2021 Home Decor Trends for Every Personality (2024)

To the Maximalists

Clean lines are nice, but so too is a space thumping with bright prints, color every which way, and things aplenty. Beabadoobee’s room in London and Dilone’s family home on Long Island express this more-is-more philosophy.

Beabadoobee, London

“I feel like no one knows me as well as my bedroom,” says Philippines-born, London-raised singer-songwriter Beatrice Laus, better known as Beabadoobee (a Finstagram handle that stuckas a stage name). “It’s seen me go through the worst and best times of my life.” It’s also where the 20-year-old singer—who rose to fame on social media—has been holed up, writing new music and pursuing her many other creative outlets. She’s created, in a nook above her bed, a mood board–like gallery wall pinned with pictures of Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro movie posters; elsewhere in the room, she doodled directly on the wall with pastels and paints. “My room is very cluttered, quite messy,” she says, “and that says a lot about how I think—I just have tons of things happening in my brain all the time. With clothes, I get so indecisive that I just throw everything on and end up layering.” Her latest song, “Last Day on Earth,” reflects on all the things she could have done had she known she would spend nearly a year homebound. For now, though, you can find her in her bedroom. —Lilah Ramzi

Dilone, Long Island, New York

“It was so chaotic,” Dilone says of her youth in suburban Long Island. The eighth of 10 children—all of whom still live within a 10-minute drive of one another—the 26-year-old model and actress, born Janiece Altagracia Dilone, moved into her mother’s house last November and ended up staying for months, surrounded on all sides by friends and family. Naturally, the experience was rather nostalgic: when she wasn’t holed up reading somewhere, Dilone could be persuaded to join a raucous round of Phase 10, an old card game—“The family goes insane over it,” she says.The photographs that crowd her in the picture above are the fruits of her mother’s labor. “When my mom starts hanging things up, it’s kind of all over the place, so I took them off the wall and hid them in a room,” Dilone says. Happily, however, the trove was discovered during a house tour before the shoot.—Marley Marius

Grand Scale

A coffee table that takes up half the living room, a towering mirror that almost touches the ceiling—it’s all about thinking big and playing with scale. Fill an oversized tabletop with a collection of tiny curios or place low seating next to a tall bookshelf. Faridah Folawiyo’s family home in Lagos, Nigeria and Kai Avent-deLeon’s Brooklyn space both provide striking examples.

Faridah Folawiyo, Lagos, Nigeria

In more normal times in her home city of Lagos, Folawiyo helps run the restaurant, Nok, at her mother’s concept shop, Alára—a Sir David Adjaye–designed sanctuary of stylish things that somehow feels more like a design museum—though at the moment, Folawiyo describes both Alára and its restaurant as existing in a liminal “half-open, half-closed situation.” Because of the pandemic-related restrictions on business operations and the Nigerian government–mandated curfew launched in response to recent protests against police brutality, Folawiyo has been mostly at home with her parents. The interiors are, of course, good taste personified, owing to the knowing eye of her mother, Reni—but while Folawiyo jokes that she wouldn’t get a vote on any of the decor, her parents do seek out her opinion for art purchases and placements. She is also a freelance art and photography curator, and she recently launched a digital newsletter, SHI. “I felt like I hadn’t been engaging my brain as much as I would’ve liked to,” she says. Arecent edition is dedicated to the Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop. All the while, she’s made it a point to get dressed each day. “In Lagos, we wear these caftans called boubous, but I told myself, actually we’re going to wear real clothes every day; no boubous,” she says. “I’m now known on Instagram for wearing a lot of Pleats Please by Issey Miyake.” But, she assures, it isn’t only for fashion’s sake. “These were just actually my most comfortable clothes during lockdown!”—L.R.

Kai Avent-deLeon, New York

The taste-making founder of Sincerely, Tommy—Brooklyn’s cult-favorite fashion-and-lifestyle boutique—moved into her Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone a few months before the lockdown.(A native of the area, she counts both her mother, Lisa, and grandmother Doreen as neighbors.) By design, the place was already deeply tranquil—Avent-deLeon and her husband, Nate, favored a muted color story inspired by the desert—but what it was missing, she soon determined, was a sense of play. In the backyard, she cleared away shrubs to make the space easier to move around in and, breaking from the elegant restraint of much of the rest of the house, she covered the floor of her family room with pillows. “I wanted it to be a place where we could literally fall out,” she says. And when her two-year-old son, Che, isn’t playing outside, he’s enjoying a new gluten-free confection whipped up by his mother. Among his favorite dishes: a red-lentil pasta with kale and pine-nut pesto. “My son is really picky,” Avent-deLeon says. “I’m constantly trying to find something he’ll like!”—M.M.

