I am going to describe a home that you may not have been inside, but which you definitely already know. The home is an apartment, possibly a loft, or at least in the style thereof. The lighting leans orange, most likely thanks to a mushroom-shaped lamp, but sometimes a simple orange orb, often both. There are slouchy modular Togo sofas and nearly always an old record player. The bed sheets are artfully rumpled, and everything is dark wood and low-slung. There are candle holders, in strange colours and wiggly shapes, and a few magazines – three or four, perhaps? – arranged beneath a glass coffee table. I’m talking, of course, about the new influencer home. Mid-century modern and loft-style, it’s the interior design trend which has become more than that: it’s everywhere.
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This isn’t the first time that a generation appears to be aspiring to an identikit home. Before the pandemic, you may remember the All Grey Everything homes of Instagram influencers like Molly-Mae Hague and cleaning guru Mrs Hinch. In a 2020 piece for Vice, writer Lauren O’Neill described the look as, “silvery furnishings with smooth glass or marble surfaces; soft, velvety textures; and a sort of pillowing effect on upholstery”. A few years back, I remember very minimalist Scandinavian-style interiors leading the way, with the odd pop of primary colour (think: everything from furniture shop HAY). And a few years before that, cutesy pastel colours and foam frame mirrors were a thing (thank god they are no longer).
But the aforementioned mid-century modern-style (I’m going to call it the “cool loft”) that we’re seeing so much of on TikTok – more so than on Instagram, perhaps – feels even more hyper-specific and homogeneous. Everyone has a fiddle-leaf fig plant. Bed frames are now non-existent. And being aware of it doesn’t make one immune; the other day, I found myself calculating how long it’d take me to save up for a black vintage Togo sofa (a good few months, at least). TikTok has infiltrated our design choices to such a degree that we’re not just after the same aesthetic anymore, but the exact same objects.
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It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why our homes (or our “fantasy homes”) are blending into one another. It’s for the same reason that so many people dress the same (read this excellent deep dive from Julia Hobbs, who spoke to everyone from tech industry insiders to cultural critics about how TikTok’s algorithm has flattened our style for British Vogue’s June 2024 issue). “It’s like the stock market,” Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, explained to Hobbs over Zoom. “You want to put your money in the latest hot thing as it goes up, then you want to cash out before it gets too cringy.” Right now, mushroom lamps are hot. In a few weeks, they might be cringe. This is down to us being funnelled through the same, or similar, algorithms.
This way of consuming interiors – constantly, on our phones, often directly in our bedrooms where we can look up and compare to real life – has sped trends up exponentially. In a 2018 piece for Fast Company on how Instagram reshaped design, TM Brown wrote that “trends that were formerly measured in decades now change with the seasons, and that acceleration has created an aesthetic tinged with circular logic: People like the things they see on Instagram, and they’re on Instagram because people like them.” The same reasoning can be applied to the prolificacy of the “cool loft”. The cool loft looks good on TikTok, so people copy it. People copy it, because it looks good on TikTok. And so on.
That said, I do think there’s something about mid-century modern design specifically which seems to have us all in a chokehold (in a similar vein to, say, the ’90s never going out of style). While exact objects – like geometrical-patterned throws and rugs – might come and go, the actual influence of mid-century modern is unlikely to drop off anytime soon. “While most design trends are cyclical, it’s actually quite incredible that a movement that began in the mid-1940s – with influences in Europe dating back to even earlier in the 20th century – feels just as relatable and appealing today,” wrote Catherine Dash for Vogue last year, “and has never really gone out of favour.”
Though I am personally starting to tire of this look (if I see another orange glowing orb I’m actually going to scream), I hope it doesn’t disappear entirely. And it’s way cooler and more lively than the muted millennial grey of yesteryear. And, hey, you really can’t ever go wrong with a glass coffee table, or indeed a slouchy ’70s-style sofa. That said, a bit of individuation would be nice. Enough with the mushroom lamps already.
