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I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks
by jszymborski 3y ago
I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoI blame house flippers honestly. They buy up houses that are in rough shape on the cheap, then renovate strictly to sell, not for personal taste. The incentives at play are to shoot for a very dull, milquetoast instagram-ish aesthetic that anyone can sort of get along with, so you won't lose people for not liking whatever hardwood or paint colors you picked.
- FerretFred 3y agoYeah! Watching any episode of (UK) daytime-TV's "Homes Under the Hammer" will reveal any number of properties - some with real character - refurbished with every shade of grey you can imagine. It looks awful to be honest and really, what kind of philistine paints over real wood anyway? What really bugs me is the way the estate agents visit afterwards and say "how tastefully it's been renovated".
- Scene_Cast2 3y agoBut what if you look at it from an auction theory perspective. If there's a set of buyers with a set of bids, you're trying to get a large set of buyers (if you're pulling samples from a distribution, more samples = higher max), but you're also trying to increase the value these buyers are willing to pay (shift the distribution to the right). I wonder if there's some amount of customization, in a healthy housing market (tons of buyers) that you can do that increases the expected max bid despite decreasing number of prospective buyers.
- jwells89 3y agoMy guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.
- wincy 3y agoRight, for example if I was shopping right now a house elevator would be a huge positive to me as my daughter is a wheelchair user and will be getting more difficult to carry up and down the stairs. That said as someone who was in a lot of middle class and upper class homes due to a previous job, I saw exactly one elevator in a single family home. I doubt it would even factor into the price because most people would have no interest in even using the elevator beyond a novelty.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoHGTV's Home Town goes for a more vernacular look, so is to be applauded. What they do seems more labor intensive though.
- account-5 3y agoNothing wrong with vinyl, you can get some real good quality vinyl flooring.
- jszymborski 3y agoTotally, I'm really happy with the functional properties of the vinyl I ended up buying. That said, I truly love how hardwood looks.
- petepete 3y agoI thought this grey decor trend was a British phenomenon - glad it's not just us!
- KerrAvon 3y agoMillennials in America apparently actually like the monotone look; it’s not just the resale thing. The process of making the house more bland for resale used to be called ‘beige-ing‘ by realtors (estate agents?) in the US; it’s not new, but it wasn’t always white and gray.
- topaz0 3y agoNot sure where you're getting this. Zero of my millenial friends like this look -- and we represent a wide range of the millenial years.
- j4yav 3y agoI don’t know if it’s millennials per se but subreddits about cozy, nice living spaces are upvoting for whatever reason quite uniformly empty and gray minimalist designs. Like a distopian hospital from the future or something.
- topaz0 3y agoSince when are redditors representative of the population?
- j4yav 3y agoJust noting the existence of a trend, not making any broader statement about redditors being representative of the population. Hopefully we can at least agree there are millennials on Reddit upvoting the style, or if not there’s always plenty of articles like https://millennialmagazine.com/2019/10/02/why-are-millennials-so-obsessed-with-minimalism/ https://millennialmagazine.com/2019/10/02/why-are-millennial.... Or, if that isn’t compelling either, there are replies from other millennials here indicating they like it. In any case try not to worry too much about it, there are plenty of people with (arguably) bad taste in every generation.
- yostrovs 3y agoWhen selling our previous property, the seller agent recommended we paint it in "agreeable gray," supposedly the current color that is neutral and will not affect anyone negatively.
- nytesky 3y agoIs that like greige ? https://www.thespruce.com/greige-best-neutral-color-ever-797930 https://www.thespruce.com/greige-best-neutral-color-ever-797...
- Ekaros 3y agoI have been trained to prefer off-white... So I find that grey or brown somewhat offensive and think off-white is actually better for light and everything... Even when my choice is as non-personal.
- wonderwonder 3y agoWhat I find really interesting is that women can see shades that men cannot. My wife painted several shades of grey on the wall, including "agreeable gray" and I could not tell the difference, all looked the same. I experienced the same thing when she was looking for a grey / green for the kitchen cabinets. I could not tell the difference and all looked grey. She was also able to see shades of blue where all I saw was grey. I have asked around and I am not the only male in my acquaintances that experiences this.
- juggertao 3y agoThe current advice is when you buy something to already think about the resale value of the item. So this excludes all colors for everything. Black, white, gray everything.
- CooCooCaCha 3y agoCall it capitalism, call it competition, call it an optimization process or w/e but this is a common phenomenon. Whenever you have people trying to maximize some value they'll copy the strategy they view as most successful and other factors take a back seat. Maximizing the resale value of a home involves making it appeal to the largest number of people. Adding character risks lowering demand by appealing to niche markets. So you end up with lots of white and grey. You see similar things all over the place. Want to maximize your career? Better suppress your individuality in favor of copying how successful people speak, act, and dress. If you've ever heard the term "TikTok Beat" that's a similar phenomenon where the most popular music on TikTok gets copied like a meme by wannabe famous music producers. It's a process that ends up with bland results as variety is reduced over time. It's also dehumanizing as humanity is slowly stripped away due to inefficiency.