The New Romantics

Grandmillienals and antique-minded individuals make up our next group of ladies (Nell Diamond, Guinevere Van Seenus, and Eve Hewson) who gravitate toward moody, meadowy florals and tufted furniture with legs splayed in a charming Victoriana curve. Plates are toile, wallpaper is chinoiserie, and when in doubt, throw in a chintz.

Nell Diamond, New York

This may be little surprise, but the founder of Hill House Home—a collection of bedding, linens, and house-centric fashions, including a stylish and sleepable Nap Dress—considers herself a homebody. “It’s a sacred space for me,” Diamond says, speaking from her West Village town house, which has seen some recent additions: In October, she welcomed twins Willow and Sebastian to the family, giving siblings to her son Henry. “When their rocking chair was delivered,” she recalls of her time in lockdown, “it was the first time in five months that people not related to me had been in my home.” To follow Diamond on Instagram is to enroll in Marketing to Millennials 101—her loyal followers give Diamond direct feedback on fit and fabric (and stay for videos of Henry asleep in the back seat with the twins). In short, there’s nothing not to like. Next up: her first tabletop collection, with everything conceived and executed from home. “It’s allowed me to show up for both the babies and my work in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to if I had been going back to an office,” says Diamond, who doesn’t shy away from the fact that, throughout, she’s almost exclusively worn her Nap Dresses. “What can I say?” she asks. “I’ve just never been a pants person.”—L.R.

Eve Hewson, Dublin

Last spring, upon seeing reports that flights between the U.S. and U.K. could potentially halt, Hewson immediately decamped from her apartment in Brooklyn (where she’d been living since 2014) back to Dublin, where she grew up. “I packed one suitcase with one pair of sweatpants and flew home to my family,” she says. Upon arrival, she slowed down, spending a stretch of time sleeping in her childhood bedroom and streaming shows with her parents (Bono and Ali Hewson) and her three siblings—everything from Normal People (“cried my eyes out”) to Tiger King (“I think everybody went through that”). More recently, she’s crossed Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain off her reading list. “I also read [A.J. Finn’s] The Woman in the Window, like right at the beginning of the pandemic, which was weird,” she says. “It’s about this woman who’s stuck in her house and she’s agoraphobic, so that was sort of a beautiful meta experience.”

After her time at home, Hewson relocated to London— “I’m just Airbnb-ing every month, winging it with no plan”—where she’s about to begin her next project. (The actor can currently been seen in Netflix’s steely psychological thriller Behind Her Eyes and as the intrepid heroine at the heart of a New Zealand Gold Rush–era murder-mystery in Starz’s The Luminaries.) But she’s come to miss her friends in New York and getting dressed up for no reason. “I have fantasy outfits for whenever I’m going to be able to wear them—I bought these Rick Owens giant platform boots last fall when I thought that this would be over soon, and they’re just a bit too much to wear, you know, to Whole Foods, so they’ve been sitting there in my bedroom just looking at me,” she says. “I’m dying to wear them.”­—L.R.

Guinevere van Seenus, New York

“It’s a piecemeal of life experiences,” says van Seenus of the collection of objects—curios from Moroccan holidays, furniture she inherited from her Dutch grandmother—with which the well-traveled model has filled her Williamsburg apartment. She describes her peripatetic pre-COVID pace as both “a blessing and a curse”—and the contrast with her current at-home life couldn’t be greater: These days, van Seenus (with the help of her partner, Beau Friedlander) looks aftera herd of cats and dogs (her Chihuahua-corgi mix, Finn, gets his Vogue debut here) and has just set up an irrigation system in her Brooklyn terrace and rooftop, where she grows thyme, rosemary, basil, lemon balm for tea, and mint. (“Dill I’m not great at yet, and cilantro I don’t seem to be able to get the hang of.”) She’s been making jewelry, including elaborate woven chain-mail-like headpieces of metal and semiprecious stones, and more recently has begun flipping the script as a photographer—she’s shot for a handful of magazines, including German Vogue. Bare-bones crews on socially distanced sets require van Seenus to serve as her own glam squad. “I took makeup—and prosthetics—at school,” she says by way of explanation. But of course.—L.R.

