Let it breathe
The worst interior design trend
Today’s accompanying tune: “The Mother We Share” by CHVRCHES
I’ve watched a lot of HGTV in my life. I’ve watched the property brothers deliver one dream home after another; I’ve seen the other HGTV twins slap some paint on the walls of a house that won’t sell and relist it at nearly double the price. I’ve watched homes materialize in a little over three months; I’ve witnessed one couple after another select one home of three options in an unbelievable number of cities around the world. The chit chat of floor plans, construction mishaps, and emotional reveals all dull enough to provide ambient noise throughout my day.
The way that some pet owners leave the television on to console their anxious dogs, I leave HGTV on for my own anxious brain, so soothing is the predictable cadence of plot as to nearly disappear from my consciousness entirely. I may be alone, sitting on my couch attempting to jiggle thoughts loose in my brain, but I am never actually alone, not so long as the couple in Detroit continues to fix up foreclosed homes for first-time homebuyers. It started in college, an easy background noise to long nights studying for exams when music became too distracting, but has seamlessly transitioned into adulthood as, at first, I worked late into the evenings to simply keep up, and then as I transitioned to working at home full time. My coworkers now the eccentric yet likable faces populating the home and garden network.
My similarly eccentric and likable background noise has unintentionally gifted me a front row seat to the ebbs and flows of interior design, at least the version of interior design palatable enough for the average American homeowner. I watched the McMansions come and go and come back again; I witnessed shiplap’s meteoric rise and subsequent stranglehold; I watched mid-century modern rise and fall. Couples battled over different shades of gray before opting to ditch it for “warm neutrals.” Like most trends, the interior design cycle never truly dies, only hibernates. Give any style choice a few years and it will likely be popular again without a doubt.
That’s not to say all trends are universally popular, try as HGTV might to make it so. Color-drenching — where someone paints every aspect of a room, including the trim and ceiling, the same often dark color — has taken off on social media to the ire of many a traditionalist, HGTV’s core audience. I have yet to watch a commercially cultivated couple turn their paint sprayer to the sky, but it’s only a matter of time before they do with the intent of trying something “different.” In doing so, they will only really create more of the same.
Perhaps the most controversial design choice started with HGTV before moving into the social media DIY realm, a sort of reverse migration that used to be commonplace but has, like many migratory species, suffered from a rapidly changing world. To save a few bucks, HGTV flippers started — gasp! — painting hardwood floors instead of refinishing them. This was prior to the luxury plank vinyl flooring revolution — another trend that refuses to fall to the wayside — and so became the easiest way to make a floor look new for prospective homebuyers without the financial or laborious burden of sanding, repairing, and restaining. A few coats of primer, a coat of two of a non-offensive but interesting neutral, and the home was ready for Zillow. For years, buyers ate it up, while corners of the internet shrieked about the trend, so offended they were that someone would dare cover up beautiful, albeit beat up, hardwood floors.
After the LVP revolution, the paint cans turned to the only remaining wood in most homes: cabinets. Gone were the honey oak installations of the 90s, replaced by the different yet the same shades of green, blue, and greige. A pop of color! Something interesting to look at! Another way to make an older home feel new! The cabinets were under siege, losing battle after battle to stark whites and earthly olives. Again, it was a cost-saving measure, a way to avoid replacing cabinets deemed outdated by current standards but still giving everything a fresh spruce. Cabinets are expensive! Custom cabinets, even more so! HGTV easily made its case — change the entire feel of your home with a weekend of DIY and a can of paint — and the masses followed. The colors will change — olive is allegedly out, this season, while mint green is all the rage — but the paint stays.
And this is where I, your humble author with questionable taste, expose myself. I absolutely despise painted wood. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone with the resources to do so would opt to suffocate the natural art of a grain, why a sanitized, smoothed over version of home is one someone would aspire to. I am not a scholar, many of whom have artfully dissected and analyzed our culture’s obsession with interior design trends that seem to maintain the surest of footholds in home after home. They blame social media, lighting for food bloggers, middle class anxiety, and a host of other societal ills for our addiction to painted wood. Wood is imperfect, a reminder of the imperfect world we inhabit. For many people, that reminder is too much, the paint a way to assume control over one of the only spaces available to those privileged enough to have access. What we feel threatened by, we seek to control.
When we paint over the rough edges, the mismatched tones, and the shades of grain, we leave less room for our own rough edges, our own mismatched tones. We sacrifice a long-term beauty for a short term satisfaction, one simply of the moment and in need of regular touch-ups. It’s an easy solution, a cheap solution, in response to something that would otherwise require care and maintenance. Something that will age poorly, just as the derided honey oak cabinets of yore, discarded yet again once the new trend has revealed itself. The swatches doing little more than marking time, aging the home in place, paint layers like rings in the trees we covered up in the first place.
Wood is warm, homey, imperfect, lived in. All on its own. If only we could exhale and let it breathe.
- Megan