The only houses I cared for having hideous wall paper
The new one is MUCH too white, but let’s be honest, the before pictures are pretty ugly too. That wallpaper is gaudy as hell.
The before pictures are bourgie and give a 90’s generational wealth ick, but at least it still looks like there’s a human being living there experiencing something nearly recognizable as a human emotion from time to time.
Well said. The middle photo of the living room looks like white hell in the new version. Like one of those underground passages in the Hoth base with some Myst-era computer generated furniture spawned in the distance.
I was thinking the place at the end of Space Odyssey, but that works too
The thing is that the 90s shots are from a movie, the others are from a property listing. They have very different purposes. A movie needs to be visually interesting. A property listing needs to be as neutral as possible so people aren’t put off by the house before even looking at it.
Two completely different genres of photography.
I get your point but they’re both reflections of how the wealthy decorate in the different eras. The 80/90’s house would likely have been advertised with the same wallpapers and dressed up similar to the movie set by Realtors because that was the style.
I disagree actually. If you think this is what wealthy people decorate like in either era, you haven’t been around rich people.
For the movie set, you can’t forget that set and the photography of it is designed to help push the message of the movie and a sense of realism is rarely a priority. With the realty photos, they are marketing first, they want to emphasize a clean, neutral setting that is full of potential.
It is also important to remember that this grey aesthetic arose from the concrete homes that were in vogue with the rich in the 2010s. Those homes were grey, yes, but they also emphasized textures, unusual materials, and lighting. The home photographed here is clearly middle class because it has none of what made concrete homes interesting.
I could write an entire essay on this, but I think I have made my point. The only comparison that matters here is that both sets of photos are fantasy. One is literally a movie set, the other is an advertisement. Neither capture any sort of reality about rich people or even people. It is silly to say that the movie set looks lived in as an example. They are both, however, what middle class people imagine rich people are like.
Edit: And before anyone says it, yes, I’m sure some rich person somewhere decorated like that. The McAllister home is a real place after all, but it doesn’t negate that we are seeing what the director wants us to experience first.
In 1990 that was the height of sophistication. Today, Millennial white/gray is the height of sophistication. What can we learn? Trends in home design/decor are bad. Stick to something timeless and you won’t think it’s outdated every few years.
Mudhuts will always be in. Don’t move with the flow, be the rock every drowning man needs.
I’m really sad as a Millennial that this aesthetic has been dubbed “Millennial gray.” I’ve watched some videos on it that make the case that it’s a backlash from the 70s aesthetic we grew up with combined with poor financial prospects in early adulthood, meaning we couldn’t buy a lot of or very nice furniture. Now that I’m firmly middle-aged, I can afford better stuff and my husband and I are slowly turning over crap particle-board furniture for nice solid wood pieces (often secondhand) in the craftsman style.
There was a thread recently where someone called it “Flipper gray”, because it’s actually being done by boomers trying to flip houses.
Been meaning to get into the Craftsman style, I’ve had a kind of shaker aesthetic going on with most of my projects.
I prefer rustic cottage theme. I never get tired of it and if someone else thinks it’s ugly… Cool, don’t live with me then.
The 1990 looks like 1890. I’d suggest that makes it the timeless decor.
Millennial gray is timeless!
You can decorate it with anything because it’s so neutral
Only partially joking
Milennial gray works when you buy like a couch or something in grey, and then install colored accents around it. Red curtains with blue table lamps. If you do the entire place in shades of gray you’re just…dead.
Millennial
you’re just…dead.
you’re just…dead.
Yes, I’m a millennial.
I meant more that you can do the walls, ceilings and floors in bland neutral colours and then furniture, curtains, etc, can be changed out as the current popular style or your own taste changes. So you don’t have to rip out the floors and repaint the walls to change the color scheme.
Also that it’ll be easier for your (grand)kids to sell the place when you’re dead because it’s easier for the new owner to redecorate around the grey than around what’s on the “before” pictures here. I was originally gonna comment that but left it out because the world’s morbid enough without my sense of humour.
Millennial grey is outdated. It’s all about the 70s revival now baby. You heard it here first.
Wanted to say that. The new one could use a few colored highlights, while the top one is stuffy and overloaded as hell.
Hallway wallpaper is great, bedroom one is definitely a bit ugly though I agree
I think if you literally just remove the before wallpaper and change nothing else, it would look perfect
I’m mourning that wainscoting.
In isolation the new ones are ok, I think. But an entire house without an accent colour in any room is crazy.
