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A warm wave of curved sofas, chunky chenille, and amber-toned lighting is sweeping through modern living rooms. Retro design is the style on everyone’s lips - and homes.
After years of stark minimalism and cool greys, it’s no surprise that we’re looking to rooms that feel lived-in and layered. And the joyful palette of the 1970s, with its organic shapes and comfort-focused designs, offers just that.
The seventies saw a wave of people moving to cities, where smaller homes and apartments called for furniture that could work hard, make a statement, and suit these more informal spaces. New materials like plastic and polyurethane allowed designers to embrace bolder colours and more curvaceous shapes. Metals and smoked glass pieces mirrored the age’s obsession with space and sci-fi. And grounded colour palettes stripped back the opulence of previous eras, pairing warm-toned reds, yellows and greens with rich, dark browns.
Although the furniture and accessories we’re seeking out draw inspiration from the mid-century modern style of the seventies, the substance they’re built on is much improved. These pieces have been reworked for our lives today, created with durability and support in mind. Here are our favourite ways to bring a mid-century modern twist to your home with the right:
Warm Colours
Velvet Upholstery
Wood Furniture
Rounded Silhouettes
Statement Lamps
and more…
How to Get the 70s Interior Design Look
Warm Colours
Think of the seventies, and you’ll probably see autumnal tones like gold, orange, rust and brown. This palette should be used with a restrained hand, finding balance by using one or two shades to anchor a room, then building around them with warm neutrals.
Olive green is a contemporary take on this classic palette. It pairs beautifully with mango wood and warm metallics, a colour combination you'll find in our Carmela side table and Asher dining chair. Use olive as your ‘neutral’ shade’, then layer in rust, ochre, or deep red as accent shades through accessories like rugs, cushions and lamps.
Velvet Upholstery
If you’re looking for a simple way to bring mid-century style into your home, trade a flat-weave or linen sofa for something in a velvet-style fabric.
Velvet and its more hardwearing counterpart, chenille, have always been an easy way to introduce luxury into a space. But seventies designs reimagined these indulgent fabric as something more laid back, with dusky, earthen tones that ground the upholstery in style and softness.
Our Caspian corner chaise sofa is a perfect choice, combining mink or olive green chenille with chunky piped edges for a soft, sink-into-quality. The Orion dining chair in smooth mocha upholstery brings that same velvet-like texture to the table, catching the light beautifully under a pendant lamp.
Wood Furniture
Where velvet brings softness, wood brings warmth. The dark, richly grained timbers of the seventies are making their comeback, providing an alternate to the pale Scandi-style finishes that have been a mainstay of homes over the past decade.
Mango wood makes an ideal choice for this look, with its natural grain variation and rich, warm tone. This is where our Ria large sideboard stands out, featuring an intricately carved dark mango wood front panel and push-to-open doors that keep the look clean and handle-free.
Although dark wood is an essential part of seventies decor, try to avoid overusing it. Especially in smaller spaces, darker pieces can make rooms feel gloomy – so make sure to find a balance with lighter shades.
Rounded Silhouettes
Curved arms, kidney-bean shapes, and soft, sculptural forms are another seventies staple.
The sharp angles, clean straight lines, and rigid functionality of the decades before meant people were tired of boxy shapes. They craved rounded designs that helped create cosy, inclusive environments that matched the era’s need for comfort. Inspired by just that, our Florence 3 Seater Sofa leads with a generous silhouette. Its chunky arms, upholstered in a gorgeous apricot chenille, strikes a sweet spot between blush and burnt orange.
And sofas are just the start. Tables, like our Burleigh coffee table design, turn organic curves into a solid wood centrepiece that instantly signals the era. Smaller pieces like the Carmela side table carry the same design identity, with a rounded form and retro-inspired high-gloss finish in plum and olive.
Statement Lamps
Seventies lighting was all about mood, not brightness. Warm pools of light from table lamps and floor lamps replaced harsh overhead lighting, acting as design objects in their own right, with mushroom shaped designs, smoked glass, and warm chromatic finishes.
This is one of the simplest and most affordable ways to bring mid-century modern style into a room. A single statement lamp on a side table, like our Louis lamp in black marble and chrome, can do more for the mood of a room than any amount of overhead lighting. Pair with a warm-toned bulb for an instant seventies glow.
Accessories
Rugs, cushions, and smaller decorative details transform a room from neutral living space to intentionally seventies-inspired – and give you a low-commitment way to test the trend before investing in bigger furniture pieces.
Rugs offer a lot to this retro revival, particularly designs with sculptural, swirling, or abstract patterns reminiscent of 1970s textile design. The Abstract Swirl rug in ochre features bold overlapping shapes and a sculpted pile that adds real texture underfoot, while the same rug in deep red makes a richer statement, ready for spaces that can handle a bolder look. For something a little calmer and more relaxed, our Neo rug in navy uses overlapping organic shapes and loop-arc texture to add depth without overwhelming the room.
Layer these rugs under a chenille sofa, complement with rich wood accessories, and light with warm lamplight to create a room that sits firmly in mid-century fashion.
The magic of the seventies revival is that it doesn't ask you to commit to a full home design overhaul. You just have to stay confident in the pieces you choose to curate and bring in. A single sculptural rug or a chenille cushion can test the waters, then let you commit to a curved sofa or a kidney-bean shaped coffee table. Introducing mid-century style is less about recreating a single decade exactly, and more about picking out pieces that capture its warmth, curves and confidence, and making them work for the way you live today. The key is restraint with the details that surround your statement pieces, letting one or two bold colours and one standout silhouette lead, while keeping everything else simple enough to let them breathe. That's how the best 70s-inspired rooms avoid looking like a themed set. They borrow the era's confidence without copying it wholesale, to keep the final look feeling considered, current, and entirely your own.
