8 Designer-Approved Ways to Update Modern Farmhouse Style

The modern farmhouse decorating style has been popular for the past decade, and recent rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Rest assured, there are still plenty of fans of this comfortable, casual look. If you're one of them, you might wonder how you can freshen it up a bit.

This 1890s Hamptons farmhouse by interior designer Allison Babcock is a playbook for doing just that. In it, she marries traditional farmhouse architecture and surfaces (think beadboard and well-worn wood floors) with Italian midcentury modern style, including its hallmark geometric patterns, saturated colors, and sleek furniture shapes. It's a unique combination that gives the beloved modern farmhouse look a shot of new energy. "I love the juxtaposition of American farmhouse with the comfort and playfulness of Italian design," Babcock says.

Here's how the designer blended these two seemingly opposite design styles to come up with a whole new look. Use her ideas to help take your modern farmhouse decor in an exciting new direction.

Choose Curvy Furniture

White beadboard walls and ceilings and a worn-in wood floor set a farmhouse backdrop, but Babcock's furniture choices are distinctive, starting with the curved sofa upholstered in a classic 1947 Josef Frank fabric pattern. Curves and circles reappear on the coffee table and the saffron-color rattan chair, which is also a midcentury Italian design. "That's what I like to call a personality chair," Babcock says. Repeating the same rounded shapes throughout the room makes the big departure that this furniture represents look intentional.

Paint a Pattern

Wood floors, whether stained or painted, are another hallmark of modern farmhouse design—but they're rarely as bold as this floor. Rather than replace the worn floors with tile, Babcock had an eye-popping chevron pattern painted on in white and two shades of blue. The design is based on one by midcentury Italian architect Gio Ponti, who is considered the godfather of Italian design. It packs quite a visual punch, especially against a wall of built-in cabinets in dark wood. Sleek white perimeter cabinets, quartz countertops, and barstools are other modern counterpoints to the dark wood.

Go for Colorful Tile

Subway tile is a classic backsplash choice in lots of design styles, including modern farmhouse, and is usually seen in white or a light neutral color, but this turquoise tile makes a major statement. The strong, saturated color balances the painted floor and puts a modern new twist on a kitchen full of traditional elements like white Shaker-style cabinets with cup pulls.

Add Abstract Art

The dining room features a white beadboard wainscot and a big farmhouse table, but that's where the expected farmhouse-style trappings stop. Abstract artwork in brown and cobalt blue skews the room toward the bold and modern, and the vintage woven dining chairs are yet another of the midcentury modern Italian design elements sprinkled throughout this house. Even the farmhouse table plays against type with an X-shaped base in sleek black.

Pair White with One Color

White walls and bedding are popular in the modern farmhouse style because they make for a serene and restful look. But the addition of a single accent color—here that's school bus yellow—to a mostly white bedroom is an easy way to bring major energy. To achieve this much visual punch from just one color, Babcock used it in large amounts and in multiple spots around the room—some of them, like the window trim, unexpected and playful.

Paint Beadboard

The subtle textural pattern of beadboard gets pumped up a notch when painted a color with a big personality, like this turquoise pulled from the kitchen floor for the adjacent powder room. The deliberately streaky, strié finish gives the wall a sense of age and patina that puts it in better harmony with the age of the house than a solid coat of paint would.

Have Fun with Light Fixtures

The lounge is filled with handsome midcentury and Art Deco furniture, but it's the unusual ceiling light fixture that adds the most distinctive note. The unique fixture is made from bottles of Campari Soda cocktails wired around a light source. Campari is an Italian liqueur recognized for its vibrant red color, making this light fixture another clever nod to Italian design as well as a cheeky conversation piece.

Go Bold Outside

On the farmhouse's gracious covered porch, Babcock again went for unexpected furniture picks. While wicker or rattan is what you often see on a farmhouse porch, the sleek glass-topped table and metal hairpin chairs she chose look just as breezy and inviting thanks to their light visual footprint and white finish. The shiny blue painted floor (Benjamin Moore's Hamilton Blue) is a bold grounding for the airy furniture, and the chair cushions carry through the theme from indoors. "Stripes are so Italian," Babcock says.