From July 30 to August 2, the Sandton Convention Centre will be remade through rooms intended to lower the pulse. Milky ivories, oat tones, clay, muted olive and washed blue make up Decorex Africa’s 2026 palette, colours chosen to diffuse light and ease visual tension. The show has dubbed its theme The Soft Life, a phrase carried from social media into a rejection of lives organised around pressure. Its danger is that the idea too easily becomes another purchasable look.
“The Soft Life is not beige on beige,” says Alan Hayward, one of Decorex Africa’s creative directors alongside Garreth van Niekerk. For them, softness may be found in colour, an inherited cabinet or a chair that accommodates the body generously. It extends into sustainability too, through local making, repairable furniture, traceable materials and objects designed to remain in use.
Van Niekerk traces the phrase to Nigeria, where it emerged online as a desire for ease amid lives shaped by relentless work and struggle. Black women helped carry it into a wider social media conversation around rest, pleasure and release from compulsory resilience. In <a href="https://absafricatv.com/mzanzi-festival-brings-spirit-of-south-africa-to-st-helens/" title="Mzanzi Festival brings spirit of South Africa to St Helens”>South Africa, it entered popular culture strongly enough to give Lebohang Masango’s 2022 book The Soft Life its title. “It’s a rejection of hustle culture”, he says, and of the promise that relentless work will eventually deliver the correct house, school and life.
Online, the rejection often appears in the form of holidays, luxury and conspicuous ease, privilege wearing a bathrobe. Decorex wants something less escapist. Its version includes ritual, rest, community and environmental consequences. A table kept long enough to gather scratches, a chair repaired rather than replaced, or an object carrying the memory of another home asks more of softness than a room assembled for immediate effect.
IKEA’s Life at Home reporting links joy at home to comfort, self-expression and time with others, while Pinterest’s 2026 forecast finds people adapting trends to their own lives rather than copying them whole. Taste is becoming less obedient to trends and more personal, even when rooms are theatrical or richly coloured.
Decorex is large enough for this mood to influence more than styling. Its Cape Town edition drew 26,974 visitors, hosted more than 300 exhibitors and recorded 7% growth in trade attendance. The upcoming Johannesburg edition will bring together more than 370 exhibitors. The theme will sit before retailers, architects, hospitality buyers, developers and homeowners, deciding what enters rooms next.
And yet, the question is sharper than whether bouclé remains fashionable. What will buyers recognise as comfort and pay to preserve? A chair that accommodates a wider body, a lamp that does not glare, a room where sound does not ricochet and a table made to survive repair all turn softness into something tangible. They also reveal how quickly the theme thins when reduced to plush surfaces.
Hayward extends the idea through the life of an object. Something made locally, designed to last and produced with less waste may be softer than a cheaper item destined for replacement. In the home, this can mean allowing an inherited cabinet to sit beside a contemporary South African chair, rather than buying a complete identity from one showroom.
As African designers gain international recognition, Van Niekerk sees a corresponding confidence taking hold at home. He points to figures such as Thebe Magugu, Thabisa Mjo and Laduma Ngxokolo, whose success has strengthened pride in local creative identity. Homes are becoming records of taste assembled across price, age and origin, with customers helping to define South African design for themselves.
That widening sense of what may belong in a contemporary South African interior reaches an unexpected point at Decorex. Featured artist Arminda da Silva, who works as ImagineThat, was invited to interpret The Soft Life through her AI practice, testing how a digital image might move beyond the screen and enter the physical language of design. Working in Midjourney on her phone, she developed the show’s strange, bodily creature, which makers associated with AfricaBurn then translated into sculpture, fabric and physical scale.
What makes the collaboration relevant to The Soft Life is not simply the creature’s yielding form. Da Silva often worked from the couch or bed between the demands of motherhood. The tool returned creativity to a period when she could not simply sit down and paint, allowing work to bend around life rather than requiring life to disappear.
The image leaves Da Silva’s phone and passes through decisions about scale, fabric, structure and construction before anyone encounters it on the exhibition floor. By then, it carries the choices of several people, each responding to something the screen could only suggest. AI becomes part of the process without claiming the whole of it. Nor does the screen dictate what finally appears.
That passage may be the clearest test of Decorex’s theme. Softness cannot remain a colour chart or a private retreat from pressure. It must survive contact with price, technology, waste, memory and the bodies a room receives. In Sandton, the more revealing moment may come when a tired visitor settles into a chair and begins to picture it among the things already at home, within a life assembled over time. The stand recedes; the chair has already entered that life.
Decorex Joburg takes place from July 30 to August 2 at the Sandton Convention Centre.
