What do avocado bathrooms, serving hatches and wicker chairs have in common?
No, not a contrived set-up for a niche joke, but a whistle-stop tour through the comeback interiors trends we once thought consigned to the dustbin of history.
If the very concept of naff decor had a physical form, perhaps it would be made of pine.
Ubiquitous in the late Eighties and early Nineties, the wood was subject to a spectacular fall from grace that saw pine kitchens ripped out of design-conscious homes everywhere. Only the omnipresent Georgian and Victorian floorboard, acceptably aged, had a pass.
And yet pine seems poised for an interiors rebound of its own.
Search demand for pine furniture on vintage marketplace Vinterior increased 28 per cent between 2021 and 2022, but has shot up 95 per cent since December.
Nina Hertig, who opened London’s largest Scandinavian antiques showroom Aelfred in Hackney Wick last year, has spotted a similar surge in interest. “Pieces like shelving made from chunky, solid pine are really popular. We’re trying to restock them as quickly as we can.”
She suspects it’s part of a wider shift away from dark woods like teak and walnut, and towards lighter-coloured timbers with a visible grain.
Could pine be coming in as quickly as it went out, some 25 years later?
Pine at the height of its popularity
Our relationship with this wood is as knotty as its distinctive grain.
As prolific builders, the Victorians loved pine — it was cheap and plentiful, thanks to Baltic timber imports — and so did we, until some point in the mid Nineties when we collectively rebranded its solidity as clunky and deemed its orange tinge offensive.
Pine-mageddon gave way to a new interiors aspiration, shaped by hotshot industrial designers like Philippe Starck.
“It was about smart and sleek and new,” says Hertig, who points out that technical innovation was in part responsible for the turn of the interiors tide. “There were lots of advances production-wise and it became much cheaper not to produce in solid wood”.
Out went pine, in came chrome, purple and bean bags.
So total was the interiors sea change that the same scenario was playing out across Scandinavia. Even Finland, where pine trees account for 44 per cent of the country’s forest cover.
Plotting a pine renaissance
“Finland was full of pine up until the 1990s, in furniture, flooring, wood paneling,” confirms Antti Hirvonen, the co-founder of Finnish furniture brand Vaarnii.
Made exclusively in what he calls “a vastly undervalued and misunderstood material”, Vaarnii’s debut collection saw the company persuaded a crop of contemporary talents to design in pine, from Mac Collins to Philippe Malouin and Max Lamb.
Three years on, it has launched outdoor range ‘Osa’ in a non-toxic Thermowood pine and lighting collection ‘Hans’, which sees pine veneer coaxed into concentric circles. Everything is made in Finland, and from Finnish wood.
“We use a new oilwax finish which allows the pieces to age gracefully. Pine used to be yellow and shiny, the main culprit being the lacquering used which made items yellow even before they left the factory,” explains Hirvonen.
Adam Hills, co-founder of reclaim mecca Retrouvius, agrees that this is the presiding image of pine: “In the late Eighties and early Nineties, everything was going into caustic tanks and getting pickled, then waxed up.”
With plenty of pine furniture and flooring still floating around, advice has generally been to paint it (white, black, anything) or at the very least sand down past the slick of yellowy varnish.
While some kind of stain is neccessary, as pine is prone to discolouration, “you can lime it, which feels quite Gustavian. It’s more of a wash,” says Hills.
“We recently had a supply of Dutch pine cheeseboards — long wide single planks, with a gorgeous patina — which we used in a range of projects. They were certainly popular; I think the circles of fashion are coming back round to pine.”
Worktops are out, he says (it’s simply too soft) but in the right context the timber will last hundreds of years. “Think about log cabins.”
Kelly Weastler and Commune Design are fellow pine converts, as is aesthete Lucy Williams, whose west London terrace features reclaimed pine flooring from Lawsons Yard, a pine clad bath and a pair of blocky shearling pine chairs picked up second-hand.
And with birch ply no longer the cheap and cheerful option it once was — surely much to the chagrin of east London architects — its abundance and availability could be a boon for construction.
Take TOG’s new Black and White Building, central London’s tallest mass-timber office building, which draws heavily on knotty pine thanks to Waugh Thistleton Architects and Daytrip Studio.
How to buy pine now
Though pedigree pine does exist — a quartet of ‘Lovö’ pine chairs by Swedish modernist Axel-Einar Hjorth will set you back tens of thousands — there is brilliant value to be had here, says Hertig.
“Part of the interest in dealing like this is to see in the market where you think people are not spotting value. What is available, and what could you show that they might not have seen yet?
“Second-hand furniture is such a sustainable way of shopping, and vintage wooden furniture from Scandinavia is so well made that pieces often have decades more life left in them.”
She recommends putting aside any preconceptions about names — pieces by mid-century titans like Finn Juhl and Vilhelm Lauritzen can command “10 times what they did 20 years ago” — and look at a piece “for what it is. The word pine has been tainted, but we need to see it with fresh eyes. These are really great things”.
