How Beige Took Over American Homes | Hacker News Reader

How Beige Took Over American Homes

atlasobscura.com

52 pointsprismatic71 comments

It's an entertaining article, but I feel like a bit of intuition can make the answer obvious: it's hard to sell a home with rooms that are bright, unique colors. Not everyone likes red/green/blue, but everyone can agree with blank-slate colors or colors that mimic raw building materials (beige for wood, gray for stone/metal, white for marble/slate/clay). They're not objectionable, therefore they can attract the largest demographic of interested buyers.

That's the point of the article. (You have to read the whole thing to get to it though.) Instead of decorating our homes the way we want to live, we started decorating it for resale, even if we had no intention of selling. This was caused by the TV telling us, "This is how you decorate your house." But the TV is focusing on flipping the house, not living in it. So now everything is beige, as if all our homes are about to be sold off at any moment, because people don't ask questions when they watch TV. They just do whatever it says to do.

That's why everyone does the repairs and improvements they've needed for years right before they sell.

> it's hard to sell a home with rooms that are bright, unique colors

I hate people that think like this. You are living in this house, correct? It is your home isn't it? Why are you so scared to make it yours.

First thing I did when I moved into my house was paint it. Every room. It didn't matter what the colour was before because I made it mine.

And I can't stand Beige.

The comment didn't state that beige in of itself is a bad colour, but when it comes to selling the house, a neutral colours works best because presumably it gives prospective buyers the idea of starting with a blank slate and not inheriting someone else's design decisions.

> not inheriting someone else's design decisions.

It takes a day to paint a room, your not inheriting anyones paint job unless you want to.

That's not really the point, though. Being in the market for a new house I can say that I really have to fight certain biases to look past a home that has hideous color choices (subjectively speaking). I tend to then find more faults in these houses. Houses that are relatively neutral are much easier for me to envision what I'd do with them differently and so I find myself picturing my family living there. As a seller I would want to maximize more of the latter obviously.

Edit: I should also add that since we will be selling our house we recently painted the rooms that were "our colors" to more neutral ones to make it easier to sell.

It doesn't matter, it still shapes the buyer's opinion of the place, even if it's only subconsciously.

[edit] punctuation.

But most people don't repaint their house (in my experience, at least). If the paint colors don't offend them, they're OK with it.

It's costing you future money when you paint it a 'non-natural' color in the lost prospective buyers. This is fine if you're loaded with disposable income, but for the vast majority of the US it's not worth it.

This is false (or at least, is not universally true, and is false pretty frequently). It's costing you some of the future buyer pool, but making it more desireable to another portion of the buyer pool: those who have similar taste to you. Because these are exactly the people who are most likely to like other (non-paint-color) aspects of a house that you also like, this is a positive trade off (unless you anticipate needing to sell on short notice, in which case, yes, be as generic as possible).

Make the house you want to live in. There are enough people that someone else will want to live in it, too, and in the meantime you'll be happier.

No, if people like to have funky colors, they would be expecting to paint a house when they buy it anyway.

>There are enough people that someone else will want to live in it,

Sure, but not nearly as many as would want to live in it if it didn't have a purple shag carpet and black walls.

Anything you do to reduce your buyer pool costs you money. You either accept a shallow pool of offers or repaint it to undo whatever it was you did to start with when you're ready to sell, which also costs money.

> No, if people like to have funky colors, they would be expecting to paint a house when they buy it anyway.

This argument applies equally to people who like beige, if they even exist. Some people are good at imagining what a house will look like after painting. Most are not. Of the latter group, some like bold colors. None of this should be controversial at all.

>Some people are good at imagining what a house will look like after painting. Most are not.

Baseless conjecture. If what you were saying was true, we wouldn't be in the situation of having so many "blank slate" colors as the housing standard.

> It's costing you future money when you paint it a 'non-natural' color in the lost prospective buyers

And how is that? No one is coming to buy it while it is my home. Oh, and it was painted not beige in the first place, so apparently it didn't cost them 'future money' either.

Your home isn't an investment.

Why not just repaint it in more market-friendly colors when you decide to sell it?

The irony is that beige became the painting itself, because of the media-driven trend towards overwhelming interior neutrality, spurred by the idea that it added concrete value to our asset-houses. What's new is that people are looking at their homes as an asset instead of as a place to live. Instead of making it suit their personalities, they're trying to appeal to a (possibly nonexistent) market.

