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Home & Design Trends

The Trends Designers Are Leaving Behind in 2025

From dupes to white bouclé, designers share the design trends they’re ready to ditch in the new year.

January 16, 2025
Photo by Schoolhouse

Spend enough time on any of your social media feeds and you’ll start seeing some of the same pieces of furniture, paint colors, and textiles dotting the photos from your favorite follows. Curvy sofas, color-blocked storage, that platform bedframe everyone seems to have. Whether the ideas are new or old, these design moments can easily toe the line of “timeless” and “trend.” And if you care about steering clear of the second category, it can be hard to decipher where things land.

And with that in mind, there are some things designers are (really) excited to leave behind as we head into a new year. And while we’re not saying you have to agree, it’s a good way to figure out where you may want to spend your time—and design energy—in the year to come.


So Long, Safe Design

“Safe, unoriginal lighting has had its time to shine,” says Beauty Is Abundant founder and HGTV Designer of the Year Leah Alexander. “I'm obsessed with risk-taking.” Thankfully, we can help with that, wink wink.

Photo by Schoolhouse

Skip the Recessed Lighting

Designer Tara McCauley and Alexander are on the same page on this one, in case you’re really looking for a reason to make a change: “I would love to say goodbye to recessed lighting. Decorative fixtures add more personality and ambiance,” she says.

Photo by Schoolhouse
Photo by Schoolhouse

Ditch the Dupes

“I am so ready for design enthusiasts to throw the celebration of ‘dupes’ away,” says designer Noz Nozawa. “It's just not realistic to find amazing design pieces at too-good-to-be-true prices without a compromise in quality or ethics—and usually, that means an original idea is being knocked off—which reduces the value of a design to the cost of manufacturing it, instead of valuing the OG designer's creativity.”

Bye, Bye, Bouclé

“Hopefully, this is really the year the white bouclé trend ends,” says Studio Roene founder Julia Sobrepeña King. “It goes hand in hand with the minimalist all-white oak and oatmeal linen room, which I am so tired of. I think people should try to have just a little more fun—add a tiny bit of color and individual character (or a lot). We don't want our home to look like it was designed by AI.”

Photo by Schoolhouse

On the Flip Side…

“We honestly hate to wave goodbye to anything,” say Robin Heller and Jen Levy of Surrounded By Color. “There’s something for everyone and if you have colors in your house that make you happy then don’t change a thing!”

Photo by Schoolhouse

What interior design trends are you leaving behind in 2025? Let us know in the comments!

See what other Food52 readers are saying.

  • Bernice Griffiths
    Bernice Griffiths
  • Terry
    Terry
Erika Owen

Written by: Erika Owen

writer / editor / creative human

2 Comments

Bernice G. January 29, 2025
i loathe boucle and can't get behind it so i will be happy to see it go (if it does). Im over plastic things and non-real materials (polyester etc) . give me real wood, real leather and real cotton and linen and wool. I want there to be a story behind my furniture - eg it was made by hand and not press board in a giant factory by a machine. craftsmanship will hopefully make a comeback
 
Terry January 29, 2025
I never saw the appeal of boucle. But I hope more customers start demanding the things you listed from manufacturers so that they have to fall in line or go away...then "real" furniture (and other products) will start becoming less niche and more mainstream, and prices will drop.

As for dupes, I wish sometimes that I could find the "original" designer of a product, but so many companies offer the exact same light fixture (for example) under different names and different price points that it's impossible to discern who made it first.
 

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