Interior Design Clinic

Interior Design Clinic

A weekly interior design podcast about UK homes, and what things cost. Hana and Marcus take one trend each week and work out whether it holds up in a British house. Dulux naming three Colours of the Year and all of them blue. The end of cool grey. Midimalism and the year everyone decided texture mattered. Warm wood kitchens. Period detail coming back.

  1. Oct 23

    Buying Furniture That Lasts: What to Check and Where to Spend

    The last one for now, and it's the opposite of everything else we've done. Not what's changing, but what doesn't, and how you go about buying it. Median UK renovation spend is £20,000 and planned spend for this year halved to £10,000, so this isn't an episode about buying expensive things. It's about where a smaller budget should go, which is a different and more useful question. The trade answer is buy less, buy better, and the word doing the work is craftsmanship, which means nothing because there's no legal definition of it. What you can actually check in a shop in two minutes: on upholstery, the frame and the joints, with weight as a rough proxy for a hardwood frame. On wood, whether it's solid or veneered, and then whether it's a decent veneer or a printed foil on chipboard, which the edge always gives away, because nobody finishes the inside of a cheap cabinet. Hana's two questions are whether it can be repaired and whether it can be taken apart. A sofa with a washable cover survives the thing that actually kills sofas, which is a stain rather than a broken frame. A chair with visible joints can be re-glued. A table with bolt-on legs survives being carried into a first-floor flat, which is where a lot of furniture dies. Also: what FSC, Cradle to Cradle and GreenGuard Gold actually certify, and why none of them tells you whether a thing will last. Contract furniture as an underrated route, because it's built to be sat on by strangers eight hours a day. The three purchases worth paying more for, chosen by hours of use rather than visibility. And the case for buying things that have already lasted, where time has run the durability test for you. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  2. Oct 18

    How Interior Design Trends Are Made, and Which Ones to Believe

    Fourteen episodes reporting what's in and what's out, and we have never once asked who decides. This is the one where we turn round and look at our own sources. A colour of the year is part trend forecasting, part sales data, and part a committee deciding what to sell. Pantone have been doing theirs since 1999 and Dulux since about 2004, and it started as a signal to manufacturers and retailers roughly eighteen months ahead of anything reaching a shop. By the time it's reported as news, the paint has been mixed and the fabric woven, which is why these things feel self-fulfilling. They partly are. Dulux's argument for blue this year was psychological: calm, fluid, stabilising in a turbulent time. That claim is unfalsifiable, meaning no outcome could contradict it. If blue sells, the mood was right. If it doesn't, the mood hasn't turned yet. Pantone used almost the same sentence about a frenetic society and concluded off-white. Same diagnosis, opposite prescription, which tells you neither of them is measuring the mood. On Pinterest: the methodology is public, which is more than most of the trade press manages. It's normalised English-language search, so it's global rather than British, it's what people looked at rather than what they bought, and a percentage with no base number can hide very small figures. A term going from twenty searches to sixty is up two hundred percent. Pinterest call it a not-yet-trending report, which is honest of them. Marcus ranks the sources by how much money had to move for the number to exist. And we admit who this reporting is written for, which usually isn't somebody with a terrace and twelve thousand pounds. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  3. Oct 13

    Home Storage Ideas: Why British Houses Haven't Got Any

    Seventeen percent of British homeowners put more storage on their improvement list this year, which puts it level with a garden makeover and above a home office, an outdoor entertaining space and smart home technology. Nobody wants storage. That's what makes the number interesting. It's on the list because there's a problem, not because there's a want. Why we haven't got any is structural rather than aesthetic. Victorian houses were built for people who owned fewer things, so there are no fitted wardrobes and no utility room. And the new-builds haven't fixed it, because floor area is what sells and a cupboard doesn't count as a bedroom. Every square metre given to storage is a square metre you can't put in the listing. Then the price of the fashionable answer. A bespoke pantry with drawers and internal spice racks is a joinery job at two to four thousand pounds. A tall larder unit from a standard kitchen range does most of the same work for four or five hundred, and the difference is the door, the depth of the internal worktop, and whether the runners last twenty years. Which is real, and isn't a fourfold difference. Also: the alcoves either side of a chimney breast, which are space you have already paid for and which are doing nothing. Why vertical storage beats horizontal by a factor of three. Under-bed space and why nobody uses it. The shallow hall cupboard that changes your morning. And why it's worth finding out what you're storing before you build somewhere to put it. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  4. Oct 8

    Green Paint Trends: The 2026 Colour Nobody Announced

    Blue got three colours of the year and a launch campaign. Pantone got an off-white. Green went up 22 percent year on year across the paint brands while nobody was looking, with no colour of the year, no theme and no name. Marcus's argument for why is that green is the only colour that's simultaneously a colour and a neutral. Paint a room blue and everybody registers blue. Paint it a muted olive and people register that the room has been decorated, without coming away thinking of it as the green room. It sits in the slot grey used to occupy, except it's warm and grey wasn't. Which greens: olive, moss, eucalyptus, sage. All muted, all with a good deal of grey or brown underneath. Farrow & Ball's Mizzle and Sap Green. What's not on the list matters just as much, because emerald and forest and bottle green were 2018 to 2022, and somebody who hears green is in and buys an emerald velvet sofa has bought the last cycle at full price. Green also behaves better than blue in British light, and the reason is yellow. Olive is essentially yellow with black in it, and yellow is the thing our light is short of. A eucalyptus or sea green leans blue and will go flat and cold in a north-facing room in exactly the way we described in episode one. Also: why green is the hardest colour to sample, where to put it in a normal house, and the pine problem. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  5. Oct 3

