Decorating Mistakes That Date Your Home

Decorating Mistakes That Date Your Home

IF YOU TOOK the advice of 1990s interior-design TV shows and painted yourself an “accent wall,” you might want to get out the rollers and brushes—at least according to roughly 10% of the 50-odd designers we surveyed about passe decorating trends, the sort of thing that makes an interior look sadly long in the tooth.

Nina Magon, of Houston’s Contour Interior Design, noted that accent walls—a strategy originally hyped as high-impact, low-cost—don’t fool anyone. “It gives the impression the budget could not complete the design intent and looks unfinished,” she said. New York designer Richard Rabel added that you can get the same vaunted pop-of-color effect in less cobwebby ways with “rugs, pillows, window treatments and art.”

Here, a list of several other once-sound design decisions that have not aged well, plus advice on how to bring tired rooms into the third millennium.