Interiors
Style Sourcebook’s 2026 Interior Design Trends Predictions
As we look ahead to 2026, the Style Sourcebook team has been watching your mood boards, exploring new collections, listening to brand partners, and absorbing all the little shifts happening across the design world. One thing is clear: interiors are becoming more emotional, more tactile, and more intimately connected to how we live.
Next year’s homes won’t just be well-styled, but there’ll be a focus on feeling. They’re the places where we recharge, create, retreat, reconnect, and express ourselves. For designers and renovators, this next year promises exciting opportunities to blend texture, colour, materiality, and atmosphere in ways that feel personal, intentional, and, above all, inspiring. This shift is shaping the trends we’re seeing for 2026.
So, let’s dive into the themes, colours, and ideas set to inspire your next projects and spark a new era of imaginative interiors.
Style Sourcebook Partner Forecasts
Dulux Colour Forecast 2026
Earlier this year, we saw the launch of Dulux Colour Forecast 2026. Dulux invites us to step into three distinct worlds of colour, each born from the rhythm of today’s shifting landscape: Ethereal, Elemental and Evoke. Specifically, they involve calming and connecting colours in response to continued global uncertainty and digital fatigue. power to lift spirits, offer emotional reassurance, and bring a sense of calm into our homes. These calming, connecting colour palettes fit the 2026 interior design themes of focusing on feeling, and shape the design of future mood boards.
Styling: Bree Banfield | Photographer: Lisa Cohen
Styling: Bree Banfield | Photographer: Lisa Cohen
James Hardie Modern Homes Forecast
James Hardie’s Modern Home Forecast 2025 looks beyond surface-level trends to explore how design can adapt to real life. The 2025 forecast draws on eight design styles that reflect the diverse ways Australians want to live: Box Modern, Modern Farmhouse, Modern Heritage, Barn, Japandi, Modern Coastal, Mid-Century Modern, and newcomer Modern Classical. Modern Classical has a blend of neoclassical formality and Mediterranean warmth, offering a sense of timelessness in uncertain times, and this is something we believe will also be popular in 2026.
“The insights in the James Hardie Modern Homes Forecast indicate Australians are moving towards homes that play a role in restoring wellbeing, offer spaces for creativity and self-expression, and are built for resilience and longevity in the climate crisis. In 2025, we see a revolutionary step towards the future of home design, as we make a shift towards flexible homes that serve more purposes and suit a range of budgets.”
Neale Whitaker, Design Expert
Image Credit: James Hardie
GlobeWest Collections 2026
GlobeWest is guiding us into a year of inviting comfort. Think of sculptural shapes you can curl into and tactile fabrics. Not to mention palettes that feel like being wrapped in a favourite throw. These pieces will shape the sensory, soulful interiors as we make our way into 2026.
Image Credit: GlobeWest
Image Credit: GlobeWest
Biophilic design
As a continued trend in the past few years, biophilic design has been longstanding and focuses on bringing the outside in. In 2026, we predict that it will move beyond potted plants and into full sensory immersion. 2026 interiors tap into natural rhythms like sunlight, shadow, organic shapes, and grounding materials. Designers and renovators can explore stone textures, curved silhouettes inspired by riverbeds, and palettes that echo forests and coastlines. 2026 is about nature, not just being a theme, but also an experience in the home.
Wallpaper
2025 was all about minimalism and neutral palettes, and whilst 2026 foreshadows a lot of that too, wallpaper helps to create an immersive home with finer details. 2026 is all about interiors that evoke emotion, and murals do exactly that. Whether it’s a misty landscape across a bedroom wall or a statement abstract behind a dining table, mural wallpapers instantly transform a space into a scene. Wallpaper would be perfect for: feature walls, entryways, and dining rooms.
Image Credit: Urban Road
Image Credit: Urban Road
Dark Woods
This year, we’ve all seen the popularity of Mocha Mousse, and here at Style Sourcebook, we’ve noticed the influx of Mocha Mousse mood boards. They don’t seem to be stopping, and we’re not complaining. We think that this colour palette will follow through to 2026, and especially manifest itself in darker woods like walnut and chocolate hues.
