{"id":537173,"date":"2026-04-18T04:29:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/537173\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T04:29:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:29:20","slug":"why-were-still-taking-design-inspiration-from-the-1990s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/537173\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we\u2019re still taking design inspiration from the 1990s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Image may contain Indoors Interior Design Kitchen Home Decor Rug Plant Floor Cup Desk Furniture Table and Chair\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"ResponsiveImageContainer-dkeESL cQPiWi responsive-image__image\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/230807HGHaHaHouse058BITsRGB-production_digital.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The birch ply and stainless steel kitchen in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.houseandgarden.co.uk\/gallery\/alice-kettle-somerset-house\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">this newbuild house in Somerset<\/a> embraces the industrial aesthetic and material-focused simplicity of the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Sinclair<\/p>\n<p>Style director Ruth Sleightholme has also embraced this marked move to tempering decoration. \u2018It\u2019s a prompt to pull in simple design pieces to help achieve a balanced, sophisticated end result. It\u2019s nice to have a flourish, a scallop, a wave but it had got to the point where unnecessary additions were disguising bad proportions.\u2019 George Morgan\u2019s debut furniture collection, which comprises 11 pieces, was a recent standout for Ruth and was created to a manifesto born from the wish to populate his projects with furniture that didn\u2019t fight for attention. \u2018There is a trend to make things which are whimsical or statementy,\u2019 says George. \u2018What I\u2019ve created is an antidote to that. It\u2019s about being well made, being quiet. I wanted my \u201cStandard\u201d chair to have not too much of an opinion.\u2019 \u2018He was very intentional about that,\u2019 adds Ruth.<\/p>\n<p>Tom Dixon, creative director at Habitat during the 1990s and responsible for introducing collaborations with Achille Castiglioni and Ingvar Kamprad, has always embraced harder materials such as cooper, steel and cast iron. He thinks it can be difficult to be radical in today\u2019s environment with everything up on Pinterest but, in what he described as the \u2018massive soup of possibilities\u2019, the more you pick out a couple of extremities and use them together, the better the end result. \u2018It\u2019s not about being in the middle but using both extremes,\u2019 he adds. \u2018So if I\u2019m working with a textile, it\u2019s the fattest, thickest fabric for upholstery in really saturated colours.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>So what is it about the late 1990s that has been resonating in recent years? Richard Benson, editor of The Face between 1995 and 1998, thinks what people express in terms of admiration for that time is that there was a lack of self-consciousness, a \u2018not overthinking\u2019 of anything. \u2018You can sense a lot of human connection in those pictures,\u2019 he says of the many visual references provided by the era. Understandable given that, as Lucinda points out, you only had one shot at something: \u2018There was no altering it in post-production.\u2019 And naturally that always created \u2018a kind of nervousness, a tenseness and sense of anticipation which was actually really fantastic\u2019. Laura Craik, fashion editor at The Face in the 1990s (as well as the Guardian and Evening Standard) remembers that stylists and photographers could shoot what they wanted: \u2018There was no edict from above, no having to shoot full designer looks from one brand, which can so often look sterile.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The birch ply and stainless steel kitchen in this newbuild house in Somerset embraces the industrial aesthetic and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,84735,3689,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-537173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-the-history-of-interior-design","tag-trends","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}