Trend lists are usually written by people selling something seasonal. Architecture moves slower than that — a home designed this year will be lived in for decades, so chasing a look that dates is the most expensive mistake available.
But briefs do change, and they change for a reason worth paying attention to: they follow how households actually live. Sitting across the table from homeowners in Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh and Carnegie this year, I hear the same handful of things again and again. Not styles — needs. Here are the five that are shaping 2026 projects on my drawing board, and what sits behind each one.
1. Defined openness — the correction, not the backlash
The biggest shift is the one I wrote about recently: households are stepping back from the single vast open zone, without wanting to return to a corridor of closed rooms. What they're asking for is a generous shared heart to the home, with rooms around it that have real boundaries and real jobs — a place to gather and a place to be apart, in the same plan. If your open plan living area works beautifully at 6pm and badly at 10am on a work-from-home Tuesday, this theme is about you. (The full thinking is in my earlier piece on open plan versus defined spaces.)
2. The workspace that is actually a room
For years, "home office" meant a desk in the spare room or a corner of the bedroom. In 2026 briefs, it means a room — with a door, natural light, acoustic separation from the kitchen, and a position in the plan that lets one person work while the household carries on. For couples who both work from home, it increasingly means two workable positions, not one. This is no longer an extra; it has become one of the first things we test in a floor plan, because it changes where everything else sits.
3. Rooms that will change jobs
The households I work with are thinking further ahead than they used to. Parents want a plan that works when the children are eight, and still works when they're eighteen, and still works when they've left. Others are designing with older parents in mind, or adult children who boomerang home, or the possibility of a dual occupancy on the block later. The design answer isn't more rooms — it's rooms deliberately shaped so they can change jobs without another renovation: a study that can become a bedroom, a rumpus that can become a self-contained space. Flexibility has quietly become the most valuable thing you can build in.
4. Comfort you can feel in July
Melbourne winters have a way of auditing a home's design. More clients now raise comfort and running costs in the first meeting — not as a sustainability statement, but as a lived frustration: the beautiful room nobody sits in because it's cold, the heating bill that arrives like a second mortgage. Good design answers this with fundamentals rather than gadgets: orientation, glazing, insulation, and the shape and volume of the rooms themselves. It is also, increasingly, about designing for an all-electric home from the outset. I'll go deeper on this in a coming piece on designing for Melbourne's climate, because it deserves more than a paragraph.
5. Heritage in front, life out the back
Some themes are perennially Melbourne, and this one is having a strong run: keeping the character front of a period home — the brickwork, the entry, the street presence — and doing the transformative work behind it, where the household actually lives. The craft is in the junction: how the original home and the new addition meet, so each makes the other better rather than the new part apologising for itself. Done well, you keep what the street loves and gain what your family needs.
What these five have in common
None of them is a look. Every one of them is a response to how a household lives — who is home, when, doing what, and how that will change. That is why they'll still make sense in fifteen years, when this year's colour-of-the-year has been repainted twice.
Where to start
If some of these themes sound like your house — the plan that no longer fits, the office that isn't a room, the cold spots, the period front with the wrong back — the useful first step is not picking a builder or a style. It is a feasibility study: a fixed-cost look at your home, your block and how you live, that tells you what is possible and the realistic cost range before you commit to anything. It is how the homeowners I work with turn a list of frustrations into a plan.
[Book a feasibility consultation] and we'll start with your normal Tuesday, not a mood board.
Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh, Carnegie and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.