Timeless design: how do you build a space that still looks good ten years later?

01What do we mean by “timeless”?

Let us first correct a mistake. Timeless design cannot mean design that belongs to no period; every space is made with the materials, the techniques and the budget of the year in which it is made. What we mean is more modest: a space that does not give away the year in which it was made, and that does not embarrass its owner as the years pass.

There is a simple way to test this. Look at a photograph of a space and ask yourself: when was this done? If you can say “2019”, that space followed fashion. If you say “I cannot tell; perhaps last year, perhaps thirty years ago”, that is what we are looking for.

The red curve in the figure is familiar. Within a few years a colour or a material appears in every magazine, every café and every new flat; then one morning you find that everyone is trying to get rid of it. The problem is not that the colour is ugly. It has been seen in too many places in too short a time, and so it has come to carry the stamp of a particular year.

02First, separate one thing: how permanent is each thing?

The most useful rule of timeless design has to do not with aesthetics but with the calendar. Not everything in a home has the same lifespan. There is an idea put forward by the architect Frank Duffy and developed by the writer Stewart Brand in 1994: a building consists of layers that change at different speeds. The structure stands for between 30 and 300 years, the services are renewed every 7–15 years, and the objects move from day to day.

We adapt it to the interior as follows.

The rule is this: the longer the life of a decision, the calmer the decision should be. Move everything in which you want to be bold to the two layers at the bottom. If an emerald green velvet cushion bores you after two years, you replace it. If an emerald green bathroom tile bores you, removing it takes a plumber, a tiler and three weeks.

Almost all the decisions that people regret are a passing enthusiasm of the fast layer applied to the slow layer: a kitchen cabinet in a colour that has gone out of fashion, a bathroom covered in the pattern of that year, a ceiling detail that became the signature of a period.

03Proportion: the one thing that never dates

Colour dates, material wears, furniture changes. Proportion stays. The spaciousness you feel when you enter a hundred-year-old apartment does not come from the colour of the walls; it comes from the height of the ceiling, the height of the windows and the alignment of the doors.

It is not necessary to knock down walls to correct proportion. In most spaces the greatest gain comes from alignment: the tops of the doors, the tops of the windows and the tops of the cabinets sitting on the same line.

There are a few more decisions of proportion to watch. Keep the doors as high as possible; a door that reaches the ceiling looks “new” for many more years than a standard 2.10 m door. Make the skirting board either distinct or set flush into the plane of the wall; an undecided skirting board 6–7 cm high is the mark of a period. Do not use the suspended ceiling as an ornament; stepped or curved ceilings with coloured light seeping out of them are among the details that date fastest.

04Material: does it age, or does it wear out?

Materials can be divided into two groups. Some become more beautiful with use: solid wood darkens, brass loses its shine, natural stone wears slightly, leather softens. This is called patina, and it cannot be bought; it comes only with time. The other group is at its best on the first day and only becomes worse from that day on: a cabinet door whose surface layer peels, plastic that yellows, a glossy surface that scratches.

Three practical rules follow from this.

Let the material look like what it is. Wood-effect tiles, marble-patterned laminate and metal-effect plastic are imitations, and an imitation depends on the fashion of the thing it imitates. If the budget does not stretch to real marble, choose an honest material that goes by its own name instead of imitation marble: a plain tile, a good composite, a painted surface.

A matt, textured surface lasts longer than a glossy one. A glossy surface shows every scratch and every fingerprint, and it belongs to one period’s idea of “luxury”. A matt surface hides flaws.

Use few kinds. Three main materials are usually enough in a space: one floor, one wood, one stone or metal. A different floor in every room and a different finish on every cabinet turn the space into a catalogue of materials.

05Colour palette: a calm ground, a free accent

There is an old proportion that works for colour: about 60% of the space is the main colour, 30% the second colour and 10% the accent. In a timeless space this proportion coincides with the layers. The main colour is the walls, the ceiling and the floor; the second colour is the wood, the cabinets and the large furniture; the accent is the fast layer.

None of the colours in the risky group is bad in itself. Avocado green looks perfectly good on a cushion. The risk lies in applying these colours to a large and permanent surface, that is, to a cabinet, a tile or a washbasin.

Turkey has its own date stamps too, and they are read through material more than colour: the Formica kitchen of the 1970s, the timber-panelled wall and moulded plaster ceiling of the 1980s, the burgundy furniture suite and stepped suspended ceiling of the 1990s, the high-gloss lacquered door and very dark timber of the 2000s, the grey laminate of the 2010s and the field of spots in the ceiling. None of them looked wrong on the day it was made; each was “the newest” of its year. Where these materials came from and where they went is the subject of the article on the materials of an era.

A few ways to stay safe with colour:

• Lower the saturation. A greyed version of the same green, closer to earth, lasts much longer than its pure version. Large surfaces in nature are rarely of a pure colour.
• Do not choose a pure white. An off-white with a drop of yellow or grey in it looks warmer and less “freshly painted” than a bluish pure white.
• Warm or cool: keep to one side. Putting a cool grey wall beside warm wood, or a yellowish light beside cool stone, was the most common mistake of the 2010s. When the palette stays at one temperature, unity comes by itself.
• Choose the colour together with the light. The same paint looks different under 2700 K light and under 4000 K light. This is the subject of our article on lighting.
• Use black sparingly and in thin lines. A thin black line, that is, a window frame, the stem of a lamp or a handle, pulls the palette together. A large black surface, on the other hand, brings problems of dust, marks and light.

06Form: a plain line, a familiar geometry

The forms that last in furniture and detail are surprisingly ordinary: the rectangle, the circle, the straight line, a soft chamfer. If you have to mention the year in order to describe a form, as in “the arched niche that everyone is having made at the moment”, that form belongs to the fast layer.

Look at the chairs, lamps and fittings that have been produced without interruption for fifty or sixty years. What they have in common is that they are unassuming. A design that has lasted for a long time is more likely to last in the years ahead than a design that came out last year. This is why, for large furniture and fittings, it is wise to rely on what has been tried.

The same logic applies to detail. A cabinet door with no handle or a very plain one, a concealed hinge, tiles with straight joints, a skirting board that cannot be seen. What these have in common is that they do not tell the person looking at them a year.

07What to have, what to avoid

The last item in the left-hand column is important. A timeless space does not mean a space without personality. A home that is neutral from end to end and carries no trace of anyone resembles a hotel room, and that too is the fashion of a period. A painting, an inherited chest, a kilim brought back from a journey: these tie the space to its owner. Such pieces do not date, because they never belonged to any fashion in the first place.

08The safe zone, decision by decision

09Finally, three questions

When you are making a decision, especially an expensive and permanent one, ask yourself these three questions.

Would I have liked this five years ago too? If the answer is yes, you are very likely to like it five years from now as well. If it looks good only this year, what makes you like it this year may not be the thing itself.

What does it take to change it? If a screwdriver is enough, be bold. If it takes a team and two weeks, stay calm.

Do I want this because of where, and in whose home, I saw it? If you want something that you have seen in three different places in the same month, very soon everyone will have seen it.

A timeless space may not make your guests say “wow” on the first day. But when the same guests come ten years later, they will not be able to tell when the home was done. That is our measure. The other side of the matter, why simplicity does not mean emptiness, is the subject of our article on simplicity and grandeur.