Designer regrets: Did it age well?

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Published Date 8/1/2024

Trends are fun and sometimes they’re flamboyant. The difference between true style and a trend can easily be explained in one question, however: Is it timeless?

The Spruce’s Sarah Lyon says, “Let’s face it: even pro designers and design enthusiasts have made decorating decisions that they've later come to regret.” So she asked a slew of designers to chime in with designs that turned out to be major regrets as time went by.

The hanging chair. "One trend that I wish I would have stayed away from in my own home was installing a hanging chair in my bedroom. Although it is super dreamy and I love the look of it, no one in my home has ever sat in it, and it stops our closet door from opening all the way. We sacrificed function for form, and it was a valuable lesson to learn,” says designer Danielle Chiprut.

Another designer Lindsey Gregg said she regrets adding an over-the-top color to a bedroom motif. "I was so excited to decorate my bedroom in my first home. I made an upholstered headboard with a colorful Suzani fabric and added yellow Moroccan tile print euro shams and mismatched hot pink ikat pillows. The result was exactly what I wanted—playful, interesting, and a little bit bold—but it was so energizing, I couldn't sleep at night! The bright colors and mixed patterns got me so revved that I couldn't rest. I had to pull it all apart and work out a more subdued bedroom."

Too much cowbell? It’s easy to roll your eyes after watching too much “modern farmhouse” while watching HGTV shows. "My biggest regret is buying into the farmhouse trend of 2015 and 2016, says designer Valerie Darden. “I spent tons of money on 'gather' and 'fresh egg' signs and was big into collecting word mugs. I used to decorate a faux milk jar rack for every holiday. It was cute for a minute, but it got oversaturated very quickly! Besides, I lived in the suburbs outside of Washington, DC, so there weren't any farm fresh eggs anywhere!"

You’d think slogans and saturated colors would never go out of style. In theory, they don’t, but displaying them on some walls definitely does. In 2007, designer Aston Moody went wild painting her kitchen lime green. “I left it up for an unfortunately long time. I got on the word wall trend, which was never cute. There may have been a 'live, laugh, love' decal up somewhere at some point. And we also bought a black pub-height kitchen table back in 2007 as well. It was too large for the small space it was in, and those tables are just not my style at all, but it took me a few years to realize that I hated the style and it didn't fit the space."

Hannah Skaar is a designer who desperately tried to create modern glam, pretending she lived in an urban New York City loft. “At one point I was even going to have herringbone inset barn doors made. That is how committed I was to this look. It was fabulous, right? I could not have been more wrong.” She says these doors are now the bane of her existence, never level and always slide to one side or the other, leaving half of the closet visible. “Sometimes they even slide all the way off while we are trying to get items out of the closet. They have chipped the paint off the walls behind them and on the corners of the closet. Black marks from the wheels scraping the wall often have to get cleaned with magic erasers."

HGTV/Magnolia Network star Joanna Gaines, whose enthusiasm for the word “shiplap,” is off the charts wasn’t even close to the first to popularize it. ”When we first moved into our current home in 2016, I tried out the DIY shiplap in our dining room and bedroom,” says Instagrammer Brit. “While I loved the way it looked at the time, I tired of it pretty quickly, and it was a major undertaking to get the walls back to their former state. All the drywall work I had to do to fix them wasn’t even remotely worth the six months I enjoyed having the shiplap."

TheSpruce, TBWS

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