I think almost all of us have changed our style although the time frame may be longer than 5 years. Just think about the styles of 70's, 80's, and 90's. You hope someone is not hanging on to a 70's look - avocado refrigerator, wood panelling everywhere, etc.

I think many people are looking for a more streamlined look these days.

My tastes have definitely changed! My DH doesn't understand that I'm ready to change my Kennebunkport Green living room into something more clean, modern and comfortable. It's been the green color for 9 years! I think I'm leaning more toward less clutter, less flowery fabric, a more sophisticated look. I just need someone to help me!!

My taste remains the same: I love new stuff.

It changes every time somebody posts pics of their rooms!

LOL, so true, princesssusan !!!!

My decorating style has changed many times over the 42 years we've been married. At first in the 60's it was "early Sally Ann" cause we couldn't afford much, then became Formal Traditional as we acquired a few antiques, then modern Euro 70's when we lived in Europe (fortunately left all those things in Europe!), then more eclectic in the 80's when I tried some weird things, gradually it's becoming eclectic/traditional/yard sale so I guess I've gone full-circle! LOL

There are times I wonder what on earth was I thinking and other times I remember fondly how my house looked. Wish I had had a dig camera thru those years. Right now I'm not afraid of making mistakes so am enjoying my home and trying new things which may or may not last. Getting over my fear of color mistakes and making fewer. Decorating only for me as DH doesn't care and he finally realizes it's one of my hobbies so is helpful with projects.

It's really interesting for me to look thru my inspiration book which has pics I've saved for many decades. I still like a lot of the same things altho might put them together differently now.

I can't imagine my home looking the same for years but some people like that so "whatever floats your boat". :-)

Not a) once I became an adult (I had an attack of Art Deco as a teenager, although since I had to pay for everything myself I didn't exactly go wild with it, and I tired of it rather quickly because it was an affectation rather than really "me") and b) once I figured out that I could do/have what I actually liked instead of what I thought I was supposed to like - like matching furniture sets. Growing up with "Early Attic and Neo-Yardsale" furniture because we just couldn't afford furniture sets, a complete matching suite of furniture was sort of a sign that you had "made it". So DH and I bought a couple of matching furniture sets and I learned (somewhat to my chagrin after spending all that money) that I really hate the whole matchy-matchy thing and much prefer the mismated conglomerations of my childhood! LOL But the underlying style preference hasn't changed very much at all.

I'm just not a particularly fickle person about decor, really... I'm not at all interested in trends, I'm not an acquisitive person, and I hate shopping. :-) Even when I could physically do it I loathed painting so I just could never "get" the people who repaint every couple of years. I actually would like to just get my rooms the way I want them to be and be done with it, which is also the way I grew up. No one did any of the constant redecorating and rearranging and "refreshing" that seems to be a frequent addiction around here! :-) Heresy I know but I would kind of like to stop having my house eat my life.

I'm with bumblebeez!

Just when I think I "know" my taste, I see some new look and covet the heck out of it. I do notice that certain themes stay constant, though. I've always liked greys and pieces of black furniture in an otherwise light room. Oh, and orange flowers!

But those element can be worked into any style - I think :)

I admire and appreciate a lot of different styles, but mine stays the same, traditional.

Nope! I was lucky enough to have a mother who was a decorator at heart. Our home was one of those old "Main Street" 2 story Craftsman..and she decorated it in "turkey red", white, greens, golds and yellows. I find the colors so soothing and homey, so that's what I've been doing since I've been an adult.

Funny thing, my son and his wife have the same color scheme!

Declansmom, if you do pack all those beautiful things up, I'd be happy to "store" them for you-just send them right on over! :)

Mine did--when I was first married, I worshiped at the shrine of Martha, and tried to re-create my East Coast life in Los Angeles. Every Saturday, I'd be at yard sales, passing by Eames and MCM, in search of pink luster ware and chintz. I regret some of the stuff I passed by, because it wasn't my taste and I didn't realize how amazing some things were. Finally, several moves later, I've ditched the chintz, refined my taste, and can incorporate Machine Age deco with Shaker and even some MCM.

My color sense got bolder, and I got less worried about what went with what. I also think the market place exploded--I can buy fabric online, rather than just at Calico Corners. On the other hand, ebay killed yard sale finds, at least in Southern California.

Maybe it's hopeful thinking, but I like to think that taste improves with age. Well, age as a stand-in for experience, cultural knowledge, and exposure to multiple trends over the years. I still get excited about something really new and different, but I consider it more before jumping on the bandwagon. I am much more cognizant of how well something will wear and last -- which coincides nicely with today's 'green' trend. But stylistically, I'm definitely an omnivore.

