Australia's most searched interior design styles

Australian interior design coverage has a Hamptons problem. Open any homes magazine and the style dominates. It reads as the default aspiration for a well-off Australian home. So we went looking for how many people actually search for it.

This study measures monthly Google search demand for 18 interior design styles across all eight states and territories. It measures stated public interest, not what gets built. The gap between the two turned out to be the interesting part.

The national ranking.

Summing state-level demand gives the national picture. Scandinavian takes it, but only just, and the top three are close enough that any of them could lead in a given month.

Hamptons is twelfth.

At roughly 240 searches a month, Hamptons sits behind maximalist, a style usually framed as a niche reaction against the mainstream. It is outranked by Scandinavian, mid-century modern, minimalist, modern farmhouse, contemporary, boho, industrial, Mediterranean, coastal, maximalist and French provincial.

That does not make Hamptons unpopular. It means editorial attention and search demand have drifted apart. A style can dominate the imagery an industry produces while the public looks up something else. Hamptons has also been covered for long enough that most people already know what it looks like. You do not search for what you can already picture.

The same gap shows up at the other end of the cycle. Japandi is fifteenth at about 180 searches a month despite being one of the most written-about styles of the last three years.

Mid-century modern wins more states than the national leader.

Scandinavian tops the national table. But mid-century modern is the most searched style in five of the eight states and territories: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and the ACT. Scandinavian only takes the national title on the strength of Queensland, the third largest market, plus Tasmania.

This is the sort of result that gets lost in national averages. A studio working across states is not designing for one taste.

Where each state searches against type.

Raw rankings mostly track population. The more useful question is which styles a state searches disproportionately, measured against that style's share of national demand. A figure above 1.0 means the state searches it more than its size would predict.

Queensland over-indexes on coastal interiors by 27 per cent. That is no surprise for a state built along its coastline. New South Wales over-indexes on Mediterranean by the same margin. Western Australia sits furthest from Sydney's north shore, yet over-indexes on Hamptons by 24 per cent.

South Australia leans art deco by 25 per cent, and Victoria leans French provincial by 14 per cent. None of these are enormous swings, but they are consistent, and they suggest local architecture shapes what people search for more than national media does.

What this is and is not.

Search volume measures the number of people typing a term, which is a proxy for public interest and nothing more. It does not measure what gets built, what gets specified, or what anyone spends. A style with modest search demand can dominate the high end of the market, and a heavily searched style can be mostly students and mood boards.

The honest reading is that this data tells you what Australians are curious about, not what Australians commission. Both matter, and they are clearly not the same thing.

Method: we collected monthly average Google search volumes on 17 August 2026, using the Google Ads keyword data available through DataForSEO. Each of the eight states and territories was queried with state-level location targeting. Each of the 18 styles used one representative query. National figures are the sum of state demand rather than a separate national query, so they exclude searches Google could not attribute to a state. Anyone is welcome to repeat it.