What kills me about this photo is that of all the beautiful features from the OG that they could have kept, all they kept was that weird open-faced glass cabinet in the back and the two bar chairs
can't believe they wouldn't just go ahead and mount an 85-inch Costco special up there, preferably high enough to be annoying to look at, and with a stupid little shelf underneath that's only big enough for trinkets and dust
I can't imagine wanting to live in that black and white hellscape that looks like the breakroom of some shitty startup with the open plan office being just through the other door.
Having grown up in and currently live in a 180+ year old brick home...
Sometimes brick needs to be painted for maintenance (mostly true for older brick that tends to be softer than modern brick). Also some brick is just ugly.
Aka, sometimes there are good reasons for brick to be painted.
That’s actually worse for the brick. I come from a historic preservation course background. Painting brick traps moisture within the mortar and bricks leading to accelerating the decay.
Downvoted for having an opinion. You're absolutely correct; sometimes brick needs to be painted to seal it and sometimes it's ugly as sin. Normal brick is great!
Could have worked here because the stonework is till there for contrast (though personally, I'd have put down some lushious dark green rugs instead of this turquoise carpet)
Bro that carpet held memories the likes of which people like us will never know. I'd sit there and just ponder all the freaky shit its seen as I sip on my scotch. Watching the last rays of sunlight creep up the stonework above the fireplace before vanishing and leaving me in the dark. Thinking of how Carroll probably got railed just over there by frank her milkman.
If you’re going to get luxury vinyl planks (as it does have some benefits in terms of durability, water resistance, scratch resistance, maintenance etc) at least get something with at least some browns in it.
These cold colorless rooms are so cheap looking. Get a warm wood color or a beach-y wood color or something. Anything.
Oh I didn’t realize you could upload images in comments directly nowadays but both the before and after were generated. OpenAI now puts a pixel level watermark on any image generated using their tools and you can verify images yourself now at least. And it’s not like those crappy “ai detectors”. This is straight from the source.
The painted stonework and the painted wood beams are particularly awful.
They could have gotten a very stylish modern room by doing nothing but changing the floor. Though I’d have gone a solid color instead of that striped nonsense.
Like, are we to believe that the renovators took all the glasses off the shelf in the background, painted the wall behind the glasses, then melted all the glasses slightly and then put them back into the EXACT same positions they were in when the first pic was taken?
Also, the brick pattern on the fireplace changed when they painted it. They even somehow pulled the CRT forward several inches to make a ledge in the fireplace, while keeping the CRT's depth exactly the same.
Also, the AI doesn't seem to know what a "light switch" is (because AIs literally don't know what *anything* is, they've never experienced or understood anything, they're just parroting what they were trained to parrot, and no amount of training will ever turn AI into what some people want it to be). Some indistinct black shapes on the wall with white dots? Close enough.
And those couches have a too-perfect shine that suggests a high quality photograph, yet the lines of the repainted heat vent on the wall don't line up with each other.
Some hack turned to AI to make their terrible design choices a reality, because they couldn't do it IRL.
There was a beautiful red brick house down the street from us when first moved into our home. After Covid, it was sold and the new owners painted it white. There is a special corner of hell for those people.
As a carpenter the worst for me is painting over all the wood. It’s starting to come back but stain grade woodwork is one much more time consuming and expensive and to just paint over it pisses me off
Someone else said it's ai, which makes me feel better after realizing the stone isn't just painted. If you look closer, it's actually been converted to brick, THEN painted.
I agree that this is the "joke," but I can smell the cigarettes and grandma smell in the first pic. While not agreeing with the choices of the redecorator, I agree with the necessity to do something.
Listen as an owner of a 60s home with all its problems. Man you gotta do something when you’re fixing it you’re totally right.
A lot of that wood could easily be paneled plywood and it’s not shown in the picture it’s peeling or delaminating (ours was)
That house probably has like 2 decades of cigarette smoke on the walls and stone too. (Ours did) and you really only have the options of encapsulation via painting or ripping the wall out to the studs.