I'd buy the "beige adds resale value" argument if it was normal to flip your house every year or so. But people are living in these houses--for years, yet they leave the walls beige (or more weirdly, repainting them in a slightly different shade of beige).

You can buy a house but you can't buy taste. Most people look to the media to tell them what other people think is tasteful, and they simply ape that. See also: Bland McMansion architecture. See also: most cars are either white, black, gray or red. See also: media-driven definitions of physical beauty.

You can probably recognize beautiful art, but you probably don't have the talent to make it.

I copy because I'm not an interior designer. I recognize interiors I like, but I don't really know how to create one I love from scratch without examples.

I'd say there's more blue cars than red.

This (and painting everything beige) has been the advice of real estate agents for many decades, so I'm not sure I buy into the author's assertion that the rise of cable TV created it.

When I was a carpenter's helper in high school (early 90's), every house that was being flipped had to have beige walls, tile and accessories, though the appliances were stainless, so not much has changed.

The author's assertion still applies though. If you talked to an estate agent, they'd tell you "paint it beige". But you wouldn't have that hammered into your brain unless you talked to an estate agent. Her thesis is that the media added a lot of pressure for everybody to conform to advice that applies mostly to prospective sellers

This explains the few houses that are about to be sold. What about the beige houses that are lived in for decades? Do these people all coincidentally like beige?

People are different. Not everybody cares about colors. I tend not to make the effort to move off of white. My wife has painted many rooms. Neither of us is wrong or right, just different.

When we were last looking for houses, I visited a couple of houses for which a beige makeover would have been a legitimate improvement. One house had a living area that was Post-It Note yellow from floor to ceiling, unbroken and undifferentiated. Perhaps it didn't look so bad when it was furnished but even with my diminished concern for color I can't imagine it could ever have looked good to me. Presumably it worked for them, though, since it had clearly been that way for a while (i.e., not a recent makeover just to sell the house).

Something that clearly was a makeover just to sell the house was the kitchen in the house we ultimately ended up buying. Good news... it wasn't beige! Bad news... my wife hated the color. Even I mustered up a signficant dislike for it. Salmon, with fairly light wooden cabinetry. Fortunately, we saw past the color and simply painted it fairly soon after moving in, but it's not hard to imagine that impacts buying decisions. (The house had several other bold color choices. Most of the rest were nice enough. We've since painted over all of them, but perhaps rather it would be more accurate to say we've decorated over them, with decoration themes that were incompatible with the original colors. The only thing in the house that we painted over was the salmon in the kitchen.)

Neither of us watch HGTV but we happened to once catch an episode where some professional designer did exactly the kitchen we ended up with, salmon with light wood cabintry. If it wasn't the episode they got the idea from it might as well have been. Still blech, professional or otherwise.

That's what always gets me when I watch these "House Hunters" type shows. People will hem and haw over what color the walls are painted, or what style of curtains are hung up, or the light fixtures, or a hundred other tiny details that they could change out in a weekend after they move in, rather than things like the layout, the property itself, or the construction, which are things that you either can't fix, or are prohibitively expensive to change.

Saying "I don't like the wall colors" when buying a house is like saying "I don't like the default desktop background" when buying a computer.

>One house had a living area that was Post-It Note yellow from floor to ceiling, unbroken and undifferentiated.

When I looked at houses an alarming number of them (including the one we bought) were painted this way! I cannot imagine the rationale behind that, it looks absolutely awful. Another troubling (to me) trend is cheap looking wall stickers. So yeah, beige must be out now!... That doesn't mean its replaced with better.

Bold colors are hard to do right (I am not artsy) so I don't try too hard making things unique. Neutral is fine with me (which includes beige). I also absolutely detest decorations, they are nothing but clutter to me. If it doesn't serve a functional purpose I want it out of my house.

Maybe the house was beige when they bought it, and they didn't care enough to paint it.

The fact that people make multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar decisions based on features that can be changed for $40 at Home Depot is some pretty damning evidence that the housing market is wildly irrational.

Rather than just the housing market, I think it's evidence that people are wildly irrational.

Of course, if many people are frequently wildly irrational you have to start either questioning what rationality is or being worried about the general ability of people to make rational decisions...

