Trend pieces usually describe what appeared on Instagram rather than what people are building. This is what is actually turning up in briefs across Glasgow and the towns around it this year.
Stone doing more than the worktop
The biggest visible change. Stone taken up the wall as a full-height splashback, wrapped down the ends of islands, and used in bathrooms in large formats with as few joints as possible. Porcelain has got good enough that the cost is no longer the barrier it was.
Warm timber coming back
After a decade of grey and white, walnut and oak are back, usually as a counterweight to stone rather than as the whole room. It is the thing that stops a hard scheme feeling like an airport.
Colour on everything, not just the walls
Painting the walls, the woodwork, the skirting and the joinery the same colour. It is a bolder decision than a feature wall and it consistently makes rooms look bigger and more considered. Deep greens and warm earth tones are doing most of the work locally.
Lighting treated as a layer
The decline of the downlight grid is the most useful change of the last few years. Concealed strips, wall lights, decorative pendants and lamps, all on separate circuits. Rooms designed this way work at nine at night, which rooms lit from the ceiling never do.
The kitchen that hides
Handleless fronts, concealed appliances, and tall runs that read as a wall rather than as storage. In an open-plan room where the kitchen is visible from the sofa, this is the difference between one room and a kitchen with a sofa in it.
Utility rooms and boot rooms
A steady rise in briefs that include one. Not fashionable and not photogenic, and the room people say made the biggest difference a year later.
Broken-plan rather than open-plan
A correction after fifteen years of removing every wall. People want the connection and they also want somewhere quiet. Crittall-style screens, half-height joinery and level changes do it without going back to separate rooms.
Not worth following
- Very dark kitchens in north-facing rooms. Beautiful in a photograph taken in a studio, gloomy in Glasgow in November
- Micro-cement everywhere. It is a specialist finish, it cracks if it is applied badly, and it is being sold as a paint
- Fluted panelling on every surface. A good detail used once; an era stamp used six times