Wallpaper's back, colour's bright, and anything goes at Decorex 2013

If a girl were to pick a profession for her mother-in-law to be in, interior design would certainly rank in the Top 5.  I got lucky.  Gill Bencard has been decorating houses out of her shop at The Uncommon Touch in Clapham for decades.  She has great taste, knows all of the high quality producers, gets me deals on fabrics and has produced some stunning curtains for the house.

Once a year she takes me to Decorex, the trade show for the interior design industry.  If you're the kind of person who likes flipping through home decor magazines, this is heaven.  Booth after booth of fabrics, wallpapers, fixtures and fittings, furniture and accessories, all at the top end of the market.  Spreading for half a mile under a purpose-built temporary building in Kensington Gardens.

This is my third year as an interloper at this design industry gig, and from this vast experience I can tell you about these trends:

• Wallpaper is back.  Yippee!  After more than a decade of trendy minimalism and solid-coloured, painted walls, this most traditional of wall treatments is coming back into fashion.  Maybe it's the rise of MadMen.  Lord knows we saw a lot of bold, retro '60s and '70s inspired stuff.  But there are plenty of traditional patterns as well.  Which is a good thing, because it's what I came to the show looking for.  Harlequin's Angelica, pictured below, may soon be gracing my bedroom wall.  It's subtle botanical print picking up the pattern of fern leaves going up our curtains.

• Colours are bolder and brighter than in past years.  Blue is seeing a big resurgence after years in the wilderness.  If you're young and trendy, neon is back.

• There isn't much of a middle ground in the industry.  Vendors seem to be abandoning it.  You're either selling to the majority of the population via HomeBase and other big DIY stores, or you're focusing on a top end where £100 per meter for fabric and £75 per roll for wallpaper isn't exceptional.  This show definitely caters to the high end. Pity the poor middle classes, who want something better than what the masses have, but don't want to spend a fortune.  But if you want something different ... and something that doesn't scream out the exact year you did up the room ... you need to shop at this end.

• There's a disturbing amount of metallic stuff around.  Bling is big.  Gold wallpaper, cloth of silver fabric.  Hell, I even saw a gossamer gold fabric with crystals woven into it.  A few too many stands looked like they were hawking stuff looted from fallen dictators' palaces.

• There's plenty of traditional stuff around, but it costs big.  Turns out you can still get hand painted  naturalistic wallpaper panels from China, just like they put into the 18th century country houses.  But you'll pay.  Clearly the oligarchs not doing bling are spending on historically accurate restoration.

• But there also seems to be a trend for quirky, individualistic stuff that will get your visitors chatting.  My favourite new pattern book for fabric and wallpaper comes from one of my mother-in-law's old favourites, Linwood.  (Pictured above.)  Their fabulous "ephemera" wallpaper range has designs based on old travel tickets, antique sporting prints, sailboat blueprints and antique letters.  There's one comprised of 19th century postcards of Florence that may eventually make its way into our guest bathroom.

Most importantly, I accomplished my objective.  In addition to Angelica for the master bedroom, our dining room continues on its bath of deep tradition, with a Sanderson gold damask wallpaper (it's much subtler that it sounds) to join the Burgundy damask velvet drapes.  And after years of fantasising about decorating a room in William Morris prints, my office is about to be papered in "willow" with "arcadia" in the windows.  Let other people go for modernity.  I am going to spend my days working in a space that looks like Oscar Wilde just stepped out for a cigar.