Cool, contemporary interiors should line up for the chicest design trend to hit the high street. Hot on the heels of the fashionistas, interior designers and leading stores picked up on the hot craze for long and lean stripes and ran with it. Now stripes are gracing everything from lights, cushions and rugs, to bedlinen, art canvasses, walls and even floors and in a myriad of colours too, so your home won't feel left out.

The beauty of stripes is that they go with absolutely any interior. Forget filling the whole room with matching stripes everywhere you look - too many will make you go cross-eyed and the word overkill springs to mind! Instead, think restraint and pick a few key items to complement an existing décor.

The trick is to pick out two key colours from your room's scheme and use this as a starting point for choosing a stripy combination. So for instance, if your room is orange and white with brown leather furniture, you might choose to hang a massive, oversized, and achingly chic canvas on one wall in a mix of orange, red, brown, beige and white stripes and pick out just a few more co-ordinating stripes in the form of a vase and a couple of cushions mixed in with some plain dyed or geometric designs. If you really want to make a statement, why not mask off stripes in varying widths on one wall and paint in a combination to suit your room. It needs a steady hand, a plumb line and is extremely time consuming but boy, does it look fantastic.

A whole wall as a work of art? Of course, if you do attempt this, avoid adding too many more stripes as this is quite enough for any room to handle. Floors too can earn their stripes; Either paint the whole floor using two different shades of specialist floor paint, or add a more subtle border around the edge of a painted floor.

If you go the route of investing in striped accessories such as bedlinen or key items of furniture such as sofas and chairs, keep walls as plain as possible so they don't fight with the furniture. And if you're thinking of adding more pattern, avoid traditional designs such as ditsy florals, paisley or fleur de lys - they're too classic for this modern look. Instead, mix with graphic florals, checks and geometrics.

Form an orderly queue for our line-up of the coolest stripes around...