6 ms·

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

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.
mhurron 10y ago
> 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.
- waterside81 10y ago
  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.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > 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.
    - wtetzner 10y ago
      It doesn't matter, it still shapes the buyer's opinion of the place, even if it's only subconsciously. [edit] punctuation.
    - SystemOut 10y ago
      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.
- 10y ago
ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  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?
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    Maybe the house was beige when they bought it, and they didn't care enough to paint it.
  - jerf 10y ago
    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.
dionidium 10y ago
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.
- vosper 10y ago
  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...
Lendal 10y ago
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.
- Osiris 10y ago
  That's why everyone does the repairs and improvements they've needed for years right before they sell.

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.

mhurron 10y ago

> 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.

waterside81 10y ago
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.
- mhurron 10y ago
  > 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.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    It doesn't matter, it still shapes the buyer's opinion of the place, even if it's only subconsciously. [edit] punctuation.
  - SystemOut 10y ago
    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.
10y ago

ComteDeLaFere 10y ago

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.

ryandrake 10y ago
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?
- wtetzner 10y ago
  Maybe the house was beige when they bought it, and they didn't care enough to paint it.
- jerf 10y ago
  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.

dionidium 10y ago

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.

vosper 10y ago
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...

Lendal 10y ago

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.

Osiris 10y ago
That's why everyone does the repairs and improvements they've needed for years right before they sell.