined to the kitchen and great for cooking pans, but now given clever applications in new places.

Design luvvie Tom Dixon, he of fantastical lighting, rolled out his copper shades at The London Design Festival about three years ago, introducing us to the warmth of this metal for interiors and giving us something very new to create a link between the cold minimalist years and the trend for colour and warmth. These beauties stunned in the best possible way.

This year copper is firmly established: chairs made by London-based Frederikson Stallard look from a distance to be covered in copper coloured throws. But the irresistible urge to touch them reveals they’re made of crumpled and folded copper sheeting. More accessible is the work of our home grown Jennifer Chan.

Her approach is to fashion copper into wall candle sconces that warm up the chilliest of white walls helped by the natural reflective quality of the metal when the candles are lit.

On the other end of the lighting spectrum another trend is applied: feathers. Adorning light shades and giving them a tactility we do not expect from lighting, they miraculously appear in our homes — even if we don’t have a budgie.

¦ Next week it’s paper, cardboard and plastic.