- deebosong 3y agoTo piggyback off of this with a call-to-action against the realities you point out, I think it's absolutely valuable and worth it to go after the aesthetic things that you like even for subjective reasons, and even if prevailing trends say otherwise, at the expense of falling outside the confines of conformity for the sake of pseudo-safety. Safety in numbers is a thing, but when it comes to art & design & aesthetics, it utterly kills courage, and things are done out of fear of rejection or disapproval, which makes the end product feel bland, uninspired, forgettable, and will be dated in a few years. Might as well just explore what is interesting to you and not worry about public reception. But then that's tied into many other things like fear of rejection, fear of sticking out, fear of failure, etc., that may need to be unearthed and explored in oneself – which is utterly worthwhile and necessary to do, and by staving it off you only do yourself and others a massive disservice and continue to operate in fear. But yeah I'm making blanket statements that needs context, etc.
- latency-guy2 3y agoI firmly dislike cherrywood, anything that is more red than brown is absolute shit to me. My parents loved it, thought it was the pinnacle of wealth. Now you might be questioning why I dislike cherrywood. The answer doesn't actually matter though, I dislike it. Most importantly, I am not the only one. I like vinyl, because I spent a few weeks of my life (probably at most a few hours total actual wall clock hours on it) replacing flooring in a couple of rooms through a few houses. The beginning, and the rest of my answer here though, also does not matter. It only matters that I like it and will pay money for it over wood. I am also, not the only one. Gray is used for many reasons in new builds, its a neutral color, and because many builders build a house/apartment, THEN sell to customers. Very few customers buy a plot of land, contract an architect, make customizations, and then build the building. It comes with the realization that people will substitute out the things they want on their own, not requiring someone else figure out everything they like and being creative all on their behalf for $0.
- pixl97 3y agoNo idea why you're downvoted for this, but I guess pointing out the obvious on HN makes some people mad.
- randomdata 3y agoYou do not understand why people are pressing the "this is correct" button even while you recognize that the comment is stating the obvious? Perhaps you don't understand why anyone would take time out their day to press any button that doesn't do anything? I suppose that's fair. One of life's mysteries.
- waynesonfire 3y agoHad you started your post with i like vinyl, i would have stopped reading sooner.
- latency-guy2 3y agoI think my comment above is of equal quality to this article, do you not agree?
- Ekaros 3y agoMy current place have this. I don't care to pay to replace it, but I would much prefer something light wood. Which is somewhat traditional indoors. It would also go with most things.
- morkalork 3y agoForget flooring, why are carpets and rugs with a grey and washed out faded look so popular? If you want a muted look, just don't buy one! Their whole purpose is to add color and style to a room and yet so much of what's available looks terrible.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe AirBnB/house flip aesthetic is truly quite lowest common denominator.
- shiroiuma 3y agoNo, one big purpose of a rug is to keep your place warmer and give you a softer and warmer place to walk or put your feet. So in front of your sofa, for instance, where your feet are usually on the floor, is better covered with a rug, so your feet don't get cold from the floor. They also help reduce the noise caused by walking around, so your neighbors don't complain.
- wonderwonder 3y agoAfter a flood, I bought pine? colored Luxury Vinyl Plank at my wife's insistence. Previously we had dark engineered bamboo which looked good but it constantly scratched (chairs and dogs) which really bothered her and I was always worried about water getting on it. I was against the vinyl just because it was vinyl. I was wrong. This stuff is awesome. Looks great, close to water proof short of a flood and pretty much no scratches in a year plus of being down. It was not that much cheaper though vs engineered wood but a good deal less expensive than hardwood.
- Gigachad 3y agoThat’s surprising. From the interior design content I watch, the white and grey aesthetic is very much considered outdated and a mistake. Warm wood tones are much higher regarded.
- NoPedantsThanks 3y agoWhen my parents were selling their house, their realtor told them they needed to paint a bunch of stuff grey because "that's what Millennials want." Now we mock everything grey as "Millennial grey."
- ryandrake 3y agoSame when we sold our house. We had some pretty muted pastel colors in our rooms, nothing flamboyant like bright pink or whatever, and the first thing our realtor said was "we need to repaint everything light gray." We also offered to leave some of our furniture around in order to make the home appealing and show better. Again, nothing wacky, just a few sofas, tables and generic non-family pictures on the walls. Realtor said "nope, you need to stage it for 30-40 year olds" (with the most generic, bland, airbnb-like non-furniture I've ever seen). I can't argue with the results--she successfully sold the house in the recent toughest house market we've seen in 10 years. But, wow, that's the aesthetic now??
- NoPedantsThanks 3y agoWell now all of a sudden "clutter" is supposed to be in. This is symptomatic of declining taste across the board... which actually means the trend of celebrating shitty taste, which has always existed in plentitude.
- firstplacelast 3y agoHey, pretty things are hard. Why isn’t half of HN looking their best at least once a week? It costs money and time. I work with people in shirts that are only befitting for elementary school kids. You can have the niceties, just have to pay for them. But I think this is about where the market is going. People (with the money for homes) don’t care, so that’s how they’re catered to.
- proc0 3y agoMaybe not a in a typical house, but I can see a minimalist architecture with white walls, cement pillars, grey wood floors, and a single tree branch sculpture.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoOne of the carpet companies I was recommended exclusively makes browns and greyscale. No. NO! And getting my car, the only options were grey and white. :( I hate the greypocalypse that has happened. So depressing.