I'm totally with johnmari: I hate shopping & once a room is done, it's done. Oh sure, if I buy new sofa or a new (antique) mantel--both of which things I've done in the last year--something's gotta give & so may necessitate other, larger changes besides just moving a few things around, but change just for change's sake? Not me. If I like something, I'll always like it. I've never gotten rid of anything I ever bought and I've never regeetted a purchase. That's because I stay away from things & styles that may be popular (and that may even be attractive in themselves) but which aren't really me. And since I don't buy trendy, faddish things, I never have to unload them when I get tired of them.
I sleep on the Empire daybed that I bought when I was fresh out of college, back when all my pals were buying brown plaid Herculon living room sets & massive pine bedroom sets that looked like they were made for Paul Bunyan; and I used it through the period when said pals (or, more accurately, their young wives) all banished ditched that clumsy-looking stuff in favor of plump beige leather sofa, off-white wall-to-wall carpet, black-&-gold glass-top tables & pictures of Greek temples & cream color cushions with gold tassels, and then, when they got tired of that bland look, went for Tuscan in a big way, carved scrollwork, rusty iron clocks & all, which stuff they're all now tired of and wanting to scrap in favor of--surprise!--Mid-century-inspired pieces with clean lines & fresh colors. "I'll never go back to that dark, cluttered, floral look!" they announce, in the same hearfelt way that they might tell me they just started a 12-step program. We'll see how serious they all are about that when the Madison Avenue crowd procalims MCM dead in the water & introduces whatever new style they have up their sleeves, just waiting for us to hang the last resin rooster off the Chinese assembly line on our still-damp Venetian plaster walls.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing agianst "Tuscan" decor per se, any more than I had against "Southwest" decor or "Rustic Lodge" decor, or any of that stuff, except for the part where it typically all meant so little to the people who jumped through hoops (expensive hoops, at that) to constantly redo their homes that they were soon sick to death of the stuff & were therefore willing to give it away for next to nothing a few years later. Oh, sure, that follow-the-leader model certainly kept the old economy humming along for a while there, and I have clients who like to do that sort of presto-changeo thing but then, they can--I guess--afford to do so & I can't. That's one diffrence between them & me. But only one. Because even if I could do that, I wouldn't. Then again, I don't need to, because when it comes to decorating, I'm not trying to 'find myself'. I figured out which styles I liked a long time ago. Like the poet says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever".

Magnaverde Rule No. 1:
Don't confuse decorating with shopping.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever".
I have to add one little note here.....I still love everything I own, but somehow, it just does not all go together. I inherited my stunning dining room from my mom and dad and I will love it forever, HOWEVER, it is very dressy, as is my living room, so I tended to decorate around that look. I purchased this gorgeous cabinet 10 years ago.....it took me 4 months to pay it off, and now, I am considering taking it out of my living room because it is just too dressy, and I want a more casual, relaxed feel. The cabinet is packed with gorgeous etched crystal, antique porcelain and limoges. I love all of it, just not in my living room anymore!
I will probably never get rid of anything, but I find that I constantly want to change things.

I like changes. :-D Life isn't stagnant, neither should decorating. I'm not talking a/b change because Target or Pottery Barn tells you to. I'm talking a/b changes because you are feeling tired of the same old thing, changes because life moves ahead and your decor style need to keep up or left behind. The same stylish decor that work for your bachelorette pad, won't work when you are a SAHM with 3 messy kids. The decor that works for an uptown apartment won't work for a suburban track home. :-D The same decor that works when you are 20s, may not satisfy you the same way when you are 60s ( unless you are magnaverde who reached the mental age of 60s at the biological age of 20s, then all the above is null) :-)

My favorite quote, "Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them." Sure I can live with the same decor for the next 30 years but what's the fun in it. If you got tired of the dish, boxed it up. Take it out in 10 years, you may love them all over again, and if not, then ebay them. By then, it's probably worth a lot more. :-)

Have fun. If there have no imagination and no desire for changes, we would still be decorating our cave with mound of moss...

Oh rat, I realized that we are still doing the same thing --

what to do w/ moss??

