To dive deeper into the question why everything looks the same and is boring I recommend the videos of Design Theory. Many of these videos are very insightful.
Some time ago I watched a video that also did try to explain thy question of How Did The World Get So Ugly?
Also cars. Next time you look at traffic, try to see the amount of white, gray or black cars. It must be at least 80%.
I have a nice blue volvo and it’s beautiful because it has a fucking color. :)
Got my first gray car this autumn, but also my first used car, so I had less of a choice. It does have two shades of gray and black rims, so it breaks up the grayness. Otherwise I have always had blue cars.
Yayyyy Volvo
The best cars, although volvo has been sliding down lately and making bad decisions and having lots of problems with their new models.
Pre War is not good enough for such luxury. What you need is:
antebellum
“Wow, this vinyl flooring. SO Antebellum!”
No heart. No soul. Appliances built to fail.
I live in a 100 year old building and would kill for those appliances
Older buildings are so beautiful but living in them if not maintained is a literal nightmare. My old apartment building was 100+ years old with pipes that banged like crazy against the walls and the waterlines were so badly corroded they shut the hot water off for a week to fix them (which got them a complaint from the health department because they didn’t offer us alternate lodging).
For real my house is falling apart and I’d love just to have a normal functioning house 😔
Millennial here, I remember hunting for apartments and the staff of one place proudly said let me show you the upgraded unit. I went in and couldn’t hide how I much I disliked the greyscale upgrade. They were then like well we have one unit that hasn’t been upgraded. Showed me that unit and I was like “oh wow this is way better”. At that point they were super angry as if they upgraded their home the same way and I just said they had the ugliest home.
Me as a cabinetmaker 20 years ago when everything went white everywhere. Why would you throw away these nice maple cabinets for this white melamine?
Yeah, I’ve seen a few of the modern home improvement shows where the first thing they do is paint bricks in the house with a thick white latex paint. That’s not an improvement. There are other ways to brighten up a place like installing lights…
Honestly if they replaced stuff with higher quality stuff that needs less maintenance and lasts even longer it would be cool, but it’s almost always a net loss of quality over the old stuff.
YES!
Our house was built in the 60’s and pretty much untouched since the 80’s (except for motor shutters and security doors put in the 2010’s). Fucking love it.
(Although we did paint (WITH COLOURS) and remove the 50 year old carpet)
It’s just missing the thinnest granite countertops you’ve ever seen.
When we sold our house in the city 4 years ago, the realtor suggested we paint over our accent wall, and have all the walls in the house painted “reliable gray.” Apparently that’s the color that sells houses to white people.
i call that ‘zillow gray’
“Landlord Greige”
I have either rented or lived in family homes for my entire life.
Ever since my dad gave me a fake option of room colour, I wanted nothing more than to own my own fucking house so I could be in my black room.
I got rejected for a mortgage a few years ago, and the lack of being able to paint the walls in my environment is STILL something that depresess me.
It presents possibilities. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people shut down a listing based on the current color… Changing it from puke green to… Anything else is apparently more work than changing from gray to anything.
I’m obviously washing over needing to reprime the walls depending on the color and quality of paint but it’s not just white people. White is too sterile but gray strikes the right balance. Same with staging furniture. Sets too many expectations for people sometimes.
I think the idea is that a light colour tends to make the room look bigger and “fresher” than a dark one. It’s also definitely a lot easier to paint over than a “Teal Ripple” feature wall. Neutral colours and basic but nice looking furniture also means a potential buyer isn’t put off by the current occupier’s decorative tastes.
painted “reliable gray.” Apparently that’s the color that sells houses to white people.
that and “swiss coffee”…
“neutral sells” is an old real estate truism.
.
It already has a name
I love how the cover image is from the Epstein files, would’ve never expected it lmao
Uff, the picture used in the article is from the Epstein Files.
Image source: FBI lol
Convenient because afaik all images produced by the US government are automatically in the public domain.