I find the old ones kinda gross.
The all white aesthetic can be appealing in a “clear slate, calm mind” kind of way, but this works way better for me when it has a few gentle touches like rounded corners, plush furniture, warm lighting, and natural wood accents. No sharp edges or cold lighting or it veers into “ice razors” territory fast.
I might do a solid color on the walls rather than the textured wallpaper. The shot of the bedroom in particular, the wallpaper is just too busy.
Another victim of big Small
big small
It’s not the size that counts, it’s how you use it.
(for some reason it’s failing to upload, but insert the meme of the guy crying behind a smiling mask.)
Every time I see that movie I think how it shaped my idea that having such a nice and big house was normal and achievable, along with like 6 kids, and it was the average normal family… I’m not even American.
I’m so much closer to the robber’s reality.
To me it is the number of children. All the happy family movies had families with multiple children, and it feels like only child families are portrayed overwhelmingly as dysfunctional and tragic.
I’m trying to work through this mindset because we only have one child, but it is hard because subconsciously, I feel like a failure, like I cannot live up to this expectation and my child is doomed to this gloomy, sad existence.
If anyone is reading this, I beg you, prove me wrong. This isn’t a challenge, I just desperately need picture perfect single child family portrayals.
Only child of lesbian parents checking in. You’re wrong, it takes all sorts to make a family please don’t let corporate bullshit brainwash you.
I was an only child and had an excellent childhood/teenage years and am still really good friends with my parents. My goal with my daughter is to do as good of a job for her as my parents did for me. I don’t live a perfect life but my relationship with my parents is not something I could ever have any complaints about. Don’t worry, as long as your kid knows you love them and you try your best to do what’s best for them (and not just what you want to be best for them), I wouldn’t have any worries personally.
Hopefully the media is changing. Off the top of my head, I thought of “Inside Out,” where the girl is an only child (I think?) and her family is depicted as pretty loving, just going through a tough move. I suspect a lot of kids’ media has also adjusted to two kids max; I’m specifically thinking of shows like Bluey and Daniel Tiger for instance.
Thank you for the tip with Inside Out, I’ll check it out! It was on our watchlist anyway and gets promoted to top rank now.
With the kids’ media that’s the thing - there is still always a sibling. We’ve always read a lot to our four year old daughter and every longer story with an only child ends up with a sibling being born. It breaks me because I actually would love to have more children and every time that I felt safe with a story and it finally was ok, a happy family of three, they add a sibling. My daughter won’t go through that. I won’t go through that. Unless, of course, the parents are divorced, one is dead, it’s an adoptive family, or a queer family. All of these are great and depict amazing, valid family structures, and I like these books too, but they still don’t represent our dynamic.
Funnily enough my daughter caught me reading Sailor Moon mangas once and at least there the protagonist has an only child. (If you do not count parallel universe stories which I don’t for my sanity.) Sailor Moon makes me cope the most currently.
There’s a whole trove of portrayals of happy, loving single-child families out there! You just have to look to China’s one-child policy era.
“But Fireweed! This is literally propaganda!” It’s all propaganda, whether it’s “be content with one child” or “be fruitful and multiply.” Media depictions of large families appear fun and loving because the creators make it that way (the more kids the more you have to work with: there’s the jock kid, the geek kid, the uptight kid, the…). Even media about the difficulties of large families (e.g. Cheaper by the Dozen) still end with everyone being happy and loving because it makes for a feel-good ending; that doesn’t mean it reflects reality in the slightest. Society doesn’t like to talk about the darker sides of large families because of heteronormativity, but there’s some media out there portraying large families as hopelessly dysfunctional (Shameless for instance, or you can read about any of the large family “reality TV” shows that have ended in scandal).
Remember that we’re in unprecedented times; large families used to not only be the norm but were practically required (have lots of kids to work the farm, or because you don’t know how many are going to survive to adulthood, or because there’s no social safety net for when you become old/sick/injured except your family members). Nowadays it’s the opposite: more kids equals less resources to go around, and unchecked population growth combined with unchecked consumption is wrecking the planet. But media hasn’t caught up yet, and with influential, wealthy people out there screaming racist nonsense about “crashing birth rates” and “great replacement theory,” there’s pressure to continue to portray large families positively and small families poorly. It’s the same situation as the propaganda I linked above, but in reverse.
