The survey: who they asked and how

Marketplace 1stDibs surveys its own network of trade professionals every year, and the ninth edition of its Designer Trends Survey, conducted with research firm Surveys & Forecasts between July and August, drew responses from 468 interior design professionals worldwide. On named aesthetics, the results were close: maximalism led with 39 percent, eclecticism followed at 38 percent. Money pressure shaped plenty of those answers too. The same survey found 92 percent of designers reporting that tariffs have hurt their business.

The real number: 85 percent, not a top-line “style”

Vintage and antique furniture didn’t need to win the style horse race, because it wasn’t really competing in it. According to the same survey, 85 percent of designers said they’d sourced at least one vintage piece, dated roughly 1920 through 2000, for a client project in 2025, the strongest showing in the survey’s five most recent years. On average, vintage and antique items made up 36 percent of everything specified on a given project, also a five-year high.

Antiques are staging a specific comeback

The survey separates true antiques, pieces made before 1920, from the broader vintage category, and that number moved even more sharply: 63 percent of designers said they’d used a pre-1920s antique in 2025, up from 56 percent the year before. Domestic sourcing rose to 72 percent as international shipping got costlier. 1stDibs editorial director Anthony Barzilay Freund described the survey as capturing designers “embracing the future” through rising AI tool adoption while simultaneously “looking back to vintage and antique furniture.”

What the colors and curves boom signals

Chocolate brown nearly doubled as a favored 2026 color, climbing from 17 percent of designers in 2022 to 33 percent now, and curvy, rounded furniture silhouettes were named by 43 percent, both aesthetic cues that lean toward older, softer design eras. Set the maximalism-versus-eclecticism numbers aside, and the survey’s real headline is simpler than any style label: whatever room a professional designer is building this year, there’s a better-than-even chance a piece of it is older than the client who hired them.