For a decade, interiors culture told us that neutrals were sophisticated and colour was gauche. Then something snapped. Now everyone I know is painting their bedroom walls a shade that can only be described as ‘anxious green’ and they have never been happier.
My friend Emma repainted her entire flat in the space of one weekend last February. She didn’t plan it. She was in a hardware shop buying lightbulbs and she saw a swatch called ‘Hague Blue’ and something broke open in her. Six weeks later her kitchen is yellow. Not a careful, considered yellow. A full-throated, someone-has-opinions yellow. ‘I feel like myself again,’ she told me, which is a lot to ask of a paint colour, but I understood exactly what she meant.
This is, I think, what the sad beige backlash is actually about. Not colour theory. Not interior design as a discipline. It’s about the long, strange decade in which we all agreed — without quite meaning to, that the correct way to live was to sand down all our preferences until they became aesthetically inoffensive enough to list on Airbnb.
The sad beige aesthetic, and if you need it explained, you haven’t been on Instagram in the last five years, which is frankly admirable, is the visual language of a specific kind of aspirational anxiety. Everything is greige. Everything linen. The inevitable rattan accessory. The artfully distressed wooden bowl containing three smooth stones. The bookshelf arranged not by any reading logic but by spine colour, graduating from cream to white to off-white in a way that makes it clear the books are decorative objects rather than things anyone reads.
We all agreed, without quite meaning to, that the correct way to live was to sand down all our preferences until they were aesthetically inoffensive enough to list on Airbnb.
The maximalist counter-movement was probably inevitable, but it’s been more interesting than I expected. It’s not about kitsch, exactly, or irony, or the self-conscious Camp of a few years ago. It’s something more personal than that. The people I know who are repainting and re-upholstering and buying things from car boot sales because they love them, not because they’re ‘vintage’ or ‘preloved’ or whatever approved word we’re using, seem to be making a quieter argument. That the home should look like the person who lives in it. Genuinely, imperfectly, a bit embarrassingly, like them.
The interior designer I trust most in the world, a woman who has decorated, over her career, everything from a Mayfair townhouse to a bothy in Sutherland, told me last summer that she’s spending more and more time helping clients ‘give themselves permission.’ Permission to hang the painting they actually love. Permission to keep the inherited furniture that doesn’t match. Permission to paint the ceiling a colour their mother would hate.
So what will 2026 look like? The colour mood board looks suspiciously like a softened version of the 1990s: peachy walls, butter-yellow corners, dusky pink upholstery and deep greens that feel somewhere between nostalgic and freshly optimistic. Designers say the shift is partly a reaction to the long reign of minimalist palettes, people are simply bored of living in rooms that resemble a well-lit oat milk latte.
But this isn’t a full return to the loud, sponge-painted chaos of the decade itself. Today’s revival is subtler. Think muddy pinks instead of bubblegum, olive greens instead of glossy hunter, and butter yellow used sparingly enough to feel chic rather than cheerful in a suburban kitchen circa 1994. The trick, designers insist, is balance: nostalgic colours layered with clean lines, contemporary art and modern textures so the effect feels warm rather than retro. In other words, colour is back, just with better taste and a little more self-awareness.
I have a poster in my kitchen that I’ve been meaning to frame properly since 2019. It’s not very cool. It’s a lithograph of a seabird from a natural history publication that I found in a box of my grandmother’s things. It is slightly crooked. I love it enormously and for years I have been planning to replace it with something more considered and I have never once, thankfully, got around to it.