{{gwi:1633238}}

Mine did . . . for a while, anyhoo. I grew up in Michigan in a home filled with Ethan Allen maple furniture with sage greens, dusty reds and golds. Nice, but not my style. My first place was in South Florida right off the beach and as a career girl I could afford to buy some fairly nice things. I went with white wicker furniture and decorated my apartments in a palate of green, white and pink or deep rose (depending on the room). Beautiful, tropical and so NOT Michigan! When I moved back there four years later I had to sell just about everything! When we married, we moved directly out here to New Mexico. Here pretty much everything was Southwestern, Western, Spanish Colonial or a Contemporary take on any of the above. At the time, 1983, dusty blues and rose were THE colors out here. We did our living room very nicely like that in a Contemporary Southwestern look . . . and I quickly came to hate it! When we built this house, we sold almost all the furniture and rugs and I was glad for it!
These past 15 years here, my style has mellowed out to Eclectic with leanings towards Spanish Colonial and Southwestern. I love white and have used a creamy white color throughout our home. I use dark wood furniture now and accent colors of mainly blacks, browns, red and green. The exception is our MBR, which is white on white . . . and DD's room, which is French done in pale green, lilac and black (she's a Francophile, what can I say?).
I've had a lot of my furnishings all this time and have no great desire to redo anything. I do have to say, though, that if my DH suddenly agreed to retire and move back to a big cottage on Lake Huron in Michigan, we'd have to sell a LOT of this stuff! There, I'd probably go with a Contemporary Western look . . . with lots of whites ;^P
Lynn

Yep. All the time. I must be somehow subconsciously influenced by the trends because every time I fall in love with a look that I think is new, different, and perfect for me - it turns up in the next issue of the Pottery Barn catalog. Doesn't make me love it any less - but I do recognize that I'm not really unique or ahead of the trends if I'm only a month ahead of PB :)

Yes. Bellaflora said exactly what I was thinking much better than I could have expressed it. It's been about 15 years since I graduated from college but this is the first house I've lived in for more than 3 years. So some of my changes have been the result of moving to a different environment and choosing styles that work with the space. But a lot of the changes are simply because a room is starting to look stale to me. There are some pieces that I love and will incorporate in different ways even when I change the overall look of a room. And there are some pieces (like my couch & loveseat) that I keep because I can't justify the expense of replacing them. But I like and embrace change.

I suspect that my taste would have changed with age anyway, but the main driver was geography. The first furniture I bought for the living room and dining room was very modern (and very expensive). The stunning chrome and glass dining table that looked so wonderful in several locations in the hot South became my sworn enemy one -20 degree morning in Minnesota. I was wearing a nightgown and leaned forward. SHRIEK!!! I was never a morning person anyway. Icy metal against my almost bare skin did not improve my mood.

I have a wood table and upholstered dining chairs now.

Given unlimited funds, I'd probably have a warehouse full of antique armoires (I have 2), useless writing desks (1), oriental rugs (who's counting), and not a darned thing to sit on other than my favorite chairs (2). Although I've always had one, I've never loved a sofa.

I've always loved rooms that had comfort and warmth, and which showed signs of a cultured and intelligent person living there, someone who loved books and flowers and good art and beautiful furniture and objects. I settled on the English country house style as the perfect embodiment of all these qualities and I still love that look today. However, through decorating books and magazines and my forced exposure to modern art and furniture (I forced myself because I wanted to understand why I feared it so much), my outlook began to widen and the purely traditional with no leavening of the modern or the unusual or the funky began to seem somewhat boring. In other words, I think I grew and evolved. The core remains pretty much the same, but many of the individual constituents have changed. For me, that's a good thing. I think it's our job in life to evolve and grow and accept new things and ideas and to keep learning. Changing our decorating taste, even if it's not a major upheaval, is an enjoyable part of that experience. I hope that my taste never becomes stale and predictable.

Ingrid VC, it's funny that you should mention English country house style, because it's the ultimate when it comes to being inclusive, rather than excusive in nature. The style was only christened with the name in the mid-20th century, but it's a look that's been around for few hundred years, and for ease & livability, it can't be beat, because rather than being about things--certain pieces or motifs (wire-fronted wooden cubboards="French Country"; pastel-painted coyote silhouettes="Southwestern")--it's about an approach, one based on comfort & practicality & hanging onto things, rather than tossing them just because their moment happens to be past.

If the damask sofa's upholstery gets a little shabby, a chintz slipcover will take care of that. If the elegant curtains form the old family place are too long for the windows, we'll just call them 'puddled' and let it go at that. There are bigger things to think about. If there are rings on the mahogany finish where somebody put down a wet drink, oh well. That's patina. And threadbare rugs are welcome too, because they not only take less upkeep than pale carpeting, they're also cheaper. The ceaseless quest after perfection is a killer, and nobody does take-it-as-it-comes decorating like the English.

But English Country Style it's not only inherited antiques & old stuff. The Victorian bamboo what-not over in the corner next to the Sheraton style desk was itself a brand new piece at one time, as were 192Os floor lamps, and if there was room for them in the overall scheme then, then there's also room for the 196Os brass drum table & the scratchy-looking 197Os wall hanging somebody made in the ashram, & those 198Os engravings of temples & that wire-fronted cupboard, too. It doesn't matter that it's supposedly "French Country" in inspiration. So, in the 18th Century, were Thomas Chippendale's ribbon-back carved mahogany chairs, and they fit into the mix just fine.

