Hubs and I bought our first house in 1995,
the deposit saved from an entire year of my hard earned salary. I'm sure I've
told you that story before - four hours a day, commuting
through the Tokyo rush hour and the thing that kept me going on days when the
white gloved platform pushers were shoving us into the carriages like cattle
was the mantra of 'one more brick, one more brick'.
It took six months from returning to the UK
to find the house we wanted to buy - a Victorian semi in a good part of
town, with a long thin garden and most important to me, stairs I could climb to
bed. As we house hunted, I read interiors magazines and dreamed of what our home
would be like. One thing was for sure, we didn't want it to resemble
the homes of our parents - it was going to be fresh, timeless, classic.
Of course now, as I look back on those
notebooks now, I smile at how dated some of our ideas of 'fresh and classic'
look now. And the super irony? I realise that my parents now live in the
epitome of a mid century modern, hipster's dream pad.
My mother's kitchen accessories are the
exact orange my design savvy friend just picked out for her kitchen. Bar cart?
Tick. Ercol furniture? Oh yes. Parquet floor in pristine condition - they have
it. Even those West German lava pottery floor lamps - though my mother swears
now that she probably bought them from Argos. Every once in a while, I will
spot an element of their home in some emporium and rush to phone them and let
them know what their tea, coffee and sugar canisters are worth on the
vintage market!
Who knows, if we had waited twenty years to
get on the property ladder, I might have been gagging to re-create their look.
Because I'm not averse to a spot of vintage chic. It is useful, living in a
fairly new build house, as we now do, to inject a bit of patina of the past.
Stops everything looking as if you just swooped along the high street acquiring
all your household necessities in one go, thereby sentencing you to a definite
design graveyard at some point in the future. Though thinking about it, if you
did that and just hung tight, you'd probably turn vintage chic again at some
point in the future.
The colours of that era are easy to
pinpoint in my mind - orange and brown, harvest gold, avocado. Poof - imagine
that lot and you're straight back to the 70's, your feet snuggled in a shag
pile rug and a spider plant in a macrame hanger. When we bought our first home?
It was beige all the way - the magnolia years. With curtain poles, not tracks -
very important.
And what about now - when our current
interior choices are examined in the cold light of hindsight. Will the cliche
of white with 'pops' of colour scream vintage 2010s? Or perhaps it will be the
Cath Kidston bright pastel palette. I strongly suspect the oh so personal
statement feature wall will be a marker, as will my beloved antlers. And let's not forget bunting.

Because vintage, where colour is concerned,
speaks to me in the same way as the dictionary still defines it in the context
of wine - from a certain year.
Put your time travelling specs on - what
are your interior palette future clichés of the moment?