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.
Apparently Cutty Sark is a whiskey, which presumably is what you meant, but the first DDG result is a British naval ship which ... Also kinda makes sense?
The scotch is named after the ship
Before the ship it was an old scottish folkstory about a guy going home on a stormy night, encountering a coven of witches, calling out out to one that had a really small shirt (cutty sark) and never being seen again Ichabod Crane style. The figurehead on the ship is what gave the ship it's name, because it was based on that story.
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 It was a style that felt outdated even before I knew what "outdated" even meant.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.)
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.
It’s manufacturing shades, beige and grey. Color costs extra in the age of squeezing working class out of anything but the daily grind. You’ll have a colorless domicile you do not own and you’ll like it.
These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn't notice the nicotine coating everything.
"Ahh yes, this will hide the cigarette stains."
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.
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.
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:
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.
That 60s one looks awesome
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.
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.
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.
I'm a school bus driver now and about half of my coworkers smoke. It's just fucking revolting because they always stink of that shit.
I know of someone who has seizures, and recently gave themselves a stay in the burn unit because they lit a cigarette after a seizure when they were postictal (meaning they are recovering from the seizure but still have no awareness). That was bad news bears as my friend likes to say. Just the risk of falling asleep with a lit cigarette would be enough to keep me from it, not to mention the way you stink, the cost, the way people avoid you, and the inevitable damage to your health. You can have quit cigarettes decades beforehand, and still end up with emphysema.
But just plain stinking would be enough for me! Ugh that's awful for you.
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
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.
This was my family room.
After a few bad lsd trips, this is calming.
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 :)
It's...so....drab
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