A small atelier like ours is, in a quiet way, a leading indicator. The brief lands in our inbox six to nine months before the piece is delivered — and the piece is delivered six to twelve months before it shows up on Instagram. By the time a trend is named in a magazine, we have already built fifty examples of it.
With that caveat, here are six things we have noticed in the briefs that have arrived between October 2025 and May 2026.
1. The buttoned headboard is back
For the better part of a decade, the dominant request for bedroom commissions was a clean fluted or slat-back headboard — minimalist, low-contrast, often in a pale linen. Since September we have been quoting a startling number of deep-buttoned, tall headboards in mid-tone leathers and saturated wools. The detail that gives it away as a 2026 piece rather than a 1996 one is the proportion — taller, wider, with the buttoning falling on a denser grid.
2. The slow death of fast-fashion sofas
A noticeable number of new clients are arriving with a story that goes: “We bought a sofa from [large international retailer] four years ago, it sagged within eighteen months, we cannot find anyone to fix it because the frame is staples-and-cardboard, please build us something that will not have to be replaced.” The willingness to spend properly on a single, durable piece — rather than rotating fast-fashion furniture every few years — is the single biggest shift we have seen in the brief pattern.
3. Mid-tone timbers, fewer high-contrast pieces
For most of the last decade, the dominant request was either very pale (whitewashed oak, blonde ash) or very dark (smoked oak, black-stained walnut). 2026 briefs are gravitating to mid-tone honeyed timbers — honey-stained nyatoh, hand-rubbed teak, golden-brown reclaimed cengal. The piece reads warmer in photographs but, more importantly, ages more gracefully than the high-contrast extremes.
4. Performance fabrics on heirloom pieces
It used to be that performance fabrics — the Sunbrella class — were specified for outdoor furniture and busy family rooms. We are now seeing them specified for the “forever” pieces too. The texture and drape have caught up, and clients are valuing the practical resilience over the perceived “naturalness” of a traditional weave. We think this trend has legs.
5. Larger sofas, smaller coffee tables
A small shift but a consistent one. Sofa briefs are getting deeper (2.4m-plus is now the common request, where 2.2m used to be) while coffee tables are getting smaller and lighter — often a single circular nest of two or three rather than a slab. The interpretation we offer is that families are leaning into the sofa as the genuine centre of the living room, and treating the coffee table as a movable accent.
6. The return of the side chair
The accent armchair — the wing-back, the tub-back, the reading chair — is back in the brief in a way it has not been since about 2014. Often paired with a small ottoman, often specified in a quite distinct fabric from the sofa. We read this as a corrective to the modular-everything trend of the last several years: clients are wanting individual pieces that hold their own visual weight, rather than a single sectional that swallows the room.
A short conclusion
None of this is a forecast. It is a description of what we are quoting in real time. The throughline, if there is one, is that 2026 buyers are willing to specify carefully and spend properly on pieces that will outlast a renovation. The disposable era of furniture, at least at the bespoke end of the market, appears to be quietly winding down.
If any of the above sounds like a piece you would like to commission, we are open Monday to Saturday and the swatch library is properly stocked.