In the home: “It’s on the cusp of going out of style” 

Sue Marenick still remembers the drapes: custom-made for the sunroom of her first house, they were a splashy floral print in lime green and bright yellow, the kind of pattern that looks bold on a swatch but overwhelming across a span of windows. “It was the early 2000s and lime green was really having a moment,” she says. Inspired by the trend, Marenick went big and ended up regretting it. “Maybe if I’d done a throw pillow in that crazy pattern,” she says. “But not two thousand dollars for custom drapes.” 

Marenick, principal and owner of Toronto design firm MAD Inc., has since developed an eye for design trends that overwhelm Pinterest one year and are gone the next. Once the height of fashion, “battleship grey” bathrooms and kitchens are now seen as harsh and cold. And then there was white on white. “There’s a sterility from design five to 10 years ago that is so ick now,” she says of the fully white kitchens with white cabinets and white counters – that once seemed like a safe, clean choice. “It just feels too sterile.” And don’t get her started on Edison bulbs.  

It’s a tension that anyone renovating – or scrolling for design inspiration late at night – should keep in mind: the trends that seem freshest are often the ones that will feel dated the soonest. Fortunately, there are some signals for discerning a flash-in-the-pan fad from something more timeless. 

The first is saturation. “When you see something everywhere you turn, you’ve got to know that it’s on the cusp of going out of style,” Marenick says. On her current watchlist: arched doorways, vertical wood slats, fluted stone and millwork, gold hardware, sage green, and kitchens with busy, maximalist countertops replacing the sterile all-white look. Open-concept floor plans, once the default ask for any renovation, are also losing favour as people look for more privacy and defined rooms. 

Ali Abdali, CEO of the Toronto porcelain and stone surface company Marbella, sees the same thing playing out in materials. Cool, glossy greys and whites and high-shine surfaces dominated for years. Now, he says, warmer tones and matte or satin finishes are in demand. Travertine, a stone look that was everywhere a decade ago, disappeared almost entirely for years and has just recently come back into style. His rule of thumb: ask yourself if it is something you will want to look at every day for the next decade or whether you’re chasing a look you’ll tire of in two or three. “If you’re leaning towards something crazy, bold, bright, or shiny,” he says, “you should consider how much time you’re actually going to spend (with it).” 

Marenick also warns to beware of the trend pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. “We’ve gone from sterile to ‘more is more,’” she says of the busy countertops and warmer hues that have dominated of late. “We’ve gone from J.Crew to Betsey Johnson very quickly,” says Marenick. 

Both Abdali and Marenick say trends catch on and burn out quickly these days, and they point to the same culprit: image-heavy platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, where the same handful of photos get reproduced, reshared and AI-ed into ubiquity. Abdali says clients frequently arrive with Pinterest images of marble patterns that don’t exist in nature. “It’s not a real thing,” he says. Marenick worries the algorithm is making everything look the same. “We’re all being served the same images on repeat,” she says. “No wonder design is feeling sort of flat and banal.” 

So what actually holds up? Natural materials chosen for the long term, dressed up with trend pieces that are cheap to swap out later, says Marenick. She recommends wood, stone, steel and porcelain as safe long-term bets, paired with a neutral base that can change with the times with a coat of paint. Trend-chasing, she says, is best done with smaller items that are easy and inexpensive to replace — a rug, artwork, a cushion — rather than a $2,000 custom drape or a full kitchen in a single, of-the-moment colour scheme.  

Abdali agrees that practicality can be a helpful guide when discerning what will endure: porcelain surfaces will resist staining and heat in a way that natural marble doesn’t, an unglamorous but practical consideration that could equal clean, spotless counters decades down the road.  

Another piece of advice from Marenick: hire a credentialed designer rather than working from screenshots, and choose things that reflect your own taste rather than striving to duplicate a photograph. Mixing eras helps, too. A genuinely antique piece grounds a space, whether it’s a family heirloom or something found secondhand. And when in doubt: plants. “That splash of natural green is never going to go out of style, according to Marenick. 

In the end, though, there’s no true immunity from a fading trend. “Pretty much everything is going to date eventually,” Marenick says. “When it does, will you still love it?” Her advice? Let your design choices be guided by your heart, rather than your feed. “I have a navy kitchen, and that’s definitely not on trend, but I just love navy,” Marenick says. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to live with it, “so you might as well choose something you love.”