The OP is Kate Wagner. She also writes the hilarious and informative McMansion Hell tumblr:

http://www.mcmansionhell.com/

Good catch. As long as we're trading catty design sites, I recommend FYNCT:

http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com

She needs an editor. I can't even tell what she's trying to say here.

"In order to keep up with the Joneses, grew dramatically during the period between 1973 and 2009."

The trend of "keeping up with the Joneses", grew dramatically during the period between 1973 and 2009.

I agree it could use a rework, but it's not that hard to figure out.

Can anyone tell me where the American trend of decorative non-functional shutters came from? It annoys me to put fake shutters on windows because they look fake, which makes them look odd. Especially ones that are too small to actually cover the window. That is soon weird and I can't imagine how you can make that mistake! Why not just real shutters?

Now on topic, I bought a beige couch because it was cheap, wasn't thinking about design. I have now learned beige is the worst color for a couch because it shows the stains from when I inevitable spill something on it.

A lot of houses nowadays are full of fake and/or non-functional features. The faux brick facades slapped over top of cheaper materials (plus the ultra-tacky "faux brick on only the front of the house" trick). Columns that support nothing. Faux-finished surfaces and fake wall treatments to give the illusion of age. Faux sandblasted wood beams. Faux stone panels (even entire fake fireplaces). I've seen fake chandeliers. They all exist so customers can have a "style" without paying for substance.

> (plus the ultra-tacky "faux brick on only the front of the house" trick).

A nightmare. Even worse are the fake cobblestones on one side of the house, and then vinyl. It looks like a giant photo decal.

And the weird thing is, you can immediately tell a "premium" house (e.g. a Passive House) from a mass market one by the simplicity and lack of pretense.

Yes, the same thing is true of the real traditional buildings. They are not overdone, they just are.

So I was under the impression that most non-functional fireplaces were once functional. But I also am used to older houses, I grew up in a town with a lot of older construction.

I'm guessing the days before window glass, and/or parts of the country (e.g. northeast) where shutters can protect your window glass from the debris of a nasty gale.

Many parts of design are inherited from since-abandoned functionality. We have a notion of "how a house is supposed to look", and we were taught that shutters are part of that.

There is no reason that I can think of to make shutters non-functional. No reason to "abandon" their functionality; functional ones can't be that much more expensive. It makes no sense, like pants with fake pockets. I had shutters when I lived in Europe and they are nice to have.

I live in the Northeast and shutters here are almost exclusively fake around here and many make no sense. (like tiny shutters on the side of a large bay window).

It just provides an accent to an otherwise uniform surface. The fake ones cost much less than real ones.

Why wear belts with dresses? Why do cars have racing stripes?

I feel like I'm having a stroke when I see those shutters. You're not the only one.

There is a paint recycling service around my town (Portland) that filters and mixes old paints of different colors. It is very affordable, less than 1/2 the price, but as you would guess most of the batches turned out to be a bland beige-like color. Its performs as well as new paint and many people I knew who flipped houses would use it. These houses ended up mostly beige, such as in this article. It was a practical decision for them, not based on trends on TV or anything just trying to save cost and make more profit!

Beige is a neutral color, harmless, inoffensive -- but less harsh than white and more distinct than gray. It's a default we settle into when we want to convey some sort of utilitarian appeal that's bound to find purchase with the masses. It's not just homes or furniture: consider PC cases before about 1998 when the iMac came out. Consider the background of this very web site.

> It's not just homes or furniture: consider PC cases before about 1998 when the iMac came out.

Beige PCs were more of an '80s thing. In the early '90s, most manufacturers shifted to gray.

Honestly, though, I miss the colorful iMacs of the late '90s. Now they're all this boring white. I like seeing computers that come in a variety of color options. It's actually influenced my purchasing decisions for phones: my current phone is an ice blue Nexus 5X, and my last one was a bright red Nexus 5.

As I recall it, beige was the standard PC color -- even for Apple kit -- until well into the 1990s. I remember rows of brand new beige Dells running NT4 one place I worked in 1997.

Colorful iMacs hail from a time when Apple was a computer company. These days, PCs are a secondary concern for them.

The same thing is true of home electronics: you can have any color you want, so long as it's black.

There was a bit a few months ago about the difficulty of making white plastics look good (basically, Apple makes it look easy but it's hard), which tangentially explained the predominance of black/grey/beige.

At least this site has an orange top bar, which is more color than the average house has anywhere.

