WE have become a nation of interior designers - of mini Laurence Llewelyn-Bowens desperate to make our homes chic talking points, so du jour it hurts.

Check the stats for proof: the most recent figures show that spending on DIY is at a seven-year high. A study by Anglian Home Improvements found we redecorate our home 36 times throughout our lifetime, spending £36,205 in the process. Meanwhile, our television channels are jostling with home improvement and property shows whose main thrust is the interior design makeover. When The Great Interior Design Challenge broadcast its first series in the UK, it seemed like just another Great British Bake Off wannabe – a desperate bid to swap star baker for star maker and turn plywood into the new soggy bottom. But, with this year’s series in a primetime BBC2 slot, and interior design superstar Kelly Hoppen on the team, it suddenly started to feel like a genuine popularising force, bringing a new vocabulary of terms like maximalism, minimalism and mid-century modern, to the British public. Just as Changing Rooms defined a 90s Britain obsessed with fast furniture and home makeovers, The Great Interior Design Challenge seemed to be saying something about the new way we were relating to our homes.

Arguably the most significant impact on how we are shaping our homes is coming not from television, however, but via the internet, social media platforms and online businesses that are revolutionising the way we live. We are, via social networks like Pinterest and Instagram, gaining through-the-keyhole access to the design choices of millions of people. Many of us are curating and set-dressing our homes for a wide, sometimes global audience, rather than just our visiting friends. Last year, home improvement company Houzz won the Best App gong at the Google Play Awards. Meanwhile, the revolution of Airbnb, an online letting company, has also meant hundreds of thousands of people are now seeking to design their home in a way that is instantly marketable to visitors. These days you can even get your home revisualised over the internet with help from an online interior designer.

This is transforming not only the way we approach our own amateur home decor, but also the professional interior design business. Malcolm Duffin, a Fife-based interior designer, observes that the industry has transformed in the 30 years since he started. “When I was training there were a couple of periodicals and that was it. Customers now have more platforms, more magazines, more television. They have Houzz, Pinterest, and blogs and things like that, and internet sales have changed the dynamics of the business completely.”

Hence, interior designers are increasingly noticing that people are coming to them having already looked at blogs and home decor apps. “The reach of these platforms is global,” says Sally Homan, interior designer at Robertson Lindsay in Edinburgh. “Clients might come to us with images they’ve seen from anywhere in the world, especially the US.”

Homan herself uses Houzz and Pinterest as a publicity and networking platform, and observes that a bathroom she created for a Fife farmhouse has been shared many thousands of times in the United States.

The result has been a huge national awakening to design. But, as architect Gordon Duffy, founder of Studio DuB, who originally trained as an interior designer, observes: “Boy did we need it – because culturally the UK has been in a bit of a vacuum in terms of design.”

“People are more demanding now,” he says. “They’re more involved in their environment, their house. With the growth of Ikea a message developed that we can give you some good fresh design and it’s not going to cost me the earth. So people think, I can have something like that thing I saw on Grand Designs but it’s going to cost me next to nothing. Might fall apart, though, after the kids have jumped on it a couple of times.”

In recent years, as interiors historian and architect Edward Hollis puts it, there has “been a massive democratisation of home”, what might be called the Ikea revolution, in which it became possible to buy design that was cheap, functional, classless and global.

In the wake of this, social media has also brought a profound evolution in how we see interior design. Partly this is because the camera has been brought into what were hitherto relatively intimate spaces, opening them up, exposing and displaying them. Hollis, who is author of the book How To Make A Home, believes that social media has become the equivalent of what the public room used to be in homes of previous eras. It’s what we’re happy to present to the world. But that world now includes bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and random nooks and crannies. They are also staged environments, the selfies of our interior worlds.

“Homes,” he says, “are like little theatre sets. But the interesting question is, like with the selfie, who’s it for? Is it actually really for other people? Or is it really a kind of theatre set for the play of one’s own life and you’re a kind of spectator? We do up our homes to tell ourselves about who we think we are. We’re trying to kid ourselves as much as anyone else I suppose.”

