I grew up in the colorful seventies. Yes, I love avocado green and I mourn its passing. Harvest gold is pretty too.
Today its all stainless steel or boring white. I hate stainless steel. Look at it sideways and fingerprints appear.
I keep warning my wife that the next refrigerator we buy will get repainted avocado green. There are companies that repaint appliances. Screw these manufacturers and their stinking, boring white. I want avocado green!
What vintage colors do you miss the most?
Check this out. A company that sells new appliances in vintage colors! There is a market out there for people sick of stainless and white. Bring back color to our kitchens!
I know you’re asking about kitchens, but my bathrooms were victims of the 70s. I have an avocado green bathtub. And one bathroom with a canary yellow toilet and sink, and another with a robin’s egg blue version of the same.
I’m all about switching them out for white ones once we can pile up the money.
White is best, IMO, for everything. Appliances, sinks, toilets… if you go with colors you’ll be stuck with a very dated home in short order. Besides, white looks nice and clean (assuming you keep up with cleaning), while the stainless ones never quite look right the day after they’re installed.
I’ve got a harvest gold fridge I could sell to the OP. And almond sinks/toilet in the bathroom, which, if you have to have non-white, I guess is the best of the bunch.
We had pink appliances in the house I grew up in. I do not miss that.
I chose blue because I’ve never seen blue appliances and I think they’d be cool. (Aqua is not blue; it’s sort of a dark mint green.) I’d never buy anything but white for myself.
I bought a new black Whirlpool gas range a few months ago. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. The fingerprints! I clean it every single day, without fail. Sometimes, twice a day. If not, the fingerprints absolutely glare at me until I do.
NEVER will I buy another black appliance. Ever. So help me, Deity.
The aqua ones were pretty cool, but I don’t see that as an option here. I can’t stand the fugly avocado green, yellow, and brown appliances from the 70s.
I did see some medium red front loader washing machines at Home Depot. Not a color I’d want in my kitchen. But at least the manufacturer’s are beginning to offer something besides white.
Theres hope that at least a few colors may be brought back. There were some pretty blues, yellows and aqua/turquoise in the old 30’s and 40’s kitchens. The 70’s weren’t the only colorful decade.
Stainless won’t go away, but we might hear fewer brain dead couples on HGTV thinking that stainless automatically means high end; it’s just another decorating choice. I’m old enough to hate the “harvest” shades & wish the lower end appliances came in more interesting colors.
The two things mentioned in that article Ice and Slate are still in the same family as Stainless, they’re just not quite as bright and have a finish that doesn’t pick up finger prints.
IMO, that whole move towards stainless has a lot to do with the cooking network. People sit at home and watching these cooking shows. Whether it’s straight cooking shows, kitchen nightmare type shows, chef competitions, whatever and the see all those professional stainless cookware and they think that’s what they need to be a better cook. It has nothing to do with their ability. Forget investing in a class or doing a better job of following a recipe or even spending some of that money on cookware or knives…let’s spend $2000 on a SS oven and $2500 on a SS fridge and $1500 on a SS dishwasher and as long as were this far we need a new (solid) countertop and bottom mounted SS sink and SS faucet and island and and and…
I have acquaintances in the professional kitchen equipment industry. The place where restaurants go to buy their 8 burner ovens and huge convection ovens. Over the last 10 years or so they’ve opened up to the public and started bringing in merchandise that’s geared more towards the homeowner but still very ‘professional’ and high end…and she makes a killing on it. She showed us an oven that she said she can sell to a regular homeowner for $5000, but to a restaurant owner for $3500*.
I don’t know what the next colors will be, but I think over the years things will change back as people realize that Stainless Steel isn’t going to help them cook better and they’re going to want more color in their kitchens. Especially since SS (and the black that usually comes with it) tends to darken the room so much.
*This is pretty standard practice in the industry. The list price is way higher then the actual sale price on a given piece of equipment. But a supply store owner isn’t expected to give any kind of special discount to someone that just comes to their store once and will never be seen again. Whereas their regular customers spend thousands of dollars a month with them.
My sister recently painted her house interior with a color palate that we realized sort of after-the-fact was updated harvest gold-avocado-almond. But the thing is–it looks fantastic. It’s the same palate, but the colors lighter and softer and clearer and it manages to be warm and cheerful and relaxing–kinda both spring and fall.
I think they were really on to something before, but the lack of subtlety in the chemistry of dyes and paints really screwed up the implementation.
You can still easily get black and white, trust me. We just did a kitchen renovation, and had to decide between stainless, black and white for the new appliances. Ended up with stainless because the (super-cool) gas range/double-oven combination we got was only available in stainless.
Some of the higher-end stuff is only stainless these days, but most of your run-of-the-mill Kenmore, Frigidaire or GE stuff is still in black and white as well as stainless.
