The hottest home interiors trends inspired by nature 

Autumn’s natural vintage themes bring our love for our planet into the heart of the home  - and it's all here to stay for 2023

The universal draw to solid wood surfacing and applied real timber veneer, like the Fritz Hansen Grand Prix, is its ability to deliver a range of characterful colours.

Nature and its calming influence on our fractured state of mind is trending heavily for autumn/winter.

Whether it’s a drifting real fern for the bathroom, or a high HD digital mural to immerse you in the forest floor while riding your sofa, allow sustainable choices, organic materials and natural themes to inform furnishings and accessorising, and stroke your soul season to season.

Expressive veneers

Tom Raffield Verso, a deconstruction of the multiple drum shade in a curl of steamed wood. Shades from €172.

The universal draw to solid wood surfacing and applied real timber veneer is its ability to deliver a range of characterful colours, textures and grain patterns. With natural elements flourishing all over the home, there’s a huge selection of iconic furniture delivering medullary rays, graphic grains and toffee-rich patinas.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

Our first pick is the Fritz Hansen Grand Prix designed by Arne Jacobsen, which is widely copied through the high-street hangers (so don’t panic if you don’t have the €536 demanded of authentic versions). 

Launched at the Designers’ Spring Exhibition at the Danish Museum of Art & Design in 1957, this diner has a light but chic shell in oak or walnut over a simple chrome kick-leg (wood are a tad more expensive), and it stacks like a dream. 

Slightly less exaggerated, but similar in form, try the new Ikea Sygtrygg at just €55 in a choice of legs and shells.

Ribbon timber lighting is another forest feast, with tangled, twisted organic forms not possible with solid wood. Semi-translucent and cloaking your bulbs, they play sculpture by day and diffuse light beautifully by night. 

Winner of the Good Design Award and the 2007 Design Plus Award, The Link Floor Lamp by Ray Power for LZF is available in a cumulus pendant or coiffure-like floor lamp, €509-€1330 from various suppliers. 

As an investment look for pieces by British designer Tom Raffield, including his offset interlinking deconstructed drum shades. My choice would be the Semper and Verso starting from €172.

For the birds

Finnish designer Oiva Toikka's birds took off in 1972 and have flown off the shelves ever since.

A popular motif for everything from artwork to wallcoverings for centuries, birds are flocking to our shelves this winter, and there are several mid-century feathered species to look out for.

One of the most beloved birdies is Charles Eames’ House Bird. Simple, witty and an acknowledged classic, it reflects elements of furniture design with its wiry legs and sculptural body supported on its tail as the third part of a trestle. 

There was a folksy wooden bird with glass eyes displayed in the Eames’ home for half a century.

Today’s original HB is available in black or walnut-painted alder €210. Vouch for a colour in a close copy over at CA Design in Dublin. 

The candy colour pieces offer that predicted 2023 trend in lavender, and flutter in at €95.20 in solid wood with a coloured lacquered finish. Ideal as a simple spring wedding gift.

Forming a collection and love deeply coloured glass? Finnish designer Oiva Toikka’s birds took off in 1972 and have a devoted following. Stylised and elegant with signature tear-shaped heads, many show the essential ornithological characteristics of real types of birds from Scandinavia or further afield. 

Created by master glass-blowers they nestle in the hand (rather ASMR to touch) and sit beautifully on any surface, Toikka’s creations can be found new or second-hand.

Iittala has released a 140th-anniversary edition in their rare colours including amethyst in real and imagined creatures. My personal choice would be the Ibis on its amusing column legs in vivid pea-green with a clear top layer mimicking water on the bird’s plumage, €499, iittala.com

Garden walls

Indie Wood wallpaper in Antique, €38 a roll, timorousbeasties.com.

Visual stories are trending in wallpaper for 2023 and this is nothing new. From Georgian hand-painted silk wall coverings, to the hilarious mountain scape of Hilda Ogden’s “muriel” in Coronation Street in 1976, our walls love to chat. 

Look for large patterns without obvious repeats or go for a digital piece that’s basically a picture exploded all over one wall. 

There are complex columns of flowers and foliage to scale every situation, but for sheer drama, nothing beats the award-winning work of Glasgow firm Timorous Beasties, under design stars Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons. 

The work is heavily rooted in the 18th taste for wild botanic imaginings, the school of 19th-century artist John Ruskin, and the art of copper-plate engraving.

Sumptuous, surreal and a commitment to melodrama – their Indie Wood combines sizable trees entwined in sapling branches of oak, inhabited with woodpeckers, jays, stately owls, red squirrels, butterflies and moths. 

It has had a very faint approximately 132mm repeat background texture but the design changes throughout the 10m roll, so it can be hung wherever the 132mm repeat matches. 

Choose from a nostalgic, gorgeous sepia inclined Antique, or drench the walls in darkness with the black-on-pearl variety, perfect for a snug situation, and even a diminutive retreat; €370 per roll.

Poppies and Hellenium from wallsauce.com

Wallsauce is my favourite source for digital murals, with a vast choice of styles and themes including hundreds of natural-borne ideas. I’m drawn to one of their latest made-to-measure pieces Poppies and Helenium, as it recalls a fading, vintage sketch book with loose, rag-paper, and is nicely scaled to fill up a wall with its fragile pretty presence. 

The company suggest “a creamy white or mustard yellow paint for the remaining walls. Why not even paint the ceiling in yellow to get that on-trend, wow factor.” Pulling a colour out of these storybook elements is a great way to kick off a full scheme. From €47 sq m to order.

Internal growth

Boskee Sky planters; €20.26.

Nothing brings nature to the haven of home like actual, live, growing things. Planters are a perfect moment to house a bit of NASA-backed “breathing” greenery or to house a few herbs in the kitchen over the winter months. 

Layer your plants against over-surfacing, treating them (tenderly and with aspects and temperature in mind) as the soft, beautifying accessories they are. 

There are styles for every room and every individual plant. The most environmentally friendly option is to use what you have, thrift and/or to buy durable, quality planters. 

The right tenants can even be assembled in the same pot to deliver multiple urban forests throughout the house. Together with sustainable and recycled potting materials, vivid leaf patterns and bold colours are trending for 2023, so go wild in your little jungle.

Air plants (Tillandsias) are survivors and can take to the air in ceramic or glass and in some cases require no soil at all. Look into upside-down Boskke Sky Planters with integrated irrigation, from €20.26 – great for home office airplay, and even growing herbs. 

I’m obsessed with Sku’s Hubsch oblong, a powder-coated metal planter in a delicious autumnal burnt orange. It has a clean, architectural 1980s vibe and a superb bucket volume for a big species-size rubber plant beside a desk or fluffing out a corner. €259, woodesign.ie.

For similar “Japandi” styles hunt through HomeSense and TKMaxx. 

Habitat for Argos throws up affordable solid design season after season. Their Spindle Legs tall planter with its upright conical rods and round top-pot is just €49 and can be teamed with the smaller version for €35.