Today’s youth prefer world in monochrome
As a Realtor, it is unavoidable to take note of the current fashion of home architecture and décor.
Currently, young buyers favor white “modern farmhouse” architecture with black-framed windows and few decorative flourishes. They drive white or dulled gray Teslas with blacked-out window trim, and decorate their new homes with simple, geometric furniture upholstered in gray and sitting on gray carpeting. If the kitchens and bathrooms are not icy white all over, they likely will not buy. Homes that are “staged” are furnished similarly, as starkly chiaroscuro as possible, the walls hung with nondescript abstract art, often painted by an untrained artist. There are no “statements” of taste in evidence, and certainly no desire to assume ownership of inherited furniture or art from earlier styles of design. God forbid, that a chair or sofa might have the curved flourish of a French antique, or that an area rug might involve a woven design. They might shrink in horror at the lovely curves of an art deco cabinet or table. They cannot imagine a pale green wall embellished with the intricate crown moldings and coffered ceilings redolent of the homes built in the early 2000s.
Sitting in “virtual” offices looking at a computer screen all day, or glued to a cell phone while walking the dog and toting a baby in a BabyBjorn carrier are lifestyle realities that may help to explain the dehumanized personalities that might favor cold, sterile environments.
This brings me to one of my favorite films from 1998, “Pleasantville,” in which siblings portrayed by Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon are magically transported from their Technicolor world back to the black-and-white world of the 1950s by a creepy Don Knotts who inhabits their television. This is a world some likely long for, where women are housewives, overt sexuality or emotion is a shibboleth, artistic men are soda jerks, husbands come home like hungry zombies asking for dinner, the local government is ruled by querulous ignorance, gay people hide in fear, and Black people serve as maids and railway porters.
Little by little, the sister and brother “awaken” the people of that black-and-white world into a universe of bright color, as emotion, love, artistic effort, and open-mindedness begin to flourish. Rain falls, people kiss, emotion and sensitivity grow, and, ultimately, a whole world of bright color subsumes the dismal black-and-white lives of the town folk who live in what was thought to be the perfect colorless world of Pleasantville.
As I watch reruns of “The Carol Burnett Show” on MeTV (retro television for old folks like me), I am brought back to the bright green, orange and red world of the 1970s. Yes, the colors were a bit loud, but they epitomized that moment of disco nights, growing societal openness, hope, and open sexuality. Color tells a story of each generation. The exuberant colors of the 1970s led to an epidemic of AIDS — too much color, perhaps. Preferable, however to this moment in which black and white is covered so divisively in the media and used so awkwardly in newer films such as “Passing.” It would be nice to see a home designed with artistic tradition in mind, with shutters painted red, and furnished with a scintilla of historic design, walls painted in soft palates of color, and kitchens and bathrooms that warm their inhabitants instead of inviting accidents on cold, slippery white, marble flooring. As the pandemic abates and color reenters our lives, perhaps we will transform our “Pleasantville,” and our black-and-white lives into something more tonal and mature.