And in the Victorian era, people began with the same room, with the same inherited family pieces both good & bad, then filled up the bare spots with Chinese vases & Japanese fans & Persian rugs & tooled leather stools from Egypt & native American baskets from Arizona & brass lanterns from Morocco & plaster casts of famous sculptures & tooled silver vases from India filled with peacock feathers or pampas grass. The eclectic look that's featured in Pier One ads or in vignettes at Cost Plus World Market is nothing more--or less--than a look that was common in millions of homes in say, 1880. So much for progress. But besides all that imported souvenir stuff in the typical English country house, there was the homey stuff, too. On one side of the elegant carved marble chimneypiece was Great-grandmother's rush-seated baby chair & on the other side was the dog's chewewd-up wicker bed & a pile of slimy doggy toys. Dogs were just as important to the overall style as were the family heirlooms. And of course there, in a prominent place, were the twin entertainment centers of the day, the upright piano & the stereopticon. As for the TV that's replaced those items today, Victorians were the ultimate believers in technology, so the last thing they would have done with an amazing gizmo like a 54" screen is hide it away in an old-timey cabinet, or othewrwise try to make it disappear. No, that's the great thing about the relaxed English Country house style, and more specifically, the ultra-forgiving, unpretentious Victorian version of it: there was room in it for everything, old & new, plain & fancy. That's why the style is still a good, practical model on which to base a room for the 21st century.

Magnaverde Rule No. 16:
Decorate for the life you really have, not the life you wish you had.

magnaverde, I see you understand the concept of English country house style completely. It is very forgiving and inclusive, and embraces many more things than people are aware of. The English aristocracy has often been wonderfully eccentric and so one could expect almost anything in their homes, from a stuffed crocodile in the closet shot by the lady of the house when she was 12 to priceless paintings brought back from the obligatory continental tour in the 1800's and crocheted tea cozies on priceless tea pots. It's the combination of hominess and grandeur that I find so appealing, and that I've tried in some small way to aspire to in my own home.

Yes and no. My heart is in cottage/bohemian style, but my home has gone to more streamlined, less cluttered look. I don't know if it's because I can afford to be pickier with what I chose, or if it's just fatigue with the look I'd always gone with. I just know that I've been taking a lot of stuff out (and have replaced a few things).

Last night I stopped in a specialty store that I LOVE, and found tons of things that I drooled over, especially these olive green burnout velvet chairs...but I realized they absolutely would not go in my home and I really don't feel like redoing everything to make them work.

Very much so. While I still love antiques just like I did in the early 80's, I am not into the Shabby antique. I prefer something that has been cared for. (Not 'fine antiques' with a hefty pricetag, just something nice.) I am still partial to greens and reds and golds with a touch of black. But now, I work some brown into the scheme. I have outgrown floral chintz draperies and a longing for toile, realizing that my house and my style are better suited to muted patterns or textured chenilles. Little cottagey rugs used to entrance me. Now, I want big room rugs with patterns that stand the test of time. And my biggest change is in my interest in some modern pieces. Even in the late 90's, I spat on modern or contemporary stuff. Now, I like a nice stacked crystal ball lamp with a modern shade. And I am slowly moving away from having to have all vintage pictures and prints.
I think the new Red still loves a well-worn room, where the wood floors are silky and the rugs are patterned. I know that the new Red adores her antiques, but she doesn't feel the need to have everything old. And the new Red likes a more modern edge to wall color too. This style is more livable, more attainable, more comfortable. The doilies are gone. The shabby dressers are gone. The old jewelry boxes and vintage trinkets are gone. The dogs are gone.

No, wait. The dogs are still here. They are just laying with their heads on velvet pillows instead of patchwork pillows.

Red

Nope. It's refined a little, but it hasn't changed. When you have pieces that are 60-100 years old, you don't wrry about them going out of style. I have no idea what my style might be called. I just like what I like. Something old, something new, nothing borrowed and very little blue.

We moved from New England to the Carolinas about 6 years ago, and really started to think about decorating for the first time because we finally had a little space and the means to move beyond the furniture that we had inherited from our respective families. As we began buying hard goods we discovered that we prefer simplicity, with a leaning toward arts and crafts/mission pieces. None of our purchases really made much sense in our old 1930's colonial, but once we were living in a new construction home we were able to build a color pallette around our new stuff. Then, over time, we began to inject little bits of Asian influence in our accessories.
We also have gotten a LOT less conservative about color. I blame these forums and the HGTV forums for that.

I wish there was a tool, that would formulate your personal taste! Taking all your saved photo, pins, likes,.. into stacking up ideas for home decor!