For me it’s maximalism. Lovely in a quirky cafe or boutique hotel but at home it would give me a headache. I like a restful house and so yes quite a lot of it is grey! Not battleship grey or anthracite but bluey or greeny greys. Concrete floors. Depressing, cold, ecologically not great, look unfinished. Plants very high up. How do you water them? Walk in wardrobes even if it means the bedroom becomes tiny. I’d rather have a bigger bedroom with wardrobes in it, than dress and sleep in tiny spaces. Uber industrial. There’s a reason we usually hide cables, conduits, vent ducts...because they are ugly. Buying new furniture and accessories very often to have an “up to date“ look. I see all these instagram pictures with everything brass, mid century, wood, rattan, green (today’s trends) and I wonder what has happened to all their grey, painted, silver, shabby chic items from 5/10 years ago. And what will they do with today’s items when the look swings round again...

Hi, if you want to inject some colour into your kitchen via the splashback you might like to think about an LED illuminated splashback. You can set it on one particular colour or set it to scroll through colours. You can also have a splashback with white colour temperature controllable LEDs in it if you prefer - this means you can switch it from warm white, to cool white to daylight depending on the effect you wish to create at any particular time of the day/evening/season. Do have a look at http://www.litetile.co.uk/portfolio/ to see the effect that can be created in a kitchen.

Thank you for everyone's comments, had no idea this thread would prove so popular when I started it. We are plastering this week and we have finally bought most things for the kitchen. I did find some real 'finds' though if anyone is looking. Not sure where you are based, but regarding electrical goods we researched all our own and narrowed down our list, and once we had that we looked online for the best prices for each appliance. Instead of buying from lots of different places we took it to Bentalls, who not only matched, but also cost us less, and beat some online prices with a good 'deal' price they also then will hold on to them until you need them, but if anything goes wrong you have 'bentalls' rather than several online dealers to return items to. RDO Appliances also do this if there is one near you, but i'd advise you to research prices first. Another thing we found was inserts for the kitchens. Through our kitchen supplier these were expensive, bin inserts, pull out drawers, pull out larders, even the pop up sockets, sourced seperately through ebay and online we managed to save quite a lot of money by doing this, so our fitter will still have the right things on the day, but we are not getting the inserts from the supplier. What else..... erm kitchen worktop, unbelievably the exact same worktop, same material, same cut outs etc.. same sizes differed between suppliers by 3k! so do shop around for your quartz and granite.

Catherine HW - You're not nosy,..........just curious - aren't we all? LOL I'm currently mad on cosmopolitan cocktails, so they're the celebratory drink at the moment! The OH prefers beer (typically). I'm guessing the less regular shaped cupboards you are referring to, are the wall cupboards? They're glass fronted with lights in and we've got things like glasses and tea pots in those. The thing above the hob is of course the extractor hood. The doors with the cat flap (yes it is a cat flap - we've got 5) leads up steps to the boot/storage room - which has a combination of the OHs cycling gear, commercial racking for things like excess cat food, extra kitchen roll, over size baking trays, etc. and the 100s of bottles of wine we appear to have. (eye roll). We've got another fridge freezer out there and a storage cupboard for brooms etc. It also leads to the side door (also with cat flap) to the side yard with the oil tank and the bins. The other double doors open onto the larger of the sitting rooms. The plain wood doors are Panoramic doors (similar to bi-folds) which open out onto the patio. To the left of the kitchen fridge, is yet another door - a stable door, which opens onto the garden - with another cat flap. It's a room full of doors!