DESIGN POSTCARD: Decorex

DESIGN POSTCARD: Decorex

Come with me to the 48th annual luxury interior design trade fair at Olympia, where nearly 300 exhibitors and 12,500 visitors from 70 countries decide how our homes will look over the coming year

Kate Watson-Smyth

Oct 14, 2026

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But first, among all the stands and VIP bars and lounges is the

Sustainability Space

, which I was very excited to have had a decorative hand in this year.

Jules Haines

asked me a couple of months ago if I would be involved in the design concept. There was no budget, not much time, and obviously we had to make sure everything was as sustainable as possible. When she said that several of the talks in the Space were going to focus on wellness, I remembered that when I was at the ISE tech fair in Barcelona earlier this year there was a stand hosted by Lutron, showing their new

Ketra

lighting system, which is designed to mimic natural sunlight throughout the day to help support our circadian rhythms. Essentially you can programme it to flood your kitchen with daylight in the morning, and it will gradually dim as the day wears on.

siting with Jules Haines on our donated Coach House sofa

I contacted Lutron and asked if they could help - and from there it was a short step to a Zoom meeting with Durgesh Sinh of

Nucleus AV

,

who was already working on the VIP bar and had previously created some cool lighting effects at this year’s WOW!house. Durgesh very kindly agreed to give us his time and expertise for free.

We just needed a window. Not least because Jules wanted to showcase her new fabric collection - printed on surplus plain fabric stock, that would otherwise never be used. She volunteered to rummage through a few of her local skips, but in the end Jeff Wildwood, of

Wildwood+

,

managed to borrow one.

YES the curtains are too short - they were hung by clever tech people not designers

Edward Bulmer

offered paint in the colour of our choice, and we headed up to Yorkshire for a day, to choose some pieces of furniture from

Coach House

-

all of which were either seconds or ex-display.

Coach House has grown from a family-run antiques business to become one of the UK’s leading trade-only suppliers of furniture and homeware. The company runs on 100% renewable electricity, with 48% generated at its Lancashire site, sends no operational waste to landfill and runs its delivery fleet on HVO renewable fuel. It has also sold more than 17,000 pieces through its Seconds Emporium and planted more than one million trees.

rummaging round the coach house warehouse

The final touches were the fabrics for the curtains and cushions, and here Jules was able to showcase her

new collection

,

both on the curtains and the cushions for the sofa.

new designs printed on surplus plain stock by haines collection

So we were all set. As soon as we arrived at Coach House, Jules and I saw a rug that we fell in love with, and that was the jumping-off point for the stand. The walls were painted in Edward Bulmer

Ethereal Blue

and the rug was hung on the wall. (If 10,000 visitors walk on it, it won’t be possible to sell it after the show.)

Last Friday, I spent the day helping to set up and it was all (nearly) ready for Sunday’s opening. Unfortunately the logos were printed on the wrong vinyl and couldn’t be fixed until the following day, and the rug was lost in transit, but overall we were delighted with the result. Especially when our (correct) logos finally arrived.

Work in progress

It was a real thrill to be invited to work on such a such a key space that hosted some really important discussions during the four-day event. I returned on Monday and it was great to see the chairs were full for every talk.

Anyway, while I was at Olympia, I spent some time wandering around the show, and as a woman in search of a headline, I have to tell you that I saw almost no plaster pink. The colour that has dominated interiors for the last eight years is fading away, to be replaced by a deeper, darker burgundy.

Long-time readers will know that I often tell you to look behind the main event to see what’s really happening - and while the standout design pieces for me this year were a lot of great sculptural lighting, I was also struck by this colour shift in the background.

I saw just one pink chair and one pink stand, while the rest of show was dominated by burgundy red. And what I also noticed was that this colour was used for the stands themselves, rather than the objects that were being displayed.

When I selected the colour for the cover of my first

Mad About The House

book (Farrow & Ball Pink Ground), I realised that many of the adverts on the Tube had a plaster pink background, which was where the infamous “millennial pink” had landed before it moved into interiors. So I chose the background colour for my book as a shade that I thought would come to the fore.

To dive down the millennial pink rabbit hole hit the button:

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A quick recap on millennial pink: It was first used by Acne Studios on its carrier bags in 2007. Seven years later, Wes Anderson released The Grand Budapest Hotel - and Glossier, with its distinctive pink packaging, was launched the same year, followed by the rose gold iPhone. In 2016, Pantone chose Rose Quartz as its colour of the year and India Madhavi painted Sketch, London, pink. By 2018 it was all over Instagram and its earthier cousin; Setting Plaster by Farrow & Ball, had begun to show up in interiors as a new neutral. It was first released in 2002, but by 2021 magazines like

Homes & Gardens

officially declared Setting Plaster as the most sought-after colour in the industry, forecasting its absolute dominance through 2022 - and it has continued ever since. Until now…

It’s the same thing at

Decorex

. The stands were often burgundy, the wares on show blue, with lots of warm chocolate brown thrown into the mix. And by the way, it’s also worth noting that the

Mylands

paint colour of the year for 2027 is Huguenot - which is, you’ve guessed it, a deep burgundy.

(There will be more on this in my next

House Notes

post).

lots of burgundy at Decorex this year including the main stage and the only pink I saw

I’ll let you into a secret there. On the morning I was due to visit, I realised that Decorex would be full of design journalists and creators compiling content on trends - and that I had just chosen the blue for our stand based on the rug we fell in love with at Coach House.

When Jules originally contacted me, I said to her I wanted the space to look like a cosy drawing room for conversations, and that I thought we should paint it in plaster pink (Edward Bulmer has a fabulous shade called Cuisse de Nymphe Emue - thigh of an overcome woman), with a burgundy sofa. So far, so signature me. I plumped for exactly that when I made over the

Bisazza

tile showroom for at LDF (they were looking for a warm classic colour that would show off their mosaics) - but then Jules and I digressed down the route of this lovely pale blue with the cinnamon rug and the bronze table.

As I walked around Decorex and saw lots more of it, I began to see how these colours are all feeding into our brains in quite a subliminal way. It’s all about looking around you. Once I’d spotted a couple of burgundy stands, I saw them everywhere.

But in a more general sense, the feeling was very much about warm earthy colours - lots of olive, chocolate, and warm cream. It’s back to that feeling of needing our homes to feel safe and cosy when it’s scary outside.

Lots of pale blue and chocolate too including the new collection from Birdie Fortescue, a deck chair by Colours of Arley, the coat paint tote bag (their stand was painted burgundy btw) and the bedding by Atkin & Thyme.

On a final note, the VIP lounge was created by Alexandra Dauley and Grant Pierrus who earlier this year launched

Aeven

- a space for conversations around the business of interior design. They included 70 chairs (all made in the UK), with the idea that everyone should have a seat at the table. Each seat is different - because we are all different - and there are no price tags. Their point being that you should judge the chair by how much you love it not by how much it costs. They varied from £150 to £10,000, by the way.

Among the chairs featured in the predominantly burgundy and chocolate interior was this, from a recent graduate whose name I sadly didn’t get in the general melée that is press day.

So yes, it’s about trends, and sustainability, and the business of interior design - but it’s also about giving everyone, no matter what field they are in, a seat at the table.

For a seat at Mad About The House

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