5 ms·

How Beige Took Over American Homes

52 points by prismatic 10y ago

searine 10y ago
My favorite term for this style is BeigeHaus, as coined by McMansionHell. Edit: Who apparently is also the author of this article. Fitting.
matthewmcg 10y ago
The OP is Kate Wagner. She also writes the hilarious and informative McMansion Hell tumblr: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/ http://www.mcmansionhell.com/
- mturmon 10y ago
  Good catch. As long as we're trading catty design sites, I recommend FYNCT: http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  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." ??
  - qbrass 10y ago
    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.
sp332 10y ago
An earlier article that looks at beige walls in YouTube videos: https://medium.com/message/the-american-room-3fce9b2b98c5 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."
Vampires123432 10y ago
FYI, a very subtle grey is the new beige.
bitwize 10y ago
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.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > 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.
  - bitwize 10y ago
    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.
- rglovejoy 10y ago
  The same thing is true of home electronics: you can have any color you want, so long as it's black.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    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.
- hx87 10y ago
astrodust 10y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  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.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  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.
- hx87 10y ago
  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.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    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.
Zikes 10y ago
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.
acconrad 10y ago
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.
- sp332 10y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    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.
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      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.
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      I'd say there's more blue cars than red.
hockeybias 10y ago
beige is the non-committal of color.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  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.
  - hx87 10y ago
    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.
    - internaut 10y ago
      Yes, the same thing is true of the real traditional buildings. They are not overdone, they just are.
  - SerLava 10y ago
    > (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.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
mwfunk 10y ago
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.
icameron 10y ago
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!
niccaluim 10y ago
I can't help but notice that this very website on which we are writing comments is beige. ;)
mixmastamyk 10y ago
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.
basseq 10y ago
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.
hx87 10y ago
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.
- douche 10y ago
  Some New England towns, almost every single house is that white clapboard with green shutters and trim pattern.
teddyh 10y ago
“Beige. Now there’s a committment to colour.” — Alf, Season 2, episode 24, “Tequila” (1988).
gopi 10y ago
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.
tmnvix 10y ago
Same reason we have a proliferation of white, grey, and black cars. The resale value is less likely to be adversely affected.
squozzer 10y ago
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?

52 points by prismatic 10y ago

My favorite term for this style is BeigeHaus, as coined by McMansionHell. Edit: Who apparently is also the author of this article. Fitting.

matthewmcg 10y ago

The OP is Kate Wagner. She also writes the hilarious and informative McMansion Hell tumblr: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/ http://www.mcmansionhell.com/

mturmon 10y ago
Good catch. As long as we're trading catty design sites, I recommend FYNCT: http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com
honkhonkpants 10y ago
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." ??
- qbrass 10y ago
  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.

sp332 10y ago

An earlier article that looks at beige walls in YouTube videos: https://medium.com/message/the-american-room-3fce9b2b98c5 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."

Vampires123432 10y ago

FYI, a very subtle grey is the new beige.

bitwize 10y ago

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.

amyjess 10y ago
> 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.
- bitwize 10y ago
  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.
rglovejoy 10y ago
The same thing is true of home electronics: you can have any color you want, so long as it's black.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  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.
hx87 10y ago

astrodust 10y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
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.
sotojuan 10y ago
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.
hx87 10y ago
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.
- astrodust 10y ago
  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.

Zikes 10y ago

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.

acconrad 10y ago

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.

sp332 10y ago
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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  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.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    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.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    I'd say there's more blue cars than red.

hockeybias 10y ago

beige is the non-committal of color.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

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.

ryandrake 10y ago
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.
- hx87 10y ago
  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.
  - internaut 10y ago
    Yes, the same thing is true of the real traditional buildings. They are not overdone, they just are.
- SerLava 10y ago
  > (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.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago

mwfunk 10y ago

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.

icameron 10y ago

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!

niccaluim 10y ago

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

mixmastamyk 10y ago

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.

basseq 10y ago

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.

hx87 10y ago

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.

douche 10y ago
Some New England towns, almost every single house is that white clapboard with green shutters and trim pattern.

teddyh 10y ago

“Beige. Now there’s a committment to colour.” — Alf, Season 2, episode 24, “Tequila” (1988).

gopi 10y ago

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.

tmnvix 10y ago

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

squozzer 10y ago

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?