In other words, rejoice that you’ve eschewed the media narrative and done the right thing for your family! Also forget visual media (where creators use large families to portray the appearance of a happy family, because more kids = more hugs and smiling faces in the shot = more love, right?) and look to books, where there are plenty of depictions of loving, functional, single-child households.
In the 90s it was more possible. I knew a lot of people like this. They were middle class.
Although this family is higher than that. I think the mom was like a fashion designer or something?
I don’t think this can be true. The house interiors in the movie weren’t filmed on location. They were custom sets built into a school gymnasium. So everything in the “before” photos are sets and set decoration.
I’m not Amerucan, but as far as I know, America often builds houses en mass. Often in factories. Everything is standardized, zo many houses look the same. It wouldn’t be weird if a set also looked exactly like a real, standardized, house. These “now” pictures could be from a look-a-like house.
And what you know is so wrong, lol.
Mobile Himes or Manufactured Homes are built in shops, but even with those the interiors can be vastly different.
Interior design is a thing, which makes every house different inside.
And the type of house in Home Alone definitely isn’t a manufactured home or even one built in a development where there are only 3 models, but a very old, custom-built house.
Thanks, I kind of expected this house to be old and custom build, like you say.
Is prefab parts not a common practice with newly build houses? Like, you get a truck with some walls and a roof, you stick them together, put in some wiring and plumbing, stick on some plaster and repeat for the next house?
Extremely uncommon.
The only prebuilt part is the roof truss. Not the roof, just the truss.
Eh, you’ll find neighborhoods where most or all of the houses share floor plans.
They’re not exactly manufactured on an assembly line but the same architects and contractors will end up doing an entire area, they’ll get a few designs approved and then they can just stamp them out. If your neighborhood is a warren of cul de sacs that’s probably you.
Then there’s the neighborhoods of Sears houses, which were literally ordered from a catalog.
That is not the same as prefab.
Sears houses as a percent of overall houses is extremely low.
Prebuilt homes, even prebuilt sections, not including trailer homes, are extraordinarily rare in the US.
They’re rare. When you see many identical houses in a neighborhood, it means one contractor developed the whole group. Usually through deforestation to expand the suburbs. They are still fabricated on site, not delivered/assembled
To clarify what others are saying, the design and layouts are repeated, but done in situ. So especially in a new house/neighborhood you’ll have a neighborhood with maybe 1-4 variations (possibly also mirrored versions of them), but each was made on the spot with a mostly standardized lot. Then over time some will slowly be modified and they’ll all get their owners’ touches to them.
It’s very much an industrial process in the suburbs starting after the world wars.
You’re talking about a country that still uses chequebooks. They’re probably decades away from prefab construction.
We don’t use checks except very rarely and we have manufactured houses (called mobile homes here). They just don’t come with the land under them so they constantly lose value and cost rent for the lot, are generally smaller and worse than in situ buildings, and are stigmatized as “for poor people” because of the fact that they’re cheap in the moment and expensive long term, which is the opposite of normal housing.
Due to a weird law, in the USA manufactured homes must be built on a permanent chassis.
Most homes in the USA are built entirely on site.
They both kind of suck tbh. The first looks like a nightmare to acid trip in and the other looks like a wizard sucked all the colour out of it.
The first looks potentially incredible to acid trip in based on visuals. But indoors is a no-go for me when tripping.
Not going to lie, I like the clean look of the millenial house more. We collectively grew up in clutter, where your grandma would have weird porcelain dolls, or a cabinet to display her fine china.
My grandpa had a taxidermied pheasant, great horned owl, and a coyote pelt on his living room wall.
Nothing wrong with all that, it’s just weird as a kid.
Our parents generation hoarded shit, because their parents lived through the depression. That has its own value but it gets overwhelming.
Clean? As in sterile like a hospital?
I think your example is the other extreme, but a little bit of color and a few personal items is a huge improvement over the sanitarium look.
Clean lines and a warm color scheme might be a good middle ground. The old version’s wallpapers were a bit too busy and the new one definitely looks way too sterile.
But yeah, of I had to choose I’d go with the old one.
It’s definitely lacking some colour, but we keep our house very tidy.
As white as an operating room
I dunno, I kinda like wondering if I’m going to be ax-murdered by a Bateman copycat when I walk into a place
I get that. It can quickly evolve to clutter. I grew up in clutter and couldn’t stand it if that happens in my house. I’m already frustrated that I have a few things on a coffee table at home.
I think there is a nice balance though, to make something feel more homey without all the dead, dusty pheasants.
