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.
It takes a day to paint a room, your not inheriting anyones paint job unless you want to.
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.
[edit] punctuation.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...