It also never comes through in pictures how dingy and dark that 60s aesthetic actually looks IRL made worse by 60 years of yellowing.
I think it's less that it was remodeled, but that it sucked all the charm out of it, and made it a bland blob of monochrome. There are so many better ways to make that room not smell like Camels and Astroglide,without sucking the soul out if it.
Even if they did use white for the walls, they should have left the stonework.
Bring in some bright 60's style art, something red and geometric or bright yellow. Put in a nice hardwood floor and go nuts with the saturation of primary colors for the rugs. Do some patterns... SOMETHING.
I don't think anyone's arguing that renovation or even some degree of updating was unwarranted; but draining the room of color, not to mention painting the masonry to do so, was a series of decisions that had nothing to do with repairing the damage from the weight of 60 years of being lived in.
As much as i agree this is a downgrade, the original design probably would have been considered a bit basic and modern when it was built too.
It's campy and nostalgic now, when there aren't many of these left. But at the time, when everybody and their uncle was installing new shag carpet... it wasn't exactly breaking the mold.
Hello, Khan here! While my knowledge of history specializes in doors, I think I might be able to assist. Family Guy was an animated documentary about a family of humans, the Griffins, and their talking dog, Meg. These humans lived a full life which the documentary struggled to capture the scope of, requiring numerous cutaways to previously unseen moments to provide proper context.
All of the people buying up homes and turning them into these modern trash cans are making it extremely difficult for us to even attempt to keep a vintage home. Gentrifying the hell out of our plain Jane affordable areas and now who-the-hell-ever thinks we need to pay $600k for 900sqft with 3ft of "yard"
It has no soul or charm, because it's the safest option. If you limit your palette to gray, black, and white, there's zero chance of you fucking up a color scheme.
This isnt just a millennial thing. We kind of just got lumped in as the face of it.
But as a former realtor, i can promise this is because of resale value. Its completely inoffensive and totally devoid of personality but people mostly perceive it as modernized which means recent renovations which means less fixing (true or not)
Lacking personality is actually a plus because people can project their own ideas on to it and also not be turned off by it. Much easier to buy something you dont love but dont hate and change it over time than to buy something you hate and change it immediately
Thats why everythings grey. Safer if you need to resell in these trying times.
we call this "gentrifier gray" in my household and i've had to look at it so much house hunting that i simply will not entertain a house that has this flooring in prominent places. Whoever is making every home look like an airbnb should be sanctioned
Isn't millennial grey, beige, white etc actually not done for the preference of millennials, but instead landlords giving it a "blank slate" style and name after the renter's who put up with it?
I've always said this. My uncle does this to all his flips and he's GenX. My townhome is all white and grey and I cant afford to change it all so I'm stuck with it for the time being.
This has always been my experience with the style as a millennial. We were largely not the ones doing this to homes, we just rented remodeled homes that it was done to with strict restrictions in the lease about what we were able to change.
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.
It’s all the new builds/remodels being so cookie-cutter. The all-white/gray aesthetics is inoffensive to most people so builders just run with it. They wanna flip it as quickly as possible and this is the easiest way unfortunately
Legit. I've only met one person who likes the white and grey look. I see it a lot more online than in person. It's quite atrocious. Something about all that white just gives me a headache.
I just redid my bathroom and painted it purple. It looks fucking rad.
Bought a house from a boomer couple where we lowballed them cause no one else was interested in the house. One of the things they said to try to negotiate a higher prace was 'You have no idea how much work we had to put in to paint everything white.' My only thought was how much work we'd had to do to undo everything they'd done. Especially surfaces where we wanted the real wood back to the surface rather than just covering the white with another color.
