Idk, this has more personality to it than the beige nightmare a lot of folks live in. Even if that personality smells like stale cigarettes and Cutty Sark.
These colors and the vibe felt the best. I was too poor in one way or the other to have this. I’d love to have this now.
Back in the 70's brown was considered neutral, neither oppressive or energetic, selected to not stand out.
Also, everything would be that colour soon anyway, on account of the cigarettes
Yes! This is vital context -- in every photo taken by/with my grandparents, every single person was smoking.
But not the married people?
As a young child, that is exactly how I felt about that style. I knew I really hated it. There was no openness to rooms and everything felt drab. It was a style that felt outdated even before I knew what "outdated" even meant.
The smell is the biggest thing I remember. The wood paneling and those types of carpets always had that smell. Well, it was either that smell or the lingering odor of old cigarette smoke and spilled scotch.
By the time I started becoming truly self-aware, the 90's hit and I was awakened with a blast of neon colors. (My brain doesn't want to remember anything much from the late 80's other than my Velcro shoes and jean jacket.)
that smell
They have managed to reproduce that smell in modern times with Febreze.
Rooms don't need to be open. My parents have an open concept modern home in Texas and it sucks. You can't hear the TV if someone is soing anything in the kitchen, but anyone upstairs hears EVERYTHING that goes on downstairs. Having dedicated spaces for different activities is nice
I like it when rooms feel open. Even without open floor plans, strategic furniture placement and wall paint can make almost any room feel a bit more spacious, even if it is just an illusion.
Rooms like the one in the picture make me feel like the walls are closing in on me, or I start to get false feelings that it is dirty or musty. The small room in the back of that space doesn't look welcoming and resembles some place were only bad things happen. I can't help but start to imagine the sound of an old grandfather clock ticking in the background as a weird sign that I will be stuck in that room for a while.
Cozy as all hell though. Better than the drab gray cookie-cutter-prison aesthetic for sure.
Bring back carpet, earth tones, and separated rooms please 😭 I want a good hidey hole to curl up in.
Cozy but hard as hell to clean. The patterns are meant to make that not particularly obvious until it gets really bad, but if dust is a health concern it gets to be a bit much.
why is it harder to clean than any current material?
Soap and water and a brush, that’s it.
Is this one of those things where sarcasm doesn't carry over the Internet, or...?
do you mean you can’t tell if it’s clean?
When I moved into my house it had a concrete coloured lino floor in the kitchen, you could never tell if that thing was clean or not. Is that bit of brown part of the design, or is it a crushed bran flake? So you'd get the Hoover out and it would turn out to be part of the bloody design.
These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn't notice the nicotine coating everything.
I can smell this picture. Mildew, thousands of cigarettes, and whatever gas-soaked disaster grandpa has on his basement workbench around the corner. It's the same era that brought us matching ceramic ash-trays for the coffee table, and bi-centennial themed kitsch like pewter minutemen that are actually cigarette lighters in disguise.
Of note. The paneling from this era is actually wood, not Masonite. You can flip it over and use it as 1/8” smooth ply, depending, for those of you into recycling materials.
"Ahh yes, this will hide the cigarette stains."
I miss it
elimination of wood, cotton, and wool as materials and fast fashion/plastic fashion means that classical fabric (or finish, or furniture) looks have been forced out, so that race-to-the-bottom Chinese goods can replace them.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam. And every wall is “agreeable gray”.
This is also a response to the 1950s:
And 1960s:
The other thing about these designs is that people tend to keep stuff for as long as it still works or looks good. So, while the kinds of photos you'd find of a "modern living room" in a magazine in the 1970s would look a certain way:
An actual living room would include furniture and decor from the 1950s and 1960s because it was still fine and didn't need to be replaced yet. IMO the image in this post looks to have a lot of 1960s in it to me.
People think of the 90s as being the era of neon, and while it's true that you might see a neon living room on Miami Vice, most people's living rooms in the 1990s were still orange and brown because the furniture and rugs from the 1970s were still good.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam.
When I was converting my school bus into a motorhome, I acquired (luckily for free) two pieces from one of those massive $4000 sectional couch things. I took them apart to rebuild them in a way that would fit in the bus, and HOLY SHIT are those things made cheaply. No cardboard, but the flat parts were made from leftover bits of chipped OSB, the sloped backs were formed from randomly-applied scraps of that nylon webbing they used to use on folding lawn chairs, and the frame was made from wood that you wouldn't even want to use for firewood. All of this was covered with decent-quality fabric and the cushions and pillows used OK foam, so a normal customer who wasn't deconstructing the thing would never know about the awfulness underneath.