The Great Indoors

One of 2021’s home decor trends is Biophilic design (things that mimic nature) and it comes into play with the hand-woven Guatemalan baskets, the canopy of greenery, and the endless views in the abodes of Annabelle Hickson, Meredith Hagner & Wyatt Russell, and Emilie Ghilaga. Also think Sissel rugs, knotty pine furniture, and an ample dose of natural light.

Annabelle Hickson & Family, Dumaresq Valley, Australia

“I started off kind of pretending that I lived in England—you know, with roses and those kinds of traditional plants,” says writer and photographer Hickson of her garden. “But I’ve come to accept that where I live is very different from England.” Where she lives—with her husband, Ed, and their three children, Daisy, 12, Tom, 10, and Harriet, 8—is a weatherboard farmhouse on a pecan farm in the Dumaresq Valley on the New South Wales–Queensland border. A dozen years into her country life after relocating from Sydney, Hickson has not only embraced the tempestuous weather (“It’s drought and then flooding rain”) but in 2020, she launched Galah, a magazine dedicated to rural Australia. “I’ve had quite a productive kind of lockdown,” she says. In the garden, she’s planted big, soft grasses like miscanthus, while elsewhere branches pruned from a Chinese elm tree end up above the kitchen table in a lush canopy installation that lends a woodsy whimsy to the room. Little Harriet feels right at home. “She thinks it’s all quite normal,” says Hickson, “eating your dinner with fallen leaves underfoot.”—L.R.

Meredith Hagner & Wyatt Russell, Los Angeles

“People assume all the time: Your husband got the van, and he’s dragging you along,” says Hagner. Russell chimes in: “It’s the opposite—though I wouldn’t call it dragging me along, either.” She grew up between Houston and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, backpacking with her father, including a traverse through the Rockies and four weeks on the Appalachian Trail. He spent a youth mostly outdoors at the Colorado ranch belonging to his parents (Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn). In 2018, the couple, both actors, purchased a Mercedes Sprinter van retrofitted with a Scandi-style blond-wood interior and equipped with all the trimmings—stovetop, dining banquette, modular seating, and sleeping areas—for #vanlife. “Vacations were always a little difficult because we have to plan last-minute because of our jobs,” explains Russell, who currently stars in the Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Now they head off for monthlong treks at the drop of a hat, spending days behind the wheel and nights beneath the stars in Shasta National Forest or Glacier National Park. “It’s funny because it can look so romantic sometimes,” Hagner says, “but more often than not you’re in a timed shower in a rest stop, laughing because you didn’t get enough quarters and the water stops while your hair’s still covered in soap.” The arrival of a baby, though—little Buddy Prine Russell was born shortly after this shoot—necessitates bigger quarters. “I mean, as soon as we can get our new van constructed, we’re going to be on the road with him,” says Hagner. “That’ll be a whole new set of adventures.”—L.R.

Emilie Ghilaga & Trevor Carlisle, Nosara, Costa Rica

Ghilaga is not an impulsive person: A career spent meticulously selecting objects—first as a buyer at Moda Operandi, now at Over The Moon—instilled in her a sense of thoughtfulness when it came to the things she brought into her life. “Ispent all this time thinking about what I wanted my home to be like,” she says, “from the types of blankets on my bed to the soap dish I wanted to use.” But within a week of setting foot in Costa Rica for the first time, in the winter of 2017, she decided to buy a three-acre piece of undeveloped land in Nosara—a beach bohemia on the Western coast of the country that has long lured both yogis and surfers. “When you’re driving on the roads, you’ll see a Costa Rican cowboy on a horse; an ATV with a guy with a scarf on his face; a tuk-tuk —the local taxi; a family in a cool pickup truck with surfboards coming out,” she says. “It’s a microcosm and harmony of lots of different cultures and people.”