I was just thinking about this the other day. When I grew up, bills, books, the news, interesting articles, photos, and every piece of information you needed to work with or keep safe was stored on paper. Almost all electronics were wired, so cords were running everywhere.
They also had less time to manage all that because they were forced to commute every single day for work.
The fact that some people had uncluttered houses is some kind of miracle.
Now, some people, myself included, also had at least one parent who couldn’t throw anything away or keep things properly organized to save their life, but I look back on my cluttered childhood home with a little more grace these days.
One looks cozy, the other institutional.
I’d paint the walls but other than that I would take the “before” any day of the week
Yeah, I agree that wall paper is not the greatest but and you can paint walls to create a welcoming and cozy environment.
But all white? Tell me you paid 10000 dollars for some nepo baby interior designer to tell you to use 3 different shades of eggshell white to offset the plain white in the hall.
When putting a house up for sale, you don’t paint the house white because of a shitty interior designer, you paint it white so that the buyer can easily paint it what they want. If, for example, you paint the walls red, and the buyer wants white, it’s going to take forever to get the red to stop bleeding through the white. Going from white to another colour however, is very quick and easy.
And that’s how we end up with all white/grey houses and cars. Everyone is more concerned about resale value than living.
Well not everyone because assets aren’t distributed evenly.
A house with fresh paint is a no-go for me when looking to buy.
Too much shit can be easily hidden behind layers of latex paint.
Unfortunately, I know from experience how much mold can be hidden by paint.
Eh, when I bought my house I specifically stayed away from houses that were painted a single colour on the interior.
When I bought me house, I remarked that I appreciated that it wasn’t freshly painted (there were dings in the corners) because I told me they weren’t trying to hide something under new paint.
I don’t understand this mindset of changing your house to the most boring plain thing because people have no imagination if your house has color in it already. Can people not walk into a space and look into their brain and imagine it different colors?
What people can do and what they actually tend to do are often extremely different things. And when you’re trying to sell a house, the idea is to get as many buyers as possible, so that you can get the most money. Whether it’s interesting or boring doesn’t matter.
You don’t paint everything beige because you like beige.
You paint everything beige because it helps people looking at the house imagine themselves living there.
At least that’s what my real estate agent told me before I had to repaint my entire house because I like color.
See I don’t get this, you can’t look at something that’s not beige and imagine it some other way? Have people lost the ability to have imaginations now?
It’s going to impact initial emotions, which filters how they see it after even as they imagine it different
I had all white walls in my apartment when I moved in. The landlord always paints them all white before someone moves in.
I get why they do it, and it was easy to paint over, but if you keep them white like that it’s gotta be so depressive. It looks so stale, and boring.
You get used to it as an eternal renter
This isn’t cozy, it’s overbearing, at least for me. The second one can be fixed by introducing colored highlights and pictures on the walls, while the first one is unsalvageable.
- The interior shots were a fabricated sound stage 2) The last shot isn’t even the same movie 3) This is most likely slop, considering the large discrepancies in dimensions.
F-, -1/10
I doubt it is ai. The same room with the fireplace can be seen in both the picture featuring it and the hallway shot where it is barely in view, but the same furniture, blinds, rug, wall molding, etc. is visible in both. The apparent discrepancy in dimensions is likely the focal length on the lenses used.
The last shot is from the sequel. Same house still. But I don’t think that the after shot is necessarily the same room. The windows and fireplace placement doesnt line up.
Same house still.
Is that not the hotel room?
No that’s him at the beginning in his parents’ room playing with his talk man instead of packing for the trip. Thus the open suit case (his parents are packing).
One can be forgiven for confusing them though. They are weirdly similar. Like Trump’s interior designer and The McCallisters shopped at the same store. Or like the same set designer did both (cuz they did).
Almost identical 4 post queen size bed, similar color and busy pattern of wallpaper, mirrored lamps and framed pictures on either side of the bed, the pictures have similar sizes and frame thickness, the placement of the door, the placement of the TVs, the table at the foot of the bed (though the latter is a room service food cart). Even filmed at a similar angle, which makes me wonder if these similarities were intentional for some reason. The biggest difference is the bedspread colors.
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House seems real. Here is a youtube short of a guy walking through it and an Architectural Digest article about the house, its history, and its transformation to the drab and now even more giant state it is in. I turned off javascript and was able to read the whole article. It also talks about how most of the filming was offsite, as you said.
Current owner says they wish to restore the interior.
