The only interior design trend that really matters
It's time to make home more homely. But that doesn't mean buying into what the "experts" tell you is trendy. It's about finding your style and telling your story to create a truly personal space.
I can’t stop thinking about a quote by Maggie Smith I read in the Times magazine a couple of weeks ago. Chatting with the actress Fiona Shaw, Smith announced: “I’m going back to bed, I can’t stand the colour of that carpet.”
Right up there in the pantheon of things I wish I’d said. Although actually, as I have a pathological fear of causing offence and upsetting people, I would never be brave enough to say it out loud. In my head though? Sure. Screaming it silently. Quite often, as it goes.
But the point is not the wit of Dame Maggie, or rudeness depending on your point of view, it’s the thought that counts. And no, not that she dared utter her opinion out loud, but that she had one in the first place.
While I applaud social media – specifically Instagram – for allowing us to see inside other people’s houses and take from them our own inspiration, it seems many of us have gone the opposite way. We are so afraid of being thought to have offended the social gods/influencers of taste that we err on the side of beige.
Before I go on, Beige is an actual colour, described as a “light, sandy fawn like a pale, greyish-yellow” which can also be used to describe pale and light brown shades. Its hex code is #F5F5DC. Beige takes its name from the French word for natural wool, which has been neither bleached nor dyed. It is not cream nor latte nor anything with a yellow or reddish undertone. It is cooler and greyer than that and has, perhaps unfairly, become synonymous with the notion of characterless décor attached to hashtags such as #banthebeige.
But such is the dominance of this colour that there’s currently a lawsuit in the US (where else) where one Amazon influencer is being sued by another for “copyright infringement, tortious (this is not a typo I looked it up – it’s from “tort” and means wrongful in legalese) interference with prospective business relations and misappropriating another person’s likeness”. She claims the other copied her “neutral, beige, and cream aesthetic”, and that her “uncannily similar content” has cut into her earnings – she claims she’s owed up to £117,000 in damages for mental anguish and lost sales commission from Amazon. You can read more about that here.
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