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There are a lot of good reasons for "the AirBNB look. White walls reflect ambient light and can enhance existing light sources. This can help make up for small (i.e: cheap) windows or limited light fixtures.

Natural wood is durable but not hard and cold like metal or glass, nor will it break down and end up permeating your cell membranes like plastic. Exposed beams make ceilings more interesting visually but also dampen echoes and make a space feel less sterile and prison-like.

Humans have been living in shelters made from wood and stone since the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if affinity toward these materials shows up somewhere in our DNA.

Not sure about the Nespresso machines.

It's often just fashion, not actual affinity for natural materials.

The "AirBnB look" IME is usually engineered wood (aka bits of wood + liberal amounts of adhesive) floor, or even vinyl (tile if they're fancy), not natural wood. Natural wood scratches too easily and is more expensive to deal with generally. So for a rental? Nah. But yeah in actually older places sometimes it's natural wood liberally coated with basically-plastic clear coat. ;)

A lot of the exposed beams are also not "real" structural beams. Often they're plastic too! Stuff like this. Lower maintenance, doncha know. https://www.architecturaldepot.com/BM.html

Reasonably acceptable coffee without demanding skill (aeropress, barista machine), potentially creating mess (anything using fresh grounds), or needing much in the way of regular cleaning & maintenance (any of the full-service machines which contain a dairy refrigerator). Inexpensive and mostly idiot-proof. Just ignore the grotesque environmental waste of the pods.

I'm surprised they didn't call it Architectural Digest look.

Empty palatial interiors staged to appear on magazine covers, but not necessarily lived in by actual humans. Sometimes, I wonder if the the AD places are empty investment homes / porn shoot locations.

As a millennial, like much of my generation who loves good coffee, I'd say it's primarily because we don't want the usual shitty instant coffee packets - Nespresso & similar is a good way to get a decent coffee without too much faff/cleaning (ie my proper machine at home is more expensive, harder to clean & maintain in an airbnb context).

For previous generations the same effect would've been before hotel rooms had TVs; there would have been a stark difference between hotel rooms that did and didn't have TVs for boomers (and maybe GenX?)

Car paint colors are driven by pull from franchised dealers and the dealership financing model, as well as by push from supply chain issues. In the US at least, most mainstream consumers expect to buy a car from dealer inventory and drive it away that day. So dealers mostly order only a few bland colors because most consumers are willing to settle for those as long as the car has the options they want and they get a good price. Like maybe you would prefer a bright green car but will settle for gray because the dealer offers low-interest financing. Dealers also incur inventory costs (floorplan financing) and their business model depends on rapid turnover so they can't afford to order "lot poison" that sits for months waiting for the right customer. Reducing color choices also simplifies manufacturing operations.

Some luxury or performance oriented car brands such as Porsche and Tesla do allow color orders from a wider palette, sometimes to the extent of even doing custom paint blending to match a customer sample. But those customers are willing to wait longer and pay more. They don't need basic transportation to get to work tomorrow.

Tesla have reduced their palette to just five colors, presumably to cut costs.

Porsche is the leader in paint color choice, no doubt about that, with 14 basic colors plus custom options. And to your point, consumers are willing to wait for the Porsche factory to build their car, rather than driving one off the lot that day.

Aston Martin probably has them beat by a landslide for number of colors. They offer well over 100 colors.

Actual Porsche prices out the door look like about $100,000 (even though MSRP for the cheapest models are a lot less). Please correct me if Porsche is significantly cheaper than Aston Martin vantage ($150k)… to me anything between $100k-200k seems like the same market segment but maybe I’m just poor.

At least for the Model 3, Tesla also charges extra if you choose anything other than white. Guess which color is the most common by far?

I sold cars for a decade. I love red cars. Atleast at the brands I worked for, dealers specd out their own vehicles including colors and interiors. We ordered a lot of black white greys because they are the easiest to sell.

If someone likes a car in general, almost anyone will accept either black or white or grey, even if you would like red (rare).

If you like a car, and all they have is red, while you dislike red (very common), you don't buy it.

Dealerships have been around for 100 years and make millions of dollars for their owners. They're not operated by stupid people.

I believe a lot of it has to do with resale value. People want to be able to trade in their car for maximum value, and picking the color with the widest appeal helps with that. This seems to have created a feedback loop where car manufacturers ship more of the "boring" colors because that's what customers are buying.

This also applies to things like computers: A cursory search on ebay shows that a silver iMac generally sells for more than an equivalent yellow iMac, for example. For someone who trades in their old equipment when buying new, this is a big deal.

Odd colors actually have the best resale value on the used market. A yellow Porsche is very hard to sell new. Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers don't spec them that way. 10 years later, if you try to sell a black Porsche, you have 72 others competing with you. If you try to sell a yellow Porsche, the buyer will fly from across the US to buy it from you.

>Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers don't spec them that way

Dealers aren't speccing them yellow because they don't sell as well as other colors. If people were lining up for yellow Porsches, dealers would absolutely be ordering more yellow Porsches.

Odd colors may be priced differently at the top of the market for used cars (I don't know), but that's just not true for the typical car used buyer.

The problem isn't that fewer unusual colors are made.

