This year, our annual Colormix^® Trend Forecast, Rewild, introduced its first-ever edition without defined palettes. In place of them, three design stories, each built to capture not just what colors are trending, but why they’re emerging – the cultural undercurrents of the past, present, and future pulling design in a new direction. It’s a shift the forecasting team made deliberately, giving designers not a suggestion of what to specify, but instead a story that speaks to what clients are searching for.

One of those three stories is Revive – an exploration of how the past is influencing interiors not for nostalgia’s sake, but to reclaim something too easily forgotten in today’s world: heritage and craft, the human touch, and deeply personal expression. We sat down with the top color experts on our Trendsight Team^SM to parse these design forces and better understand what every designer can take away from this triumphant spirit of revival.

Every forecast has a “why” question at its center, and for the story of Revive, the answer can be found everywhere we look. “Heritage and craftsmanship have become powerful symbols of authenticity in an era increasingly shaped by automation, AI, and constant digital consumption,” says Emily Kantz, the interior designer and color strategist who leads curation of the annual forecast. “This ‘past-meets-present’ narrative reflects a deeper cultural shift toward permanence, provenance, and meaningful connection.”

Anne Diedrich, who serves as the Trendsight Team’s Color Strategy Lead for Multi-Family Segment, Commercial Environments, says that paradigm shifts in consumer lifestyles continue to drive demands for thoughtfully designed community-centric commercial spaces. She points to adaptive reuse as one of the clearest expressions of the Revive story at scale: “converting previously used commercial buildings into multi-family residences not only conserves resources and minimizes excess waste, but it also aids in the preservation and protection of iconic and historic structures that bring character and charm to urban and suburban neighborhoods.” The details matter here too: “Interior design directions that reclaim original ornamental details and exposed materials from decades past remain especially celebrated among today’s conscious consumers.”

Sue Wadden, Sherwin-Williams Director of Color Marketing, points to a more specific inflection point. “For me it was watching how people started talking about the things they own,” she says, “a shift from ‘where can I get that’ to ‘who made this?’ That’s a small change in language and an enormous change in values.” Sue cites the evidence: “The resurgence of the maker’s mark. Menus naming the farm. Fashion houses reissuing archive pieces and, more tellingly, showing the mending. A whole generation treating their grandparents’ furniture as more desirable than anything new.” None of it, Sue says, is really about aesthetics. “It’s about wanting provenance in a world that has started to feel authorless. When a value shift shows up that consistently, across that many unrelated categories, it’s no longer a mood. It’s a direction. And directions belong in the forecast.”

There’s one distinction the Trendsight Team hopes to make abundantly clear: Revive is not a vintage story wearing a new label. “It’s not about recreating the past. It’s about reinterpreting it,” Emily explains. “Rather than filling a space with antique pieces or adhering to a single historical style, designers are selectively borrowing from heritage influences and layering them with contemporary forms, materials, colors, and technologies.”

A traditional piece, Emily says, might be refined with the use of an unexpected color, paired with sculptural modern furnishings, or reimagined through a new material application. “The result feels collected rather than curated to fit a specific era, allowing the past and present to coexist in a way that feels fresh and relevant.”

Sue frames the distinction historically, having watched more than one “back to basics” cycle come and go. “What’s usually driving them is fatigue. People get tired of excess and reach for simplicity as a corrective – the late-’90s minimalist wave, the post-2008 reclaimed-wood-and-Edison-bulb era. Both were reactions against too much.” Revive, Sue argues, is different in kind. “Nobody’s asking for less. They’re asking for meaning – for the thing to have a story, a maker, a history. That’s not a reaction against excess. It’s a reaction against anonymity.”

The other shift, according to Sue, is an embrace of unvarnished reality. “Past heritage moments were often about a fantasy of the past – a romanticized, tidied-up version of simpler times. What I’m seeing now is more honest. People want the actual imperfection, not a styled version of it. They want the visible repair, the uneven glaze, the color that isn’t quite consistent. In earlier cycles, the flaw was something to hide. Now it’s the proof. That’s a real shift in what people find beautiful, and I don’t think it reverses easily.”

It would be easy to treat the rise of AI and the rise of heritage design as unrelated trends running in parallel. The forecasting team sees them as cause and effect. “The more of our day is spent in flawless, frictionless, machine-made environments, the more precious the imperfect becomes,” in Sue’s opinion. “When your screen can generate a perfect image of anything in seconds, the thing that becomes valuable isn’t perfection anymore. Perfection is now free and infinite. What’s scarce is evidence of a human hand. The wobble in the pottery; the brushstroke you can see; the color with depth and variation, one that shifts a little across a wall, one that clearly came from pigment and process, reads as something made.”

