We asked Shea McGee a deceptively simple question with a lot riding on it: if you had to bet on one bathroom trend defining 2026 – a finish, a color, a material – what would it be? Given the designer's long-standing affinity for warm metals, her answer caught us off guard. Nickel.
‘I think the polished nickel is going to be the trend of the year because I think people are ready to move,’ she says, pointing to a collective exhaustion with golds, gunmetals, and other aged finishes that – through sheer overuse – have started to do the storytelling for us. ‘We’re seeing so many silver accents in decor, lots of silver frames and silver decorative objects, and I think that as people warm up to the idea of kind of going back to silver tones, you’ll see them go back to those classic polished nickel tones in the bathroom.’
