[quote]I wonder if it was the depressing feeling of the Bush years that brought this on.
No. Instead blame those fucking Property Brothers. Since they went on the air in 2009 they have hawked timid, monocromatic color schemes, white on white on white kitchens, and gray, lots of gray. Now they have a zillion hours of programming in 150 countries Five years ago they had 180 hours of 'Property Brothers' in the bag, just that one show of their catalogue of titles. These former magicians are ostensibly a contractor and a real estate agent, but they present themselves as magicians of interiors (they seem never to touch the exterior of a house, or more than a few camera-worthy rooms, but that´s the magic of television.) Their style is insipid and driven purely by corporate sponsors: switching from granite to quartz to marble to syntehtic stone counterops as their chief sponsors hav dictated. They hate color, doling it out only very begrudingly when a 'client' insists. Mostly their color exists in irritatingly small accents and kicthn backsplashes (glass mosaic tile anyone, yeah, the long skinny kind, as seen on TV!)
Big budget, small budget, it all looks the same: middle of the middle of the road and, barring the occasional karate-chopped decorative sofa cushion, remarkably color free. Though they did climb high onto the universal gray wagon, and, a few years behind the times, are still riding high. Of course these two, bland even by Canadian standards, didn´t start any trends except maybe mediocrity, they didn't earn a quarter billion between them selling anything they didn't know would sell to the widest possible market.
Color is an interesting class marker in houses. It never went out of style for the very rich, for old money, for artists and creative people, for interior designers with real nowledge and training (not the ones with one trick and a brash atitude up their sleeves.)
Millenial Grey is love-hated by Gen Z we are told, but there´s more to it than that. Everybody hates it, yet is quick to use it for their own house and think it looks Fucking Battleship Brilliant (Not Too Grey) Grey. I think it has more to