You're perfectly able to repaint your Hackernews header beige if you think it will help your resale value /s

Makes you yearn for the aesthetic of the 1950s where items of furniture or appliances would add a splash of color. I'd even take the 1960s when things got a bit nuts, or the 1970s when people were willing to take chances.

The stuff they sell these days is designed to be as inoffensive as possible and yet seems so utterly sterile and devoid of personality and life.

Yeah, I saw a bit of that 1970s look. We were house hunting, and we looked at this place. The living room walls were vertical stripes, alternating between bright green carpet (on the walls, remember) and mirrors.

It was an interesting look... for maybe five minutes. To live in for a decade? Not so much. We passed.

I might be wrong, but I thought that 1970s house design was pretty similar to today, except with orange and brown everywhere instead of beige. There are few McMansion features as tacky as popcorn ceilings and dark brown fake vertical floor-to-ceiling wood paneling.

There was a lot of carry-over from the psychadelic 1960s where green and yellow were still in play, though oppressive levels of dark woodgrain and heavy use of brown were creeping in.

You wouldn't go all-in on that palette though, you'd have a colorful lamp, couch, or artwork to offset it.

Of course, those that played it very conservatively would go all-in. It just seems that more people are using a very restrained palette today for no other reason than bizarre conformity.

Eh, not hard to paint your walls the colors you like and I see plenty of crazy furniture colors at IKEA. The "white blank walls and wood floor" is a choice people make and like—there are plenty of colorful houses.

I like beige and neutrals. Minus a soft teal accent wall, my whole house is various shades of blue-grey and beige. (Excluding the yellow guest bedroom and faux-painted basement I haven't gotten around to painting.)

I think some of this is current "modern" aesthetics: in the same way we don't have avocado refrigerators and brutalist architecture. I think TV reflects those trends rather than the other way around.

And sure, resale has something to do with it. I'm going to budget $5k to have my next house repainted, because that's what it costs. But I'd make the same aesthetic choices no matter what.

I can't help but notice that this very website on which we are writing comments is beige. ;)

An earlier article that looks at beige walls in YouTube videos: https://medium.com/message/the-american-room-3fce9b2b98c5 "The curtains are drawn. Some light comes through, casting a small glow on the top left of the air conditioner. It’s daytime. The wall is an undecorated slab of beige. That is the American room."

Is this any different from the '80s and '90s? I'm no fan of beige-everything in houses but it sure doesn't seem like a phenomenon of the 2000s to me (which the article claims it is). US apartments and homes have defaulted to being oppressively beige for pretty much my entire life.

FYI, a very subtle grey is the new beige.

You should also watch the commercials on HGTV. The ones for paint never show anyone painting a wall beige. It's always something more vivid.

Personally, I prefer beige over white, which probably still dominates as a wall color for homes undergoing sales prep.

So to a certain degree, HGTV has doubled the palette for us casual decorators.

PS -- I haven't watched HGTV for a couple of years - cut the cord. Are they still pushing granite counters / stainless steel appliances?

Beige is warm, cozy, and has a natural feel, simple as that. Perhaps its been overdone for sales purposes, but you are free to customize as you see fit upon purchase.

My favorite term for this style is BeigeHaus, as coined by McMansionHell.

Edit: Who apparently is also the author of this article. Fitting.

Seems every decision people take in regards to their Homes is based on a perceived resale value. Thats the reason average homes have useless features like formal dining room or large fireplaces. Most people seldom use those and those spaces can be repurposed for better use.

“Beige. Now there’s a committment to colour.”

— Alf, Season 2, episode 24, “Tequila” (1988).

Here in New England, there are a lot of 100-200 year old houses with beautiful green/red and green/blue color schemes. Much prettier (and better resale value) than beige, IMO.

Some New England towns, almost every single house is that white clapboard with green shutters and trim pattern.

I bought a cookie-cutter house that came in beige, and after a few years I picked a dark red and repainted my living room. Everyone said I was crazy when I told them what I was doing, but after it was finished and I invited them over to have a look they inevitably said "that looks a lot better than I was expecting." Most of them even said it was a marked improvement.

Beige is boring. I'm no interior designer, but just about anything is better than beige. Pick a color, give it a shot. I picked out a couple of shades of red and painted a few large patches on the walls just to see how they'd turn out, then used that to narrow down which one I would prefer.

Same reason we have a proliferation of white, grey, and black cars. The resale value is less likely to be adversely affected.

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