But the internet has also brought still more complex relationships between ourselves and our homes, through the sharing economy. Hollis notes that he first observed what he describes as the “Airbnb effect”, when he found that the majority of flats on the street he lives in, the Royal Mile, were on the platform, and that through it he could actually peer inside them.

“Airbnb,” he says, “has made people occupy their houses in a really different way. Homes have become more public and more aspirational, because your home is literally on the market the whole time.” The platform is, he notes, “the Grindr of the interior”. “People are talking a lot about the Uberisation of the economy in general, and here we’re doing this to our homes. They’ve become these resources. It all results in a really fascinating self-censorship. You end up buying mini soaps and putting all sorts of things away that lie around your house.”

Nevertheless, at the heart of a lot of the new interest in interior design, is really an attempt to create living spaces for the kind of lives we want to live today. As architect Rebecca Wober points out, much of what we are seeing now, is part of a revolution with its roots in the legendary German art school Bauhaus and its principle that form should follow function. She quotes Arthur Korn, the architect who brought the philosophy to the UK, who saw such design as playing a role in the “whole range of scales from town to teaspoon”.

“People think of ‘modern’,” she says, “as a style, but actually it’s just a way of thinking. Actually it’s about designing things around you that work for your lifestyle and not getting locked into the lifestyles of people who lived in these places before us.”

Hence, trends in how people are adapting their interiors also reflect wider social changes. The open-plan home and the kitchen-dining room, for instance, reflect a new type of family or relationship dynamic. Wober describes: “It’s no longer the case that the woman’s in the home and the parlour looks neat and she’s slaving away in the kitchen. It’s more like it’s everybody’s job to hoover the flat, or to put the supper on the table, and so we join things up more. We change the spaces around us to suit the idea that we’re moving towards an equal society.”

Since interior design is all about finding solutions to ways of living, it’s not surprising that the big current trends revolve more around whole lifestyle philosophies: hygge, hipster aesthetic or even escapism (interiors designed for respite from our tech-lives). They’re about the stories we tell ourselves. Historian Edward Hollis describes, the hipster narrative as: “I’m showing I reject the neoliberal military industrial complex and all her evil works because I have found this beautiful mid-century chair in a junk shop in Hoxton and I’ve brought it home to my disused reconditioned loft apartment in Peckham on my bicycle.” It is, he says, “about trying to make something unrepeatable in a world where everything’s mass produced.”

The craze for hygge, an idea based around the Danish concept of cosiness or comfort, meanwhile, was an approach that incorporates everything from food and drink to lighting or installing a wood burning stove. Its popularity has driven a resurgence in the popularity of Scandinavian furniture that reaches way beyond Ikea. Justin Baddon, interior design guru, runs Moleta Munro an Edinburgh-based store selling interior furnishings with a Scandinavian aesthetic of clean lines. Baddon believes that Scandinavians “have got a lot of things right”, including, as he mentions, “the idea of creating a cosy home and a nice environment”, currently on the rise in the UK.

But Scandinavian design, he observes, is changing rapidly. “The idea,” he says, “that it’s all bleached wood with everything painted white is something of a misnomer.” A great many contemporary Scandinavian designers, he explains, are “also appreciating ideas that at some levels might be considered more Italian in their origins. The idea of luxury and huge comfort.”

Among the design trends Baddon predicts for the coming years are “colour” and a return to the grand statements of maximalism. “We’re going to see aspects of maximalism coming into interiors,” he says, “and things going back to looking a bit more Italian and showy. People will be heading for something more flamboyant, rather than the greyish interior. There is a sea of greys out there and there will be a reaction to that. Looks that evoke the 1970s are going to come back at some level, though somewhat watered down. And it’s already happening. Brasses and coppers which were really popular in the 1970s are replacing stainless steels and chromes.”