Yeah, set dressers to a hell of a job. Not just a sound stage but the entire house was dressed to be Christmas colors. Everything is red, green, and gold. Because it’s a Christmas movie. I doubt the house actually looked like this.
It was beautiful in the movie, but as someone who lived through that time, it feels pretty dated these days.
The new look is boring, sterile, and reeks of faux-minimalist wallet flexing. Not my thing either.
There’s got to be a happy medium between everything has extra detail and patterns and bad sci-fi set.
The happy medium is beige colored walls, one accent wall and warm lighting
I think the happy medium is modernism. A handful of colors that look good together, maybe a simple pattern or two. Idk i think the 60s and 70s both had great home aesthetics
I hate it. I hate how there’s no colour in the world any more. Houses are black and white, cars and black and white, clothes are black and white.
Why do people hate colour?
Advertising made people prefer those colors. IPhones, tech gadgets, speakers, televisions, computers, desks, chairs…
Its not generic, it’s programming of our minds. And now, when a new color MacBook appears, we feel it’s amazing and we want it. Right? Absolutely ridiculous.
I would argue that it’s not just advertising. It’s also a lot to do with how many people grew up in really terribly design homes with terrible hoarding situations.
A lot of millennials seem to course correct to the other extreme. Add to that the rental market where neutral is better because it can be customized without clashing with what renters already own.
People in developing countries don’t hate color, I swear the classism has to be part of it. Go to almost any place in South America and it is so colorful. Go to Africa everything’s full of color, and I’m sure that goes for a lot of other countries. But any country that is supposedly wealthier has gotten super boring.
generic taste of modern house, copy and paste.
People who grew up outside vs people who grew up inside.
A mind grown in the cacophony of nature, literally formed to use it as substrate for thought and inspiration, finds the stimulation necessary. They are made of it.
One grown inside, finds it overwhelming and uncomfortable. For them, stimulation must be confined to a completely controlled experience.
You guys like wallpaper?
I’ll agree the white is eh but burn the wallpaper, no fuckin thanks.
Fuckin’ everything is white.
Repainting everything twice is still easier than dealing with wallpaper
Egh… such a boring millennial aesthetic.
Ps. I’m also a millenial. Gray is the worst colour
I agree, what they did to this house does not look good and it feels like a hotel. I’ve been in hospital rooms that were warmer and more inviting than this.
Gray is one of my favorite colors. I’ve decorated my office using various shades of gray and grey-centric hues. It looks good because I made sure there’s plenty of contrast, especially under natural light.
I’d guess these photos were taken for a home listing and that the bright and neutral paint color was intentional. Repainting walls in white or light neutral tones is common advice from realtors because it makes rooms feel brighter and is easy to paint over.I agree.
but we’re both unpopular. popular opinion is that everything should look like hotel. and if it doesn’t, it’s shitty and disgusting and awful. it’s ‘unclean’. as you can see from other comments here complaining how awful the 1990s version is.
but i confess my mentality is not upper middle class corporate where the goal is to be as inoffensive and neutral as possible. and for folks with that mentality, anything that isn’t grey and white with flat lighting, is awful and terrible.
i live in an old building with real wood floors and trim. people tell me it’s ‘unclean’ all the time and how I need to remove all the flooring and trim and put up that fake grey shit to make it ‘look clean’. and when I say ‘no, i like it this way, that’s why i bought it.’ they basically never come back to my house, because you know, clearly I’m mentally ill and disturbed if I can enjoy real mapled stained wood.
also freaks them to that i have solid wood doors, cabinets and such, instead of hollow plastic ones you find in new construction.
What a bizarre way to think, that just because you have wood floors it’s unclean? That is mind-boggling that people actually think that
i live in a city full of people who grew up in 6000 sq ft designer homes and they think anything that is older than 10 years old is ancient and shitty and trend-following is like their sole source of self-esteem.
so yeah, they think anything that isn’t grey or white is shitty and gross. and if the aesthetic changes in another 5-10 years they will hate on grey and white.
one lady i dated, had a beautiful condo, that clearly had been redone like less than ten years ago. but it had like 2000s style, with the light wood floors and trim and marble countertop and she went on and on and about how HORRIBLE it was and how she had to tear it all up and make everything grey and white, including the crappy shiplap stuff. i told her it was a horrible idea nad her home was beautiful and she told me I was a stupid piece of shit who lived in a trashheap.
also she whined insistently about how expensive owning a home was… yeah that’s how life works…
Good. That place needed a renovation. It was a regular death trap!
Careful what you wish for, what with the paint cans and all.
