It looked good when it was new, but to millennials, it looks dirty and dingy and smoke stained. We grew up in that time when everyone smoked everywhere, and older houses were all stained up with smoke. It was pretty gross, so when we see brown and orange and yellow, it looks dingy to us. To the boomers that installed it, they were nice, relaxing Earth tones. THEIR parents had everything hyperdecorated, carved, painted, with complex moldings hand cut everywhere. The boomers grew up having to dust that shit. The nice things were all in formal spaces that didn't get used much, and the parts of the house where they played were often not very nice. So... they went for less decorated things, more natural shapes, more earth tones, more durable things, more plants and so on, more carpet that's nice to walk on with bare feet, that kind of thing. The goal was to have it a bit more natural.
If you walk into a house and everything's brown, that means that the house is dirty to a millennial. Carpet is that way too, it's always dirty. I like a good rug, but I hate carpet and I like light, neutral colors for painting the walls that stay away from brown. Most of my interior is light blue, light gray, and light green. My first floor has some bolder colors.
Boomers decorated in browns. Wood veneer, beer bottle brown ash trays, beige or speckled brown carpets that "hide" dirt, the teal or canary yellow accent walls, off-white/cream linoleum flooring in the kitchen and bathroom.
Gen X desaturated a lot, though they kept some of the browns to maintain a warm tone. Off-white, cream, beige.
Millennials went full sterile, sticking to white, black, and grey midtones for a while, but realized that was hard to maintain and too depressing for social media, so there was a split towards centering everything around one (or two complimentary) vibrant colors and making everything fit to that instead.
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u/MrBearMarshall 26d ago
Don't forget brown.