Once upon a 2000s pinnacle in time, a house could tell you everything about the person living inside.
Most likely you would find a cozy kitchen with yellow cupboards, chipped floral china sets, satin striped curtains, a fridge hidden beneath a mosaic of holiday magnets, a wonky painting (of no real significance) hanging over the fireplace, and endless posters of the most iconic pop stars splattered across bedroom walls.
Nothing ever matched and don’t even mention colour co-ordination – it didn’t exist back then.
Our homes, our wardrobes, our possessions – they all used to exhibit little pieces of our character to the world. All it would take is five minutes inside a strangers home to get a vague sense of who they were.
Now, you can be more certain of walking into a strangers home to find the exact same things:
A beige sofa, natural throws, round coffee table (with display purpose only books stacked neatly on top), marble-effect kitchens, olive trees, bare walls with one lone piece of abstract artwork, a ribbed ceramic vase...
Welcome to what can be known as The Great Beige Era.
Now I know, I know – minimalism is nothing new. And truly there is something beautiful about simplicity. But minimalism was meant to be about having less. Today, it has naturally grown into a giant consumer industry focused on selling people more things that look like less things (but really it’s just more things)…
And perhaps part of the problem is that we don’t discover interior ideas (or most ideas really) the way we used to. In the past, maybe you visited a friend’s house and thought ‘God, I need those cushions’ or ‘I am definitely ordering that lampshade when I get home’.
Not to mention the added complication of social media. Instagram and TikTok present us with thousands of house tours on demand – then we have the algorithms. Watch one video, and next thing you’re caught in a loop, trapped watching the same content for what feels like an eternity.
Everything is aesthetically pleasing, perfectly positioned and bloody beautiful. Yet often it can feel strangely anonymous.
Personality is rarely a product of perfection – beauty rather comes from the mismatched. This is reflected not only in the rooms we see, but the people we meet.
Perhaps that is why so many of us have a soft spot for the older homes – the one’s that send us spiralling back into childhood memories when we step through the front door.
And I’m not talking about big, grand homes – just real, ordinary one’s. The homes with patterned tiles, wacky curtains, wooden tables, chipped painted doors, bookshelves full of actual books, posters and framed pictures covering every surface.
And in most cases a dishevelled sofa that has survived four dogs, two cats and an army of toddlers. As imperfect as these things may first appear, they have a colorful story to tell – one that beige cannot.
My (totally unwarranted) advice: Keep the colour, keep the random weird paintings, keep the old things, keep the charachter.
Let your home be a little chaotic, a little messy and a whole lot of fun. Because it was never supposed to look like a showroom , it was meant to look lived in.
And maybe what we should be aiming for is not a perfectly curated life, but rather one that is personal to us as individuals. A home filled with objects that make us smile for reasons that other people simply can’t understand.
Because someday, long after trends have changed once more & today’s ‘perfect’ is no longer so, I hope to possess something more valuable than an aesthetic.
A life that looks familiar to me, a home I can recognise as my own.
Until next Sunday.