Design and style changes throughout the decades. The style now is basically to keep a blank slate for eventually re-sale. That's why everything is beige and white. If you alter your colors or style too much, then you'll be reverting back to beige/white when you go to sell.
So sure, throw in that shag carpet, brown walls, and wood paneling. But lose about 50k-100k value on your home.
I recently bought a house that had used that '70s paneling as a sort of wainscoting in the kitchen; the panels had been cut to 4' and applied in various ways (everything except just fucking nails) around the base of the walls. It had been painted white so it wasn't quite as hideous as its original state and I didn't feel like replacing it all, but I did have to repair one section of it that had been badly water-damaged. I was surprised to find that Lowe's still has that shit in stock so I bought a piece of it and brought it home ... and discovered that it wasn't really like the original stuff. It looked the same but the grooves between the alleged "boards" were not recessed, they were just printed on the surface, so once it was painted it would have just looked like flat board. So I ended up having to rip that shit into fake planks and nail them up separately with small grooves between them. All that work just to simulate '70s hideousness.
Thank god there was no shag carpet in that house.
They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.
I was told that the brown and puke green of the 70s were the result of backlash the bright hippie colors of the 60s. Dirty, earthly colors were more "natural" and "organic". There's probably truth to both
I recently bought a house that had been previously occupied by smokers. During renovation I had something happen that I've never seen before or even heard of. I tried repainting one of the walls without any prep and it seemed like the paint went on fine even a couple of hours later, but when I came back the next morning the paint had all flowed down off the walls onto the floor. As best I can tell, the nicotine and tar on the walls penetrated the partially-dried paint like a solvent and re-liquified it. Fortunately, just wiping the walls down with mineral spirits before painting fixed the problem.
When my aunt was alive and chain smoking her life away, we hesitantly visited wearing our oldest clothes that could be disposed of. There was no opening windows or anything like that, you just sat with your eyes watering and endured for an hour, during which she'd have smoked 7 cigarettes. Finally my eye started to swell from the smoke because I'm so sensitive to it, and my aunt noticed and got mad I hadn't told her.
In the meantime my ex wandered through to use the bathroom, but he touched one wall and it was dripping nicotine and tar. What an awful habit. I lived through the 70s and 80s, where everyone smoked everywhere all of the time, and there's nothing like riding with your parents in the car with the windows rolled up and them lighting a fresh one every ten minutes or so.
Yep my grandmother, and parents had all that shit. And everyone smoked. It was no surprise of 15 years of second hand smoke if I didn't become a smoker too. Now 2025 we are all non smokers. Except for my mother she refuses to give it up.
It’s more than that. Those colors were chosen to hide the ever-present, persistent glaze of nicotine stain over everything. There were no white walls back then, only shades of “cream”, “ecru”, and “off-white” because no shade of true white could exist in that persistent haze of cigarette smoke.
If you ever took over a house from the 70s you’d note the amber brown drips down the kitchen wall after making spaghetti or heating a tradition tea kettle on the stove. Or after a shower in the bathroom. Scrubbing, priming, and painting would help, and then you’d make another pot of spaghetti and see another amber sludge nicotine drip from somewhere on that wall.
To this day I cannot abide beige, any rendition of off-white, or pale yellow. They’re all shades on the nicotine glaze color palette.
It does fit with the surroundings, to be fair.
I remember looking at estate agent photos of my parents home when they first bought it back in the 1980s. It looked very much like this. I remember when I was very young they had a carpet with a similar sort of dead plant motif, I remember crawling along and following the plant stems.
That's just how everybody seemed to decorate things back then, people used to wear a lot of brown as well. Perhaps we all depressed or something
After a few bad lsd trips, this is calming.
This was my family room.
90% of my furniture comes from them, at least it's repairable and high quality.
A million times better than what the average person buys nowadays
The furniture is great. If not wood, it’s still paint worthy. The hexagon end table is a great item in any color. If it’s paint grade, you can slap a little bondo in any dings, paint, poly, and it will likely last another 30yrs.
literally the look of a new cocktail bar here in town
Something tells me you picked the wrong house foo'
I kinda like it, feels cozy :)
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