Lol thats cray
I think that makes perfect sense in an article titled Millennial Gray
The trump files.
Gross
I remember the yuts raking millennials for their passion for grey.
I think the decades of stagflation makes everyone think they can resell whatever and it must be neutral to facilitate this eventual sale and escape from poverty.
I have served in the industry. This is exactly the rationale. I heard this one all the time: “But this isn’t our forever home. We’re only going to be in this house 20, maybe 25 more years. What if the new buyers don’t like it??? We have to make the safe choice.”
No statement. Only grey. Never mind that all four of those craptastic Frigidaire appliances in the picture will be scrap within six years anyway, if not less.
Also, people in niver neighborhoods than me have seemingly forgotten that stainless preceded the avocado and yellow appliances. Fashion is a flat cycle.
give me earth tones, stained hardwoods, shag carpets, swag lamps, and bead curtains on doorways (and real drapes over windows) over this millennial shit… and yes, those glorious avocado green appliances!
Bead curtains sound terrible for holding heat. I like my thick solid wood doors. Keep the living room nice and warm in winter. Agree to carpets/rugs though.
those don’t go on “all” doorways, obviously. the house we had when i was a little kid had several of them but not as doors to bedrooms or bathrooms. that house had hot water radiator heat, so heat in any room was absolutely not a problem.
We also have hot water radiators but it would be wasteful to heat the hallway when we don’t need to
I think you described a few old houses i saw here in Italy lmao
Same thing with cars.
They used to be really colorful and fun. Now I’m surprised when I see a red car.
…I painted my car grey. Although to be fair I did it with Monstaliner, in their “quartz grey.” That was because the thing used to be silver, and I was too lazy to pick a color materially different from original for all the twiddly little bits in the doorjambs, etc.
I do, however, laugh at rock chips. Laugh, I tell you.
I’ve been calling it 21st Century Blah. Is there a name for the architecture that goes with it? They rebuilt the Taco Bell down the road and looks likes this inside and outside.
My wife and I call this “sad beige”
at one point it was even in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Millennial_grey&diff=prev&oldid=1365776291
U-taupe-ia
I’m a millennial and it does appeal to me. It looks clean. Though I prefer the Nordic look.
there are dozens of us! haha I’m just glad I’m not the only one.
though the criticisms of the aesthetic are valid. I just like my surroundings to be as non-distracting as possible and that overlaps with largely unimaginative design lol
Our house at first looked like this, mostly because we couldn’t agree on colors. The bedroom area is still quite desaturated, but the living area and kitchen are much more colorful now.
The house I bought three years ago has those fake wood gray planks in the living room. I deliberately left the floor uncovered during renovation on the assumption that it would be destroyed and I’d have to replace it with something I actually like. Unfortunately, that shit is indestructible.
It’s luxury not because of any element in the house, rather because the return on investment needed to justify building housing over just putting the money in the stock market require it be priced as a luxury unit.
Fuck me that’s literally the exact vinyl plank flooring in my apartment right now
Huge upgrade over the carpet I had originally though… Fuck carpet
Yeah carpet is nuts.
Why would you not want to cover your floor in something to trap all the dust and soak up any liquid which is impossible to clean.
Carpet has a lot going for it. It’s relatively cheap, easy to install, forgiving of subflooring issues, pleasant to walk on, and dampens sound. That’s not to say it has its downsides - mostly keeping it clean and that it shows wear, but I can see why its popular.
City apartment dweller here. My lease requires having carpet or rugs over a certain percentage of the floor area. It’s a basic necessity to avoid aggravating one’s neighbors on the floor below.
You could also just take off your wooden clogs and go barefoot.
Oh come on now, I don’t wear wooden clogs! They are entirely inappropriate footwear for the finish on my home bowling alley!
Bare feet would make the rest of my suit of armor look silly.
sound/echo dampening.
One might wonder why this is not a problem pretty much everywhere that’s not North America.
WDYM sticks and paper are not appropriate building materials ?
