One topic I’m asked to speak about more than any other is trends – design trends, colour trends, interior trends etc… It’s a topic I love to cover, quite frankly, because there is so much happening in the kitchen and bathroom design world that is of interest and I always find I learn something myself from doing these presentations – mostly from conversations I have with attendees during and after the presentation.
But talking about “trends” can be a slippery slope and here’s why. If all you kitchen and bathroom designers out there were only designing for your own homes, or showrooms, that wouldn’t be a problem. You’d take all the elements of the latest trends you love and apply them to the location and situation in which you were designing.
But kitchen and bathroom designers can’t just produce something that suits them.
It also has to meet the needs of the homeowner – your client. And it has to suit the home’s architectural style, and the way your client lives, and how many members there are in the family, and whether they entertain, and how they cook, and a million other factors which – not so surprisingly – can get in the way of your dream to create a kitchen or bathroom that embodies the latest “trends”.
I strongly believe that keeping in touch with emerging and enduring trends is of vital importance in maintaining a well-resourced, well-researched and highly-informed industry but I would never want a need to be trendy to overwhelm or become more important that the need to meet the client’s brief. So, it’s always going to be a balancing act between applying what you know to be cool, happening and groovy right now and designing a space that has an enduring quality so it lasts.
Over to you – how much do “trends” influence your work? Or do you feel that “trends” are all well and good but they don’t have a lot to do with the end result?
