According to Ideal Home, in London people spend an average of £5,781 each year on decorating their home and purchasing furnishings.

Elsewhere in the country, the budget is much less, with people in the north east spending an average £758 a year, and those in Scotland spending £566 a year. It is estimated that over our lifetime, we will spend approaching £36,000 on decorating our homes. Now that’s a lot of paint!

So, if we are that keen on home décor, what should we be on the lookout for with new trends in 2018? Will it be a radical change, or will retro and nostalgia guide the designs? With the economy on the up but house prices still remaining very high, more and more of you are turning to revitialising your existing home rather than moving, which makes a great deal of financial sense taking into account the cost of selling and buying a home.

• Scour the Internet and it is clear that where colour is concerned, earthy tones are very much the way to go when it comes to creating a warm and inviting look to your sitting room. Note we say ‘sitting room’ and not ‘living room’. There is a more than subtle distinction as living rooms are more for everyday existence, but a sitting room is more of a place to relax, switch off and de-stress.

 

• It is not so much a radical change but more an underlining for ‘tried and tested’ for living areas, and the colour palette is crammed with bright and vibrant colours. Crisp white walls reign, but with an eclectic mix of bright blues and yellows adding an almost electric feel through fabrics, covers and wall art.

 

• Individuality is also now more accessible than ever when you start to consider the addition of wallpaper, either to one wall or to all four. Thanks to Hewlett Packard’s Indigo inks, to name just one brand, you can now design your own wallpaper and pop down to your local printers and ask them to run you off a few rolls of wallpaper. Yes, it really is that simple, and amazingly effective.

 

• If there is an overall feel to home décor for the coming year, it is elegance, but that doesn’t mean dull and boring. Elegance can be a combination of stylish, neat and simple, which still leaves you plenty of room to play with. Elegance also translates into clearly defined elements and spaces, as opposed to clutter. Free-flowing tones which blend from one room to the next enable a sense of flow as well.

 

• Storage has always been the bane of most homes – seldom, especially with modern property, is storage something you will find plenty of. Rather than building in cupboards and hiding everything away, next year’s trend will be for open shelved units – almost industrial in format and in greys and whites. Individual pods with connected rows will enable you to avoid too much of a sense of linearity and functionality, replacing it with eye-catching novelty as shelves become a focal point rather than an afterthought.

An element of caution has to be included when adopting any of the above ideas, as they run the risk of turning your home into a well-decorated space, but without those elements that allow you to stamp your personal mark. It is the accessories, those little touches that matter, and one of the best sources for this is florist sundries.

That may surprise you, but if you look carefully at what interior designers use to accessorise their ideas, you will soon realise that it isn’t just flowers that give a finishing touch to a room, but those other items that you associate with a florist, but which they may not themselves sell.