Highly irregular: five interiors trends for 2024

Forget the rigour of minimalism and the neat details of Scandinavian modern. The latest stylish interiors are shunning uniformity to embrace wonky shapes and wobbly lines. Designers are celebrating the irregularity of the hand finished, unrefined edges and joins that are intentionally visible to the eye.

But unlike wabi-sabi, the Japanese celebration of an object’s flaws, there’s purpose to this imperfection. It is a kind of curated inconsistency that works best when styled against an opposing polished surface or a poker-straight line. We’ve selected five of the hottest examples. 

Free-form rugs
Over-dyeing, the use of natural fibres and handmade Berber weaves are all rug treatments guaranteed to bring characterful irregularity to your environment, but the latest way to stir things up underfoot is to choose a free-form shape. At Nodus, Sam Baron gives us organic realism with a piece designed to look like a cluster of leaves. There are punched-out holes and beautiful asymmetry in the rugs of French designer Garance Vallée for Nordic Knots, while unusual shapes and jagged edges are the order of the day at CC-Tapis.

Raw edges
A touch of the Flintstones is creeping into bathrooms, with the smooth surfaces of gloss tiles contrasted with hand-hewn stone basins. They feature in interior designs by LA’s Proem Studio and London’s Angus Reid and Holloway Li, who recently installed an eye-catching piece in a Chelsea villa.

“The bathroom unit has a rough underside with a polished front,” explains Alex Holloway. “The contrast of rough, ‘imperfect’ finishes against the smooth helps the piece to feel sculpted, as if the entire unit had been chiselled out of a single block.” Antonio Lupi’s Controverso freestanding basin is a perfect expression of the hand-hewn trend. It begins as a machined cube of marble layers that is then chipped away to create a perfectly imperfect silhouette.

The human touch
Hand-carved and hammered materials are a textural trend bringing the character of human touch into interiors. A chiselled surface is a favoured motif of Zanat, a Bosnian furniture brand reviving local wood-carving techniques. The Porto-based Philipp Grundhöfer’s skilled craftsmanship is apparent in the Artesão side table by Origin Made, which contrasts sculptural asymmetry with a smooth top. And Superfront’s Bruta handle by Raw Edges introduces hand-shaped detail to clean, architectural cabinetry.

Wonky homewares
Jochen Holz and Miranda Keyes both focus on hand-blown glassware, with Holz’s elegant, colourful pieces and Keyes’s fluid drinking glasses with ball-knopped stems looking utterly wonky. It’s the same for Michael Schoner’s meandering cutlery handles and James Shaw’s irregularly shaped Confusion Spoons – homewares are all at sea right now.

Mismatched kitchens
The fitted kitchen, with identical cabinets wall-hung and floor-fixed, can look rather old hat. Kitchen furniture is now being viewed in a new light, with makers contrasting colours, finishes and textures to stamp character and individuality into designs. Look at Superfront, Hølte and Pluck to discover just how easy it is to get things mixed up.

Pictures from top: a raw-edged bathroom by Holloway Li; Pipeline rugs by Patricia Urquiola for CC-Tapis; hammered Touch bench and bowls by Zanat; and a mismatched kitchen by Pluck