I mean it is a problem, people just aren’t aware of it, or just live with it. It used to be much more common to have carpet in Scandinavia but for some reason fell out of vogue. Everyone’s living room is now horribly echoey and I have no idea how they put up with it.
A living room is only echoey if there’s nothing in it.
Do Danish people have empty living rooms?
Yeah a lot do actually. A lot of Danish people have combined open plan dining and living rooms with only two rugs in the vicinity of the couch and the dining table. There is then often a lot of unused space and hard surface around. The acoustics of my ex-girlfriend’s parents house was always horrible to me, you can tell when it was built in the 1970s it was fully intended to be carpeted.
There are better ways of doing that
Like textured ceilings, but people seem to hate those too 🤷
Again, impossible to clean.
Unless you’re a smoker, what needs to be cleaned with them?
Everything?
Anyone who’s ever removed carpet can attest to how much fine dust gets trapped. Its gross.
I mean, if you just stipple the ceiling it looks ugly. Like stalactites in a cave. But it can be nice with a bit of intentionality and design effort
Helps retain heat. The solution is a throw rug in the winter that you hose off in the spring though.
Warmer and absorbs sound. Obviously not in the kitchen or bathroom but we have carpet everywhere else.
at one point we had carpet in our bathroom
Are you guys really such a stranger to vacuuming? I want lavishly plush carpeting in my house. Especially the bedroom.
You must not have allergies/pets. Vacuuming does not get your carpets clean enough, and steam cleaning your carpets often enough is a big hassle and time consuming.
I have a cat and I don’t really see what the problem is, my carpets are fine. Yeah there is some cat fur when using the hoover, so what?
You’ve never replaced carpet have you? The amount of dirt and dust in it is insane. No matter how often, how good or how deep you clean, carpet is disgusting even after a couple of years.
Most were replaced when we moved into this house.
Vacuuming doesn’t achieve much.
carpets in themselves are not the problem. even vacuumming wont get rid of all the dirt and possibly stains. thats why you have separate carpets on the floor you can take out and actually wash without having to rip out the entire floor
Are you a stranger to rugs that can be cleaned or replaced easily?
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no like bathroom
where the toilet is, as in it used to be carpet when you get out of the bath tub, and also carpet when you take a piss/shit
Oh no. Yeah, a piss soaked carpet is no good.
I love carpet, just the ones that you can pull up and give a thorough clean to occasionally tho. Built-in carpets are nuts.
Yeah those are ok.
https://www.lung.org/clean-air/indoor-air/indoor-air-pollutants/carpets
and unlike art deco - this kind of luxury is dirt cheap.
I am eager for faux wood vinyl planks to go out.
I don’t mind vinyl, but just find the attempt to imitate wood makes it feel obviously like cheaping out.
Polished concrete is way underrated.
Too bad most people pour epoxy over their concrete.
you mean concrete paint?
or clear sealant?
ok for garages, I suppose. Inside the house, maybe not so much unless you are into that look.
I was thinking more this…
Oh, no. I’m not most people. I guess it could have been interpreted that way though.
Terrazzo is one of my favorite textures, and polishing it, is simply peak.
In general, making things look like something it’s not just feels wrong. Unironically painting plaster walls to look like stone or brick comes to mind - you’re ruining the plaster.
TBH, I’m a sucker for the ceramic tiles that have a bit of wood grain. I think it’s because you can easily tell it’s not real wood because it’s cold, but the ceramic gives it a comfy hefty and the wood look gives visual interest and a texture that improves texture.
The plastic fake wood is convenient. It came with my kitchen and is both water resistant and easy to clean. I’m not sure what I’d go with if I redid my floor.
Oh I am fine with the vinyl, I would just prefer some non wood appearance for it . Also would favor tile over plank.
that shit has a layer that is literally printed onto a thin sheet of vinyl.
The better quality stuff has quite a thick ‘wear layer’, with the effect all the way through that layer, so they don’t lose it too quickly.
