If there are any certainties as we embark on a new year of design, here’s one: More than a few homeowners sitting on historically low interest rates will hunker down and renovate or remodel instead of moving. So when we compiled our list of what’s hot for 2025, we decided to take the long view. No viral fads or disposable trends but rather measured advice about how to design a home you’ll be happy in for years, if not decades. And that starts with worrying less about creating an Instagram-ready showpiece and more about figuring out what you and your family need for the foreseeable future. That can be a hard question to parse, but these ideas should nevertheless generate some design magic in 2025.
Finding Value in Vintage
The rise in shipping costs and a recent spike in inflation have strained some renovation budgets. For Maria Crosby Pollard of Alexandria’s Crosby Designs, one challenge has been how to do more with less. When she recently overhauled a repeat client’s living room, she managed to reuse the old sofa, sending it to an upholsterer who added an extra three feet so it would fit in the reconfigured space. She has also established a robust network of vintage-furniture dealers, whom she relied on during the pandemic when supply chains were snarled and who remain a go-to resource. For a client who loves antique beds, she sourced a $200 vintage frame that she upcycled with some paint, upholstery, and a box spring. “We’re always trying to figure out ways to be thoughtful about the quality of the things we can get while also being mindful of our client’s budget,” Pollard says.
The Return of the Dining Room
Open floor plans and island seating in the kitchen helped spell the demise of a separate room where a family could gather for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. But no longer. “People are wanting their formal dining rooms back,” says Sondra Zabroske, an architect with DC’s Four Brothers Design + Build. With a caveat, she says: Her clients ask for larger openings to the kitchen—maybe French doors that can help lessen the separation. Zabroske dubs it a “hybrid” model.
Farm-to-Shelter Design
President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs may well affect the cost and availability of building materials—steel, drywall, lumber. Not to mention that many traditional building supplies either off-gas or contribute to our carbon footprint. Enter Jack Becker and Andrew Linn, who have built their DC architecture practice, BLDUS, around the use of materials that can be obtained regionally and are eco-friendly: sheep’s wool or hemp as insulation; BamCore panels made of bamboo as an energy-efficient framing system; wood, bark, and stone from companies and quarries in nearby states as cladding or interior detailing. Linn even used the mulberry trees from the site to build his house in an alley lot on Capitol Hill. Says Becker: “We’ve tried to create an architecture that relates to our place and time.”
The partners call it “farm to shelter,” and it’s a soothing palette of natural materials that rejects the Home Depot–fication of housebuilding. At minimum, homeowners should give careful thought to the environmental impact of the materials they’re selecting for a project. “The spaces we live in deserve the same care and attention as the food we eat and the clothes we put on our bodies,” says Linn. “We’re hoping that we’re very boring and conventional in ten or 20 years, because other firms are doing this, too.”
A Quiet Modernism
When families holed up during Covid, they became hyper-aware of how their houses functioned (or didn’t). Were there places where they could work, where the kids could play, where they could enjoy some privacy? Post-pandemic, those concerns remain paramount.
For DC architect Colleen Healey, the question of the moment is how to balance zones of work, play, and refuge, ensuring there’s sufficient sound-proofing even as she designs a beautiful space. The result, for her, is a softer brand of modernism: textured wall coverings made of cork or felt, inlaid rugs, and, for a Logan Circle project, a thin crown molding to lessen the transition between wall and ceiling—the first time she’s ever used molding. And, more pragmatically, the addition of insulation between floor joists, for instance.
Given the prevailing political winds, she has a prediction: “I’m wondering if more people will think about investing in art because they need something to resonate with or emotionally connect with.”
Slow Design
We live in an age of immediacy: The latest design trend comes into vogue and in a flash it trickles down into the mainstream. What retailer doesn’t have some take on Danish Modern or midcentury furniture? But with that accessibility has come a plethora of design clichés.
“What I’m seeing happening in my world is that it’s not enough to curate these iconic new modern pieces for clients, because they’re sensitive to the fact that many of these designs can be purchased in a lot of places,” says Georgetown interior designer Thomas Pheasant. The question for him: “What can I design that will be something special for that person?” Pheasant took a recent pair of young clients on a tour of galleries and boutiques in Paris. They returned home with a painting—and a story they could tell about the design of their new space.
Set aside the RH catalogs, in other words, and take the time to uncover an artist or artisan whose work has escaped mass production (and reproduction). On a recent project, for instance, Pheasant sourced a custom chandelier from a small workshop in Florence. “It’s hard to raise your voice in a loud world,” he says, referring to the sea of images floating online. But slow design has a better chance of rising above.
Embrace Uncertainty
As tempting as it is to pursue a carbon copy of a staged photo on Instagram or in a shelter magazine, Catherine Fowlkes of DC’s Fowlkes Studio has some advice: Trust the process. Let the bones of your house or perhaps some heirloom furniture dictate your space’s design. “We don’t really know where it’s going to end up,” she says of her typical project. “But that’s the exciting part. Once we start chipping away at it, it becomes clearer.”
For a recent project with a client who had more subversive tastes, the firm decided that instead of covering a structural steel beam in the ceiling, they would drop the piece down and paint it. And they plastered an adjoining wall to make it look like a relic they had uncovered as they demoed the interior. The ideas “came from [the client’s] sensibility—a little more rock-and-roll,” Fowlkes says.
That advice carries over to more mundane choices, such as a paint color for a room or a sample for a window frame. Sometimes the option you like least in the abstract works best in context.
Finding Comfort in Color
Pantone chose Mocha Mousse, a warm brown reminiscent of chocolate or coffee, as its color of the year for 2025. Laurie Pressman, a vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, says the selection reflects a desire for “comfort and harmony” and an “earthy refinement” that helps align us with the natural world. At the same time, she says, Mocha Mousse evokes a “thoughtful indulgence.” All of which suggests home design that generates a grounded yet luxe feeling and a cocoon-like embrace in turbulent times.
This article appears in the January 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
