Interior Design Clinic

Blue got three colours of the year and a launch campaign. Pantone got an off-white. Green went up 22 percent year on year across the paint brands while nobody was looking, with no colour of the year, no theme and no name.

Marcus's argument for why is that green is the only colour that's simultaneously a colour and a neutral. Paint a room blue and everybody registers blue. Paint it a muted olive and people register that the room has ...

British houses are among the smallest in Western Europe, and the new ones are smaller than the old ones. So most of the trends we've spent eleven episodes on were designed and photographed in rooms almost nobody listening has.

This one starts with the advice everybody has absorbed and why it doesn't work. Paint it white isn't wrong exactly, it's incomplete: a small room painted white with white woodwork and a white ceiling reads as ...

Ten episodes of colour advice have all ended the same way: it depends on your light. This one is about the light itself.

The constraint is latitude. London sits level with Newfoundland and Edinburgh not far off Moscow, and in December parts of this country get seven hours of daylight, most of it overcast. Overcast light is diffuse and cool, so everything under it reads cooler than the paint chart promised. That, rather than fashion,...

The median UK kitchen spend rose 34 percent in a single year, to £17,500. Ten to twenty thousand is the normal range and the high end passes fifty thousand without much trouble.

What did people get for the extra four and a half thousand? Mostly the same kitchen at a higher price, because materials and labour moved at once.

On colour the sources contradict each other and we say so. Ideal Home has colour quietening to warm neutrals and...

There are roughly five million Victorian and Edwardian houses in this country, and almost everything written about interior design assumes you don't live in one.

Part L of the building regulations now wants a U-value of 0.18 or better on any new or significantly altered wall, roof or floor, and the word altered is doing a lot of work. On a solid-wall terrace, reaching EPC C adds £18,000 to £35,000 to a full refurbishment. Internal w...

Every trend report assumes you're allowed to touch the walls. A third of households in England aren't.

Hana has rented seven flats and got four deposits back in full, so this one is hers and Marcus asks the questions. The design industry has essentially one piece of advice for renters, which is removable wallpaper, and it comes with a caveat nobody mentions: it works on smooth modern plaster and it takes paint off a wall that's been...

A bathroom is the most expensive room in the house per square metre, and the one people think about least. About £6,000 for a normal one, with a range from £4,500 to £12,000 before you add the London premium.

It's also top of the 2026 wishlist. Wickes asked 2,000 people and a new bathroom came out ahead of a kitchen at 31 percent.

Hana and Marcus go through what's changed. Out, according to the designers Livingetc asked: the all-whit...

The last episode of the series, and it's the list nobody publishes in January: what's leaving.

Out, according to the designers Livingetc asked: the all-white bathroom, matt black taps, matchy-matchy suites, gloss vanity units, feature walls, crisp white hotel bedding, and the separate formal dining room. Bi-folds are losing to sliders. Quartz worktops have plateaued as porcelain composite takes share.

Hana pushes back on some of it. ...

Two in three British renovations went over budget last year. Not the ambitious ones. All of them.

Renno surveyed 300 UK homeowners in April: 65.6 percent over budget, 60 percent behind schedule, and over half of those projects were budgeted under £25,000 to begin with. Hana and Marcus go through what things actually cost this year and why the overrun is predictable enough to plan for.

The numbers: a kitchen is £10,000 to £20,000, a b...

Midimalism is a terrible word for a real thing. It's the middle ground between Scandinavian minimalism and full maximalism, and the phrase the trade keeps using is comfortably imperfect.

Hana and Marcus work out whether there's anything underneath the word. The strongest evidence is Etsy, which this year named a texture of the year rather than a colour, for the first time ever. It's washed linen. Zulufish's Caroline Milns says the t...

Britain painted everything grey for about twelve years. That's ending, and what's replacing it is harder to get right.

Hana and Marcus go through the warm neutrals coming in — greige, mushroom, clay, chestnut, terracotta — and the green nobody has mentioned, which is up 22 percent year on year and has moved into the slot grey used to occupy. Jane Landino of Taylor Howes calls the palette sun-baked, which needs some trans...

Dulux has named one Colour of the Year every year since 2004. This year it named three, and all three were blue.

Hana and Marcus go through whether that means anything. Etsy, Pinterest and Lick landed on blue as well. Searches for moody blue kitchens are up 325 percent. Ideal Home's bathroom editor thinks sky blue is still standing in 2027. Then Pantone named an off-white, the first in the history of its colour of the year, and used...