4 design trends you need to know about before giving your home a new look!
Discover the latest trends for designing residential settings
The world of interior design is evolving all the time, influenced by a range of different artistic and social trends, so choosing your favourite style is no easy task! In this article, we’ll be illustrating the four macro-trends in vogue right now, to help you give your home a new look, without too much effort and in a way that suits your personality. We also talked about this during our Lessons from Marca, a cycle of webinars dedicated to interior design, colour, designing residential and commercial spaces and the decorative potential of ceramic floor and wall coverings for contemporary furnishing projects.
But let’s get back to the top trends of today – and tomorrow! Here are our favourites:
1. Wellness Interiors
The new Green awareness, the desire to take care of mind and body and the pursuit of comfort provide the inspiration for numerous renovation projects today, in both residential and commercial environments. A key role here is undisputedly played by the bathroom, which for a long time has been undervalued and overshadowed by other rooms in the house with a more social and entertaining function.
There’s been a decisive move towards rediscovering the bathroom, which has become the most important room in the whole house, given a rethink as an authentic temple of relaxation, a place to spoil ourselves with beauty rituals worthy of a spa. Space, light and a simple style are the must-haves for a wellness bathroom: minimal furnishings, materials with a raw look and green elements, all designed to re-establish contact with nature, which for many of us is essential.
Among the numerous Marca Corona solutions, one of the best collections to choose to follow this trend is Soul Bay, with its 40x80 wall tiles inspired by the Biophilic design trend.
With their delicate watercolour nuances, surfaces with material relief effects and elegant oriental-style decorations, these ceramic tiles are designed to create walls with a sophisticated look, bringing a natural touch to both private bathrooms and the most exclusive wellness centres. A suggestion for making the most of Soul Bay?
Go for the two three-dimensional textures, Form and Line, taking care to lay them on adjacent surfaces or walls. This will bring out the best in the fresh, original relief patterns, thanks to the perspective effect and the touch of the light. To create a relaxation area with a pleasant material feel, both patterns can be combined beautifully with the base tiles.
2. Comfort zone
Recent behavioural psychology studies have shown that the design and arrangement of our living spaces have a major impact on our mood and our physical and mental wellbeing. The extraordinary situation we have been experiencing for the last few weeks confirms this, and is encouraging us to take a completely new look at how we can conceive and experience our living spaces.
Our home has been turned into a multi-functional environment we spend 24 hours a day in, rather than just evenings or weekends: throughout the day, our homes host an endless variety of activities, from our work to fun and entertainment, from sport to peaceful moments of family and private life. So today it’s more important than ever before to know how to make the most of our homes and to design living spaces able to awaken positive sensations of wellbeing.
And what better choice could we make than covering solutions and furnishings inspired by the nuances of nature, able to create cosy, inviting atmospheres?
Neutral or warm shades, used on walls, textiles and furnishing accessories. For furnishings, the accent is on rounded shapes, able to create a relaxing, enveloping sensation, with tactile surfaces and bright, natural surfaces able to bring a warm touch to the environment. Such as the Elisir series, inspired by natural shades of oak, or the Mementa wall coverings and the Overclay surfaces, reminiscent, respectively, of the authenticity of stone and the exotic allure of the desert.
Although apparently completely different, all three collections are able to shape inviting, modern, classy ambiences that are also practical to clean and maintain, thanks to the distinctive characteristics of the ceramic material. And this leaves us more free time to devote to the things we enjoy most, or even just to relax!
3. Minimal and colourful
Although neutral and natural shades are predominant in most residential and commercial environments, because they’re versatile and we never tire of them, lately we’ve been seeing a move on the part of more eccentric, non-conformist designers and artists towards more vibrant, lively colours, able to bring a unique touch of character to our everyday living spaces.
This trend can take shape in two ways: the choice of a single eye-catching colour featured on a number of details throughout different rooms, or different colours chosen for each room, which all share a similar style or tone. So you might like to go for retro nuances that are trending again today, such as mustard yellow, sage green or all kinds of shades of pink.
The home becomes a blank canvas on which to give free rein to our creativity, playing around with irreverent colours and original solutions for every area.
The only rule is not to go far when shifting from one colour to another, or with accessories, to avoid creating a circus effect! In the bathroom, for instance, it’s best to stick to a more classic style for the fittings, furnishings and taps (if you’re feeling audacious you could try matching the bathroom fittings to the colour of the walls), and leave the explosion of colour and three-dimensional patterns to the floors and walls. And for the kitchen and living room, you can bring a cheerful, positive touch by choosing warm, sunny shades, tying them in with sophisticated accents of matching colours on the textiles and tableware.
If you’re going to go for colour, there’s no better choice you can make than the Bold and Victoria tiles. While Bold features 4 colours with a vintage flavour and 2 supremely original three-dimensional textures, the Victoria tiles are reminiscent of the elegance of neo-classical wood panelling, with a decidedly sophisticated, bon ton range of colours. The combination of nuances and patterns in both series are virtually endless, designed to bring a uniquely trendy, modern touch to your home.
4. Remix
They say that nothing goes out of fashion forever, so it comes as no surprise that the latest trend in interior design is Remix, which takes the style and emotions of the past and combines them with modern furnishing elements.
Designers and design engineers are showing growing enthusiasm for the re-use of vintage furnishings and materials to create innovative mix-and-match looks that team the old with the new. We spoke about this in our last Lesson from Marca, dedicated to the Remix trend, in which seemingly contrasting elements, such as modern designer objects and recycled furniture, can co-exist and engage in perfect harmony.
Small-size tiles with a hand-crafted look alongside large designer slabs; polished, shiny finishes teamed with dusty matt effects; natural tones with touches of soft colour: anything goes, provided it’s combined tastefully to create settings with a timeless charm, in which apparently random combinations are actually the result of carefully considered, balanced choices.
For the floors and walls, you might like to go for a combination of majolica tiles with a Mediterranean flavour and cement tiles with a vintage inspiration, such as Storie d’Italia, Regoli and Ossidi, along with modern, large-size tiles, such as the bright, elegant, marble-effect slabs in the Foyer collection, or Phase and Stonecloud, which take their inspiration from the material allure of natural stone. These ceramic floors look great either on their own or teamed with extra-bright, colourful cement tiles, with which an original carpet effect can be created, ideal for the living area.