Whether in cabinetry, flooring, or furniture, deep timber tones bring a sense of permanence, grounding, and sophistication to spaces. Paired with lighter textiles, metal accents, or muted colour palettes, dark woods balance modernity with tradition, adding warmth and structure to interiors without overpowering them. Pantone’s ‘Cloud Dancer’ as the Colour of the Year 2026 is a perfect match for this contrast. For designers, it’s an invitation to explore layering, contrasting dark grains with soft neutrals, soft metals, or greenery for a nuanced and inviting result.
Photographer: Alyne Media | Design: Mulberry Manor
Photographer: Grace Picot | Design: Form Interiors Group
Moody Colour Palettes
2025 has embraced soft, neutral colour palettes, but 2026 is taking a bolder turn with the emerging rise of moody, atmospheric colour palettes. Next year, we predict that designers and renovators will be embracing colours that move, like olive smoke, plum dusk, ocean depths, and espresso brown. Rather than decorating rooms, moody palettes set moods: introspective, luxurious, cocooning. Kitchens feel richer, bedrooms feel more intimate, and living rooms feel cinematic. They invite you into a space and wrap you in atmosphere.
“The fig and plum tones were a deliberate direction to sit alongside contemporary palettes featuring warm chocolate-toned timbers and brown toned schemes. The patterning too plays a big part in this range, with traditional, ambient, sculptural and simplified patterns to allow the range to have something for everyone.”
Darren Palmer, Interior Designer and TV Personality
Styling: Bree Banfield | Photographer: Lisa Cohen
Image Credit: Unitex Rugs
Japandi and Minimalism
Japandi evolves into a softer, more expressive version of itself. Clean lines remain, but textures like cottons, linens, raw woods, and handmade ceramics are the centre of this design style. With Pantone naming Cloud Dancer the Colour of the Year 2026, this reinforces the idea of refined minimalism and crisp, clean interiors, with this colour softening silhouettes and enhancing natural textures. It’s minimalism that’s warm, and we predict that these styles will continue to shape how we create calming yet characterful spaces in 2026.
Image Credit: Unitex Rugs
Image Credit: Unitex Rugs
Colour Drenching
We saw this trend begin this year, and we predict that it will become more widespread next year. Colour drenching is set to be a trend of 2026, wrapping entire rooms like walls, trims, and ceilings in one cohesive colour. Why? Because it transforms a space into a feeling: a sage-green study that calms the mind, a terracotta dining room that encourages connection, a lavender bedroom that melts stress away. This trend reflects the feeling that one colour, used well, can say everything.
Design: House of Pez. Photography: Kristian Van Der Beek
Design: Mulberry Manor. Photography: Villa Styling
Colour Palettes
Keeping in mind biophilic Design, moody colour palettes, and the Dulux Colour Forecast 2026, these tones all symbolise the home becoming immersive and comforting as a wellness space. What are some examples of colour palettes that will align with 2026 trends?
Bathrooms: Misty greens, sage washes, and soft botanicals that ground and soothe.
Kitchens: Warm terracotta, earthy clays, dark woods and sunset-toffee tones that make the heart of the home feel even warmer.
Bedrooms: Silky beiges, oatmilk neutrals, Pantone’s Cloud Dancer and buttery creams that create cloudlike calm.
Designing in 2026
As we step into 2026, interiors are no longer just about aesthetics, but they’re about feeling, living, and experiencing a space fully. From moody colour palettes and rich dark woods to expressive wallpapers, soft minimalism, and liveable luxury, next year’s trends are guiding designers and renovators toward spaces that are personal, layered, and intentional.
For your mood boards and projects, this means embracing texture, atmosphere, and emotion, allowing every choice, from colour to material, to tell a story. We can’t wait to see your 2026 mood boards!
Create a mood board to explore these trends and use Project Studio to bring your designs to life.