Wood is not good for longevity, especially in a hot and humid location near the ocean. These full vinyl planks will survive a lot of abuse in addition to the environemnt. Do they have to lool like wood, no, but what should they look like?
I prefer a vaguely stoney look, but again not trying to look too much like specific stone. Further I favor larger tiles over plank form factor.
Or some sort of design untethered from imitating some other material, though I admit I don’t know of any examples of that off hand.
Just something about very specific wood looking with a plastic feel, especially the ones that have a bit of ridges along the grain that actual wood wouldn’t have.
But absolutely agree that a decent thick vinyl plank or tile is a great material.
I guess the plank form factor is because wood has grain which runs lengthwise in a direction and lends itself to planks. I doubt you could ever get planks to line up and look like stone, or tiles to line up and look like wood for that matter. Tiles and stone might work, but there may be some industry thing about avoiding the look of the older asbestos tiles.
planks make installation easier too. big squares would be awkward. small squares would be more tedious. other shapes would not interlock like a straight line. Also, seems can be nearly invisible in a quality locking material.
I hate that flooring. Just so you know, don’t place car tires on it because it will burn in the tire tread. (Didn’t want my tires stolen before I put them on)
Good to know, but how exactly would someone accidentally get in a situation where a car is driving in their kitchen on the third floor of an apartment building? Edit: oh you mean even simply placing a disembodied tire onto the surface of grey laminate flooring will burn tire tread right into it? 🤔 How about putting something like a moving blanket onto the floor first, (update: I couldn’t finish writing my thought because my phone keyboard switched to Russian and wouldn’t let me switch back to English so I had to restart my phone. I’m back now. Keyboard back in english now thank goodness.)
I mean I didn’t think brand new tires would have a chemical reaction with the flooring. I actually wonder now if it would have still happened through a blanket.
Pre-war?
This country has been in a constant state of war since I was 14, I’m 38 now. We were out of war for like what? 6 months to a year before we started this clusterfuck?
Pre-WWIII, that’s the big one, fatty!
Fatty? Certainly making some assumptions there lol.
But okay, even if it is WW3, with WW1 and WW2 we weren’t in a continuous near 30 year state of war leading up to those wars.
It was a King of the Hill reference
The American education system is worse than I imagined
It’s intentional, or they’d be on civil war nine by now.
Well usually if someone says “before the war” they are likely talking about the most recent big and significant one. So here that would be WW2. In Ukraine it would be the one that is going on right now.
Yes because almost 30 years continuous isn’t worthy of being significant enough.
When its normal, its hardly significant.
Never heard of the Indian Wars, huh
Who does the president work for lol? We’ve been in WW3 for a hot minute.
Don’t worry, we could all probably lose a bit around the waist.
Who does the president work for? This one? Pretty much anyone that bribes him.
Nah lol, I was in a motorcycle wreck that damaged my intestines. I genuinely have a hard time getting enough calories due to pain pretty much anytime I eat solid food. So as far as schoolyard insults go, swing and a miss.
The president is a Russian asset and I was just poking fun because nobody on the Internet knows that you are a dog. It’s always sort of funny when people forget that. It’s better to brush that stuff off. Less a swing (as that’s nonsense) and more of a nudge nudge remember we are here to have fun.
But I do apologize if that was a trigger of some sort. Remember that everyone you’re talking to could be a statical probability. OP was using the word fatty as a little joke and doesn’t really know how much you weigh.
When you have issues with food people bringing up weight can be a bit of a trigger. Not that it bothers me, it is just a school yard insult. It’s just mostly annoying because I used to be fat and I really miss food.
He was referencing Cotton from King of the Hill. He wasn’t actually referring to your weight my dude.
i know quite a few folks (myself included) who could probably stand to pack on a bit around the waist, but sure okay
That was implied by your username.
One day we’ll accept the seven years war as ww1.
Hate to tell you but the Gulf war was going on before you were fourteen.
