Cape Town is so ahead of the trends!  We’ve been camping, glamping, cycling, using nature to inspire design and wrapping ourselves in Mohair for years!  These are just some of the trends that are BIG in 2013 and we’ve picked out the Top 5 Trends that we think we’ll see more of in Cape Town:

Camping:  It’s about getting back to nature and doing it with style – we were inspired by this picture in Feb/March Elle Decoration magazine of an Animal Farm tent from Field Candy. It’s brilliant! Field Candy have a whole range of extraordinary tents! We’ve got plenty of camping opportunities here in South Africa, with National Parks and Cape Nature Reserves, plus plenty of private properties offering camp sites and you can buy camping gadgets and gizmos to your heart’s content.  If you don’t want to camp, you can Glamp – see  our Top 5 Glamping blog post.

Décor & Design: Green; the colour, the garden, the mindset of reuse, revamp and repurpose – 2013 is the year for green.  Pantone come up with a colour of the moment each year and 2013 is going green – emerald green to be precise! This will make its presence felt through fashion and design. Texture with bold design is also in, especially geometric shapes in rugs, fabrics and tiles and even on exterior walls. Mohair, wool and wood have an enduring exquisite appeal but used in new ways.  Look at this Li Edelkoort-inspired Pinterest board for inspiration.

 Gardening: Rooftop gardens are so in!  And so is growing heirloom plants and turning unlikely spaces into gardens. You can grow pretty much anything anywhere, like a rustic wooden framed vertical succulent garden hung on your lounge wall. And then there’s guerrilla gardening; transforming ugly spaces into a gardens or seed bombing them and hoping come spring they’ll burst into life.

Cycling:  If you’ve been to London recently you’ll know that there are cycle lanes all over the place and thousands of people using them.  Cycling is already huge in Cape Town (you can’t fail to have missed the thousands of cyclists that are here for the Pick n Pay Argus Cycle Tour), but this year’s cycling trend is less competitive and more ‘take it easy’, with a basket on the front to carry the picnic.

Food: Peruvian food is an on-going trend – we even have a Peruvian Restaurant in Cape Town – and look out for Peruvian cookbooks coming soon. Chicken Restaurants are in (and I don’t just mean KFC), and should do well here since it is Africa’s favourite meat.  Look out for more inventive cocktails from ambitious bartenders infusing the basics with fruit and local exotica. Then there’s the on-going rise of the gourmet burger pepped up with toppings in fancy buns. And finally, move over celebrity chef and enter celebrity farmer! Where our food comes from is increasingly important to the consumer and we’ll see supermarkets making more of this.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our research into the international trends of 2013 and we’d love to know if you’ve noticed a shift towards these trends in Cape Town. Do tell us