The problem is that no unusual colors are made in almost all car models.

There are a very small handful of models that have a few particular colors beyond the basic black/white/red/silver/dark blue options, but otherwise manufacturers have decided that because fewer people want yellow (or bright blue, or pink, or orange, or magenta), no one gets those colors. Ever.

Even the new Miata's color options are gray-scale, red, very dark blue, and sand. Worth mentioning that you can just buy wraps for wacky colors while protecting your paint and resale value, maybe that's part of it.

I specifically wrote that a new yellow Porsche is difficult to sell.

People will travel for used cars. New car buyers want to pick a car. A few new car buyers do spec out custom orders and wait, but it's very rare. In general, that's atleast how half the crazy colors come into the market.

Fwiw, the explicit advice I got from my parents about cars/houses was to never choose a unique looking one. I was told odd-colored cars are more likely to be broken into, and houses that draw attention (if placed in a neighborhood of otherwise very similar houses) are more likely to be robbed.

So even if my favorite color was an easy option when choosing a car, I'd probably go monochrome as long as that's what the majority of other cars are doing, almost entirely for property crime reasons.

On writing this out, I have absolutely 0 idea how factually-based this is, but it is at least a thing some middle-class Americans tell their kids.

There's an old thought that red/yellow sports cars are more likely to get tickets because they are more noticeable. No idea if that's just lore or if data bears it out.

It's very unlikely. Once you control for the type of car (minivan, sports car, etc) and type of person buying the car (young/old, male/female), red cars get similar amount of tickets to other colors.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/red-handed/

They generally have higher insurance rates although I'm not clear on what's driving the model.

> They generally have higher insurance rates

Because they are on average driven by people who rate higher risk for other reasons, not because color is part of the model.

Otherwise, a popular hack would be to get insurance first, and then paint a car red/yellow if that’s what you wanted.

People repeat this for decades... Apparently never noticing that they have never ever been asked for the color of their car when getting an insurance quote.

> All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue.

Isn't this just fashion?

I've heard it argued that times of popular optimism and plenty tend to favour bright colours, extravagant design and conspicuous consumption. Think Calvin Klein underpants deliberately on show above low slung waistbands, analogous to frilly lace ruffs and cuffs in earlier ages.

Times of austerity tend to be associated with muted shades, and perhaps virtue signalling rather than wealth signalling.

Since the 2008 banking crises I think we've been firmly in the the dull, serious phase.

> What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers?

It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.

I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.

It should be true for the US that customer can't order a specific car. But other markets also like boring colors.

Interesting to see worldwide research (PDF) https://www.axalta.com/content/dam/New%20Axalta%20Corporate%...

> so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to)

they do have to, though. updated standards to fuel efficiency and crash safety.

there are only so many ways to make that happen -- an aerodynamic, fuel efficient bumper that also meets safety requirements -- and still be cheap enough for the average person.

So I checked the local market and while metallic grey is the most popular here in Ireland, white is fifth, compared to its clear first place when I've been to California. White is established in popular culture as the colour of transit vans and small traders, which isn't an image that inspires demand in personal vehicles. I think in recent years, Tesla marketing has rehabilated the image of white cars a little, but I don't see them getting US levels of use in the near future, especially as there aren't actually that many Tesla's being sold here.

So I think there's some level of marketers adapting to at least what they think works in the market rather than simple volume discounts on white paint.

There's a very boring, practical thing that most of those colors have in common. White, silver, and gray make your typical road dirt less visible. Black also accomplishes this pretty well in climates where they don't need to salt the roads.

Blue and red are common favorite colors, so it's not surprising you get a little of those. Brown and tan used to be very common up until the late 80's or so; I'm not sure why that went away but that's the only one that seems surprisingly absent.

I'm a digital nomad. I've lived in a lot of Airbnbs, and I love the Airbnb look. You know why? Because when landlords are trying to get creative, the result is usually horrible.

Getting creative, if you're not a specialist in the field, would yield horrible results 95% of the time. Which is okay if you're doing it as a hobby, of course. But as a customer, I really don't want to be subjected to this.

And Airbnbs where landlords have actually hired a competent interior designer usually have "Luxe" brand and are clearly targeted towards people in a completely different tax bracket.

Maybe that has more to do with your specific taste though? For me personally, I think my tastes have changed over time where I think I enjoy a bit more variety/chaos in terms of decoration and environment compared to the sterile greige look that's currently popular.

That is a good point as well, it's also a template that can be used. These people are financially motivated, it's cheaper to just use an existing and proven aesthetic to target a particular demographic than come up with something unique that may or may not work.

It's certainly not millennials that are renting out these airbnbs, but I'm sure are heck we're mostly the ones staying in them.

Companies like selling cars, so I think they pick colors most people prefer. "Exciting" "Unique" colors look a bit silly or non-unique when your neighbors have the same color. If what you are asking for is 1000 color choices instead of 10, that's obviously more expensive to mass produce or customize.

> "Exciting" "Unique" colors look a bit silly or non-unique when your neighbors have the same color.

Reminds me a lot of the orange Chevys Cruzing around.

There was a time in the aughts when nail polish colors were prevalent in (sub) compact cars for some reason. Not so much now.