Several decades spent in Manhattan (Ghilaga was born and raised on the Upper East Side) solidified her longing for proper greenery, and at the time of her trip she was already looking at properties in upstate New York and Long Island. Though when she describes what she felt when she toured a patch of mountain land that “felt like the Hollywood Hills in the 1930s, when not many people were there yet,” she uses the word kismet. Three years later, Ghilaga is well on her way to realizing a dream.

Life in Nosara, though, means submitting to its limitations. She’s learned to deal with the heat by wearing Eres swimsuits, which she likes to pair with men’s boxer shorts or Indian block-printed pareos. (“I’m nine degrees from the Equator,” she says, “so the heat is real.”) She’s weathered the rainy season—three months when a wet forecast is almost guaranteed—and has embraced the yearlong 5:30p.m. sunset. Right about when she’d be having dinner in New York, she’s already asleep in Costa Rica. “The environment rules you, essentially,” she says. “You have to respect that—and there’s no problem respecting that, because it gives you a great quality of life.”—L.R.

Modern Family Room

How do you fill a space that’s full of kids? With metallic accents, graphic patterns, and a bit of whimsy. In Los Angeles, Ziggy Marley goes for the gold, Gary Clark Jr. and Nicole Trunfio evoke the bohemian in Texas’s Hill Country, and Ashley Graham’s Brooklyn nursery is as playful as it is pleasant to look at.

Ziggy & Family, Los Angeles

It took the disruptive force of stay-at-home orders forthe musicianZiggy Marley and his wife, Orly Marley, to revamp the Toluca Lake homethat they share with their children Judah, Gideon, Abraham, and Isaiah. “We always set out to have this cozy, beautiful environment, but the lockdown is what really got us to tighten everything up,” says Orly.(Formerly a vice president at William Morris Agency, she now heads Ziggy’s record label.)They fitted the playroom with custom cabinetry and racks for the kids’ guitars—like their dad and his own dad, Bob Marley, they know their way around a melody—and scattered the floors with antique rugs, among other thoughtful tweaks. But the family also spends a great deal of time outdoors— something their house is well suited for. “Every single nook and cranny opens to the backyard,” Orly says, “and there are French doors into every part of the house.” As the group’s de facto “activities director,” Ziggy oversees daily outdoor workouts. As he puts it: “I’m the outside guy, [Orly’s] the inside guy.”—M.M.

Gary Clark Jr., Nicole Trunfio & Family, Texas Hill Country

Some 30 miles outside Austin, musician Gary Clark Jr., his wife, the designer and model Nicole Trunfio, and their family live on a ranch so remote that they can’t receive deliveries there. “It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere,” Trunfio says—and that’s exactly the point. For both Clark, who was born and raised in Texas, and Trunfio, who hails from the Australian countryside, the place offers a welcome change of pace from their on-the-go lifestyle. “Our home is not meant to show off,” Trunfio says. “It’s a place where we can be in our own element and have our own oasis.” When the five of them are there together—the couple’s third child, Ella, was born last February—dance parties are a popular activity, as are swimming, barbecuing, bird-watching, and taking long drives together in their truck. “Simple stuff,” Trunfio says.—M.M.

Ashley Graham, New York

“It’s the maternity leave I never thought I would have,” says Graham, relishing the silver lining of those dark pandemic clouds that populated skies shortly after the birth—at home in her Brooklyn apartment—of her son, Isaac, last January. Since, it’s been quite a lengthy, uninterrupted stretch of family time. “I always joke: I’ll feel really bad for the second kid because Isaac got so much attention.” Graham, though, hasn’t actually stopped working—hosting the podcast Pretty Big Deal, making social-media content, shooting editorial imagery. “Who am I not Zooming with these days?” she says, laughing. Multitasking comes into play here—she may very well be breastfeeding while on a call. “Sometimes people don’t know, because I can just keep the camera up.” When he’s not bonding with Isaac, Ervin, a cinematographer, has been working as well, even shooting magazine covers of Graham—“He knows my best angles,” Graham says. A glam room sees multiple functions—as an office, a podcast-recording room—and the kitchen is getting more use than usual. “I am going to flex for a second: I make the best scones in the world,” she says.—L.R.

Edited by: Willow Lindley