Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic High flyers with the lifestyles to match rarely live in a single place for a long time. But signing new leases doesn’t have to mean a fully furnished property livened up with a few cashmere throws. Designers are rising to the challenge of creating temporary feature decor that can move and adapt from place to place. When Anaïs Seguin and Alice Gras, the designers behind Paris-based brand Delajoie Editions, moved into a rented Haussmann-era flat last year, they left the living room and all its decorative cornicing white, but made frames stretched with bright yellow moiré fabric from Dedar to fit into the ornate rectangular wall mouldings. “We see it as a kind of film set,” says Seguin. “We won’t be here a long time, so when we move, we will take it with us and rework it.”Renters represent a substantial target market for design. There were 28 per cent more rental homes on the UK market in the 12 months ending April 2024, compared with the previous year, and 35.7 per cent of people in the country are tenants. That figure is higher in many countries across Europe — as much as 40 per cent in Denmark, a country renowned for its stylish furniture. In Germany, more people are tenants than not. With the rental market in mind, Bavaria-based company Schotten & Hansen recently launched a magnetic flooring system that can be taken from property to property. An example debuted at Clerkenwell Design Week in May — seen on Kit Kemp’s PIT-A-PAT table, which incorporates the magnetic system with interchangeable, coloured, wooden veneer pieces. “The design involves single millimetre magnetic foils concealed within each piece,” says Schotten & Hansen founder Torben Hansen. “You can install a floor without using glue and take it to your next property.” It’s also, of course, inherently modular — pieces can be swapped out if damaged, and added to.Renters are also now able to bring more than just accessories to their cooking spaces. Neptune Kitchens launches a freestanding kitchen collection next January, designed to be easy to move with. “We use only solid timber or ply,” says design director Fred Horlock of the brand’s collections; clients are reluctant to leave them: “people often de- and reinstall when they move”. The new pieces make that more straightforward. He adds that Neptune’s first kitchen design was created to be freestanding and that the new collection, including a moveable larder unit, oak and marble island, and butcher’s block, “takes us back to our roots”.The concept has pedigree. Some of the greatest designs for homes have been made with impermanence in mind. Consider Dieter Rams’ glorious wall-mounted 606 Universal Shelving System, designed in 1960 and made by Vitsœ. It is prosaic, handsome and functional, easy to install, totally reconfigurable, and simple to add or subtract from. You move, it moves with you. If you want a statement sofa, it doesn’t get much bolder than a Roche Bobois Mah Jong, first seen 11 years after the 606. Designed by Hans Hopfer, its modular nature means you can reconfigure it for different spaces, and mix and match the fabrics of each element — throw some Kenzo Takada with a bit of Missoni or Jean Paul Gaultier. A new element looks just as good with older, more weathered pieces.Renting can also be an opportunity to experiment. Like Seguin and Gras, this is the case for brand polymath and creative director Ramdane Touhami and his wife Victoire de Taillac, who have lived in numerous capital cities. Before moving to, and transforming, their current 1870s home in Paris, the couple rented a house in Tokyo. They landed in the city with next to nothing, apart from their children. An ascetic set up of futons, tatami mats and shoji screens became a canvas for Touhami to create simple and geometric oversized armchairs and curved platforms cut from insulation foam, which he covered in brightly coloured Kvadrat fabrics. “They were prototypes,” he says. “Now they are office furniture in my HQ in Paris.” When fashion designer Erica Toogood and her husband Thomas Downes, an architect, moved back to the UK from Cape Town in 2022 with their son Cass, they didn’t settle into the Victorian house they still own in east London, but rented a 19th-century cottage on the borders of Hampshire and West Sussex. It had been radically modernised but left fairly vanilla. “We weren’t ready to entirely commit to something outside of London,” says Toogood. “It allowed us to test an environment.” Downes finds what he calls the “break clause” reassuring. “In a world where everything is so fluid, and everything is changing so fast around us, it’s good to build in flexibility. For the last 10 years we have bought, flipped, and reshaped.” The cottage is full of Toogood furniture (designed by Erica’s sister Faye), and artwork by friends. Like many renters who are permitted to paint the walls, they laboured over the choice of colour. The couple stuck to landlord-friendly white but an elevated version, daubing most surfaces in the cottage Flint from Little Greene. “In the house in London we used Cloth, from Atelier Ellis, which has a hessian tone, and is immediately calming. Both paints are neutral and work best with the light in each place and suit us — we are minimalists.” What next for innovative designs that suit rental properties? We aren’t quite there yet when it comes to high quality removable wallpaper, but it’s inevitable. Similarly, you can’t beat kiln-glazed tiles for flooring and splashbacks — but there are plenty of options out there for semi-permanent wall graphics. Other easy-to-achieve interiors tweaks: handsome radiator covers. They can be custom made by a local joiner, or Jack Stonehouse creates unpainted models you can transform with Cloth or Flint or full-on Nancy’s Blushes pink from Farrow & Ball. Striking dividers are also a useful device. Alvar Aalto’s Screen 100, from Artek, looks like Richard Serra had an unsung lacquered pine period. Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec’s Rayures Screen is a multicoloured glass multitasker. Also by the Bouroullecs, for Ligne Roset, is the decorative Clouds installation — a modular felt sculpture, that can be fashioned into anything from a wall feature to a whole curved cave. It has the potential to be a room within a room.Global nomads might also want to rent furniture as well as the apartment. The weight of a Mah Jong sofa makes it ruinously expensive to ship overseas. In the UK, David Phillips offers a design and furnishing service, the latter chargeable by the month. Forecasts suggest the global furniture rental market will grow 9 per cent by 2031.London-based interior designer Tommaso Franchi has long lived in rented accommodation and says it has shaped his aesthetic. “I furnished my home with elements I know I can take with me in the future,” he says. “My Fortuny Scheherazade pendant light is the focal point of my living room. I hate it when people think a rental should be furnished with random, standard furniture, just because you don’t know how long you’ll be there. Why choose a cheap Ikea side table when you can find fantastic trouvailles at a local auction?” And if you don’t know what style your new home needs: “When it comes to furnishing a rental, maximalism helps . . . massively.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
