You’re flicking through an interiors magazine and a living room catches your eye. Warm, sharp, just right. Two years later you open the same magazine and think: I wouldn’t do that now. That’s how trends work. Before you make any decisions, ask yourself a different question: what will you still like in five years? What you like right now matters far less. Interior design that lasts doesn’t start with a trend. It starts with a plan.
That’s the question we start with at Choc Studio. We don’t find trends uninteresting, and we’re not trying to be contrarian for the sake of it. An interior built around whatever’s fashionable right now simply tends not to hold up.
When does an interior start to date?
An interior doesn’t age on its own. It ages when style leads and everything else follows. When material choices are made based on what’s popular this season. When the layout, the flow and the proportions of the rooms aren’t really thought through, but the colour of the cushions is.
The most common mistake: starting with an image rather than a plan. You see an interior you like and try to recreate it. But that image was made for a different space, with different dimensions, different light and different people. What works in an editorial shoot doesn’t automatically work in your home.
The second problem is accumulation. You buy something because it looks good now. Then something else. Then something else again. Eventually you have a living room full of individual decisions that each made sense at the time but don’t add up to a whole. The taste wasn’t the problem, and neither was the budget. There was just no plan.
What interior design that lasts really needs
A lasting interior rests on three things. None of them are trends.
Flow and layout
How do you move through the space? Where does the door open, and what does it block? Where do you stand when you look into the kitchen, and what do you see? The flow of a home determines how it feels to live in, and that doesn’t change when the trend colour shifts from greige to terracotta. A home with a well-considered layout has room to adapt as your life changes. One where the layout was never properly thought through keeps asking the people who live there to adjust to the space, rather than the other way around.
Materials chosen for the long term
Good materials age differently from poor ones. A solid oak floor develops character over time. A laminate floor that felt contemporary in 2024 will look tired and dated by 2030. A chair with a timeless line and made from solid materials will still be a good choice in ten years. One that’s popular this season because the colour happens to be on trend might not be. What matters is whether the choice was based on quality and use, rather than on this season’s trend. How fashionable the material looks barely factors in.
A style that suits the people who live there
We say this at the start of every project: this isn’t our house, it’s yours. You need to feel at home in it, not us. That sounds obvious, but it isn’t always. A lot of designers work strongly from their own aesthetic and tend to impose it. The result is an interior that’s recognisable as that designer’s work, not as the home of the person who lives there.
We have our own view on what works. We’re influenced by what’s happening in the field. But the starting point is always: what suits the people who actually live here? What fits the way you use the space, what you find beautiful, what you’ll still be glad of in ten years? That’s a very different question from: what’s in fashion this year?
How to make choices that still feel right in five years
Nicole and Enrico bought a property in Bloemendaal that was handed over as a bare shell. Everything needed doing. They came to Choc Studio because they knew that otherwise they’d be making every decision in isolation, without any sense of the whole. “They’d done our previous house in Haarlem beautifully, and we knew that together with them we’d get the best out of this place,” says Nicole. “Julia and Robbert did brilliant work here. They thought of absolutely everything.”
That ‘thought of everything’ is exactly the point. That means starting with a plan that treats the layout, the materials and the style as a single whole, instead of choosing each element separately and hoping it comes together, and building that plan around the people who live there, not around a trend.
We’ve been guiding interior projects from concept to completion since 2007, first from Haarlem and now from our studio in Bennebroek. Over those years we’ve seen what holds up and what doesn’t. That’s what interior design that lasts actually looks like: a solid plan, good materials and a style that fits the people who live there. One built on whatever’s in fashion this year has a use-by date.
Let’s meet
Want to know how we approach it? Get in touch for an initial conversation.