    Small Room Ideas That Work: Why Painting It White Doesn't

    British houses are among the smallest in Western Europe, and the new ones are smaller than the old ones. So most of the trends we've spent eleven episodes on were designed and photographed in rooms almost nobody listening has. This one starts with the advice everybody has absorbed and why it doesn't work. Paint it white isn't wrong exactly, it's incomplete: a small room painted white with white woodwork and a white ceiling reads as a small white room, because you can still see every edge and your eye measures the space from those. Colour drenching works better in a small room than a large one, and it doesn't have to be dark to work. Then mirrors, where the advice is right and the execution usually isn't. A mirror opposite a window doubles the light. A mirror opposite a wall doubles the wall, which is where most of them hang. What actually works: furniture up on legs so the floor runs underneath, because your eye judges room size by how much floor it can see. Vertical storage rather than horizontal. The alcoves either side of a chimney breast, which are space you've already paid for and are doing nothing. Curtain poles hung higher and wider than the window. And rehanging a door to open the other way, which is an hour's work and can decide whether a wardrobe fits. Also: why buying small furniture for a small room usually makes it worse. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  6. Sep 28

    Lighting a British Home: North-Facing Rooms and the Big Light

    Ten episodes of colour advice have all ended the same way: it depends on your light. This one is about the light itself. The constraint is latitude. London sits level with Newfoundland and Edinburgh not far off Moscow, and in December parts of this country get seven hours of daylight, most of it overcast. Overcast light is diffuse and cool, so everything under it reads cooler than the paint chart promised. That, rather than fashion, is why cool grey went wrong here and warm neutrals are coming in. For north-facing rooms the guidance is consistent: warm off-whites, buttery yellows, earthy terracottas, warm pinks with brown underneath, warm sage. Anything a brochure calls crisp means cool. But Hana's argument is that the wall colour isn't the lever, because if your window looks at a brick wall four feet away, the light arriving is already the colour of that brick wall. Then the free things nobody does. Clean the windows. Cut back what's growing outside them. Clear the windowsill, which in a Victorian house is deep enough to hold a whole shelf of things at exactly the point where the light comes in. And the electric lighting mistake in almost every house here: one bright pendant in the middle of the ceiling, lighting the top of everybody's head and leaving faces in shadow. Three warm sources at different heights, lamps in corners rather than along walls, 2700 kelvin bulbs, and the big light off. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  7. Sep 23

    Kitchen Trends 2026: Warm Woods, Worktops and Where £17,500 Goes

    The median UK kitchen spend rose 34 percent in a single year, to £17,500. Ten to twenty thousand is the normal range and the high end passes fifty thousand without much trouble. What did people get for the extra four and a half thousand? Mostly the same kitchen at a higher price, because materials and labour moved at once. On colour the sources contradict each other and we say so. Ideal Home has colour quietening to warm neutrals and, two paragraphs later, earthy spice tones dominating. Pinterest is darker than either: dark cottagecore kitchen up 915 percent, village kitchen up 825, aubergine up 495. The trade press is saying calm and the public is searching for aubergine. The material story is clearer. Fifteen years of pale is over and it's walnut and truffle oak now. Hana's argument is that it's a maintenance retreat dressed up as a trend, because a white gloss door shows every fingerprint and nobody chooses that twice. Also: why quartz has plateaued as porcelain composite takes share, the silica dust question Marcus won't state precisely because he hasn't checked where the UK has landed, why a pantry is an appliance garage with better joinery, the 1,100mm between runs that decides whether two people can use a kitchen at once, and what to do with £12,000 and a kitchen from 2006. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

  8. Sep 18

    Renovating a Victorian Terrace: Part L, Damp and the 8-15% Rule

    There are roughly five million Victorian and Edwardian houses in this country, and almost everything written about interior design assumes you don't live in one. Part L of the building regulations now wants a U-value of 0.18 or better on any new or significantly altered wall, roof or floor, and the word altered is doing a lot of work. On a solid-wall terrace, reaching EPC C adds £18,000 to £35,000 to a full refurbishment. Internal wall insulation runs £90 to £140 per square metre because there's no cavity to fill. Loft insulation to 300mm is £25 to £40 and where you'd start. Then the number that should stop you removing anything. A London practice reports Grade II houses selling for 8 to 15 percent less where the original features have been stripped out. Somebody who took the cornicing out in 1985 believed they were modernising, and it's still coming off the price four decades later. Also: why the real problem in these houses is ventilation rather than damp. They were built leaky, with open fires and gappy floorboards doing the air changes, and we sealed all of it and replaced it with nothing, which is why people pay to have injected damp courses fitted for condensation. Why lime plaster on a solid wall is a moisture question before it's a decorating one. Why sash refurbishment usually costs less than replacement. And what to do with the dark middle room. The podcast comes from the Interior Design Clinic app. If you want to see one of these trends in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes every five days. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps. This show is made by Interior Design Clinic. If you want to see a trend in your own room before you pay for it, you can upload a photo of the room and try it in 26 different styles at interiordesignclinic.com Got a room you're stuck on, or a trend you want us to price up? Tell us and we'll take it on the show. New episodes weekly. Following the show in your podcast app is what tells the app to show it to other people, so if this was useful, that's the thing that helps.

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About

A weekly interior design podcast about UK homes, and what things cost. Hana and Marcus take one trend each week and work out whether it holds up in a British house. Dulux naming three Colours of the Year and all of them blue. The end of cool grey. Midimalism and the year everyone decided texture mattered. Warm wood kitchens. Period detail coming back.

Information

  • Creator
    Interior Design Clinic
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Interior Design Clinic
  • Show Website
    Interior Design Clinic