Kiki Redhead, the brand’s industrial coatings expert and strategic futurist, sees the same tension but resists framing it as opposition. Asked how the rejection of mass production shows up in color choices specifically, Kiki points to something more instinctive than ideological: “Personal expression and emotional association are driving rejection of the mass produced. People want to feel a kinship to their spaces and their belongings, and color creates these connections. Independent, intuitive color choices – that overwhelming gut instinct balanced between the mind’s logical choice and the heart’s desire – is the epitome of creative confidence.”

As a futurist, Kiki’s relationship to “the past” is deliberately practical rather than sentimental. “As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20,” she says. “The hope is that we learn from researching the past – honoring by repeating what worked, or being inspired to improve for the future. Without historical data, analysis, and trend tracking over years, decades, or even centuries, there would be no educated projections.” 

And technically, Kiki notes, the past has never stopped informing the present: “From the linseed oils of the past to the plant-based coatings of today. From the virgin resins of yesterday to the recycled plastic powder coatings of today. From traditional mid-century rotogravure printing with limited patterns of woodgrain or patina to digitally printed pattern making with infinite design possibilities of today.” Materials science, in other words, is its own kind of heritage story – one where old techniques keep finding new expression.

No conversation about this year’s forecast is complete without a chance for designers to play with the collection of 48 trending hues, so we asked some of our forecasters to curate their own personal palettes that embody the design story of Revive.

Ashley Banbury, who brings her background in historic restoration and color to her work in homeowner trends and guidance in the selection of our Color of the Year, built a simple palette that leans into everyday livability: Celery SW 6421 (154-C1), White Duck SW 7010 (254-C5), Stolen Kiss SW 7586 (275-C1), and Mountain Fig SW 9690 from our Designer Color Collection. “These colors create a story of self-expression, where calming tones come together with personal creativity,” Ashley says. “The palette feels familiar yet unexpected, offering a balance of comfort and character that feels curated over time.”

For Sue’s palette, she sees the color choices as only half the assignment. “The through-line here isn’t hue; it’s evidence of process.” The anchor she chose is Clove SW 9605, “a hand-mixed, iron-rich brown-black – the deepest note in an old lacquer box.” From there the palette moves through Taiga SW 9654, “the green of aged copper and kitchen gardens,” and Reynard SW 6348 (125-C5), “the hand-thrown clay; the color of a thing made on a wheel, not a mold.” High Sierra SW 9588 rounds out the neutral ground: “not white, but undyed; the color of a material before anyone tried to improve it.” A note of Humorous Green SW 6918 (146-C1) adds levity, what she calls “a little nostalgic sparkle, where the palette gets its glint.”

Kiki’s palette – Drift of Mist SW 9166 (238-C2), Celery SW 6421 (154-C1), Beachcomber SW 9617, Dutch Tile Blue SW 0031, Reynard SW 6348 (125-C5), Trinket SW 6685 (135-C7), Secret Garden SW 6181 (213-C7), and Clove SW 9605 – speaks to past and present in constant flux, built on tonal shift rather than a single anchor color. It’s a natural extension of her futuristic philosophy, and where more traditional vintage stories root themselves in popular hues, Kiki reaches toward something more subtle – reverence and artistry, rendered in tones that more deeply examine what these mean to us today.

Anne Diedrich, the Trendsight Team’s multi-family design expert, developed a palette that is built for range: Warm Winter SW 9506, Eminent Bronze SW 6412 (144-C7), Mountain Fig SW 9690, Perfect Periwinkle SW 9065 (179-C5), Mauve Finery SW 6282 (190-C2), Cordovan SW 6027 (191-C7), Celery SW 6421 (154-C1), and White Snow SW 9541. It reflects, as Anne describes it, “a balanced mix of timeless foundational hues and unexpected strategic accents,” designed to hold up across multiple market segments, from residential and multifamily to hospitality, workplace, and healthcare. Paired with natural finish materials, she notes, the palette is meant to “reveal a revered rawness and charm with an elevated and evolved aesthetic,” proof that a heritage story can flex from a single custom home to an entire commercial portfolio without losing its integrity.

If Revive is reshaping what homeowners want, Sue Wadden argues it should also reshape how the industry talks about color long-term. “For a long time, color was marketed on aesthetics and emotions. ‘Here’s a beautiful color, here’s how it makes you feel.’ That’s necessary, but it’s no longer sufficient. What Revive tells me is that people increasingly want the story behind the color: where the hue comes from, what inspired it, what it’s made of, why it exists. Provenance is becoming part of the product.”

To let the design story of Revive inspire your next project, use your Design+ membership to order your complimentary designer-exclusive sample kit of Rewild, our 2027 Colormix Trend Forecast.