Modern Interior Design in 2009
May 1, 2026
Designer Daryl Carter in Metropolitan Home
So what’s modern now?
More folks are living in smaller spaces and have fewer resources to allocate toward furnishing their homes. So I think that the return to simpler lines in furniture and window treatments is a natural reaction to this shift. Rooms and furniture have to serve multiple functions. When open floor plans feature views from the kitchen, across the dining area, to the living room, the interior furnishings have to support a unified scheme. TVs are thinner, laptops are lighter and printers are cordless. Scanning documents to flash drives means we can give up the file cabinets (at least some of them) and our office is wherever we open the laptop be it the dining room or bedroom. Suddenly the built- in home office seems unnecessarily permanent, and indeed few buyers will repay you for the custom site-built bookcases or media units which were so carefully designed to store your Beta, VHS, CD, Blue Ray discs…..You must assume and design around constant technological change. Elaborate layered paint finishes are giving way to blocks of solid color on a single wall or in the whole room. Lamps and their shades are less detailed, and the fabrics and floor coverings appear to have been designed on the computer with simple repetitive geometry. And we’re trying to recycle, and use green materials, and consume less energy, and……………..
photo from Metropolitan Home
So, here is a list of themes which I think represent what modern interior design looks like today. None of these ideas is particularly ground breaking, but used in combination should create an interior which should last well into the next decade.
1. Skirtless sofas and chairs. And sofas with a single seat cushion.
2. Classic mid century pieces mixed with some hand made tables, boxes or accessories.
3. Casement curtains in natural fibers mounted with streamlined hardware. Curtains clear the windows and may cover the entire window wall.
4. Lamps in solid color ceramic glazes, clear glass or marble with drum and empire lampshades.
5. A pair of hefty buffet lamps.
6. Dining room furniture where the table is distinctively different from the chairs, which are a mix of a couple of styles. Thus it appears that there are some inherited or flea market finds, which are accompanied by more fully upholstered (comfortable) chairs.
7. Crewel fabric and other hand guided, machine embroidered fabrics. Many are imported from India.
8. Judicious use of large scaled wallpaper patterns and use of natural textured wallpapers like grass cloth and linen.
9. Using fewer but larger scaled pieces of art and/or sculpture. Pillows as art using hand made techniques such as applique, needlepoint and crewel embroidery.
10. Figuring out a way to repaint, remake, recover, cut down and embellish the furniture and draperies that you already have, because frugality is modern now.
Sheer curtain wall by Ravi Design drapery workroom
Geneva Collection from Donghia, Inc.
Osborne and Little wallpaper
From Elle Decor
needlework kits from Ehrhan Tapestry
And another kit from Ehrman
LA designer Peter Dunham in Elle Decor
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