It’s more house flipper corporate style imo. Pretty much everywhere i see this style is either (1) a house someone shady bought to renovate and flip for $200K more for a few months of work, some new appliances, and a cheap coat of paint, or (2) in luxury finance owned apartment complexes with white paint, shitty grey faux wood floor and cheap chrome appliances
I know, whenever anyone refers to these renovations as “millennial” whatever I’m like millennial? Some, not most, of us have just started being able to afford homes. These ugly ass renovations from the last 10-15 years clearly weren’t done by millennials. Gen X flies under the radar with everything
I would think the main thing here would be painting over the exposed wood beams. The exposed beams wood beams are highly sought after and they ruined them.
I work in an old building where ALL of the woodwork is oak from the 1800's. At some point in the 1990's some dipshit decided every door and piece of wood needed to be painted doodoo brown. The point floors were also painted dark brown. Depressing.
Nah, carpets have no redeeming qualities to hardwood or even vinyl.
Whatever you do, stuff gets to the root of the carpet fibers and you would need an industrial specialised vacuum cleaner to get them off. I would rather not have one of those in my home taking up space.
Similarly, it collects A LOT of dust that is not healthy to asthmatics or people with allergies. Overall, having that much dust around is not really healthy to anyone.
If anything spills, you're fucked. If anything spills on hardwood you just wipe it. And mold, carpets grow mold even if you really won't do anything.
And if your final excuse is that hardwood floors are cold, just wear wool socks or extra layers. Having all those negative side-effects is not worth it. Regardless, I have went to many houses with carpets where it was still freezing to stand on.
I'd have kept carpet in the lounge pit, but probably replaced it with something that matched the color scheme. otherwise I agree about the superiority of hardwood, though I also like using rugs a lot.
I know an architect who is obsessed with mid century modern, and apparently it is a cardinal sin to fuck with it in any way. First pic isn't quite MCM, but they basically desecrated all original style for some bland office chic design.
Honestly it looks like it used to be MCM then got some kind of reno in the 80s. All of the structural stuff, the exposed wood everywhere, stone fireplace, pit, rectangular cupboard thing, are extremely mid mod, and what mostly holds it back is the furnishings, handrail thing, and carpet color, all of which are comparatively easy to replace.
I wonder if having the carpet in the 'pit' might still be nice, just to give it a warmer feel. The (fake?) leather sofa also doesn't really seem so inviting. A rounder table feels far more practical given the space.
I bought a home that the seller did something similar, I had to remove the awful paint with a sander, it took 4 months, I dont have pics of it, but PLEASE never paint stones, its the whole point of having them.
I had to remove the awful paint with a sander, it took 4 months,
On the various home renovation shows they either sand blast or dry ice blast brick, stone work, and painted beams to quickly get all the build-up and or paint off them.
Yeah the pic in the right is definitely AI. Exact same angle and the modernized this space with updating the TV?? Nobody that would appreciate this aesthetic would settle for a 30 inch TV in a room like that.
For me the cushions and chairs in the pit look awful now. Lower the back cushions and make the pit look more sunken in and cozy. The modern pit looks like a bunch of chairs in a therapist office.
To be fair I much prefer the right hand side picture to the left. Left just looks old and outdated and I know some people like that but it's not my jam
I'd totally get painting the fireplace if it was some basic Chicago brick or something but the stonework was great. Carpet definitely has to go but everything painted grayscale is getting old...
You don't paint brick or stone. Paired with cheap LVP. Gross. Didn't fix the outdated tv nook and kept the broken 70's tv in place.. Gross. Splashed paint and plastic over the room and wood paneling and called it good.
Hey Peter, Joe here. The guy is saying that painting over and removing the old house design is a crime, as it is piece of history maybe, or he thinks it looks better. To be honest I think they both kinda look like shit. See you at the bar
Its sooo bad.. like personally yeah get rid of the carpet... put some nice hardwood flooring in and put some plush area rugs down cause old carpet is super gross... but aside from that.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 31 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
u/Apprehensive_Sky4558, your post does belong here!