I have this great book about vintage color theory. It’s a college text book and it’s a girthy boy. It makes me feel like Denzel Washington in the Book of Eli, crossing a vast desert of achromatic modernism with the last remaining book that dares mention the word color.
In this book, it explains all kind of color palettes and how to best compliment your space for the type of vibe and energy you’re looking for. Inside it, there is a whole spectrum of colors and color wheels and hundreds of years of interior design knowledge that no one uses anymore.
An entire science and art, cast aside like a Furby in Marie Kondo’s hands.
Take these colors down to the Home Depot and tell them to give you a can of each and then paint everything in your house. Get some soft curves and bold palm trees and wide leafed plants. Turn on some neon and kick up the Vaporwave, cuz it’s gonna be the ’80s in your house. Look at how cool, calm and powerful those colors are. Those colors don’t give a FUCK and they’re ready to fuck.
The life of an ’80s heartthrob was a stressful one. Your whole life was a mullet. Business in the front and party in the back. All. The. Time. American Psycho is clearly a documentary. Even the music of the time had a melancholy thickness that was both insincere and telling. It was the cold dead smile of a burned out Wall Street millionaire, one small step away from complete mental breakdown.
That’s why the cool smooth pastel color palette of the ’80s was integral to keeping our dear nation together. If it wasn’t for the reassuring hues of pink and peach, who knows how many wars we would have fought?
Don’t sleep on the smooth pastels guys. It’s the fucking best. Better than another slate grey rug on a slate grey wood floor with slate grey furniture. What the fuck happened to us?
Again, thank you for another excursion through the interior design twilight zone. Funny how so many decades were defined by these design trends (or vise versa?). But I really couldn’t say what the trend is today? It’s like everyone got burnt out on trying to keep up and said fuck, mid-century modern is easiest to understand. Or fuck it, I like the Italian countryside, Tuscan it is. But damnit I’m not remodeling my dining AGAIN.
*dining room
Yeah man. It’s frustrating. The push towards an achromatic contemporary design has been really frustrating. Not because it looks bad, but because of the connotations it casts on all other forms of interior design. Mid Century Modern is a truly timeless design due to it’s beauty and functionality, but heavily lacks in creativity and comfort (MCM couches have 3 mm of padding and hard wood arms, it’s like napping on a prison cot.) There are so many colors in the rainbow, but we don’t use any of them anymore. I don’t think achromatic contemporary is timeless. It’s like an aesthetic holocaust. It’s frustrating because bland farmhouse and achromatic contemporary kind of look at any other form of interior design as “ugly, cluttered, dingy, dusty, old”. And I just don’t agree. I don’t love every form of vintage interior design (that 80s trend of super matchy patterns hurts my eyes) – but I’ll take a bad idea over no idea any day.
Loved, “like a furby in Marie Kondo’s hands”
Again, Awesome.
Please consider self publishing these all someday with the lush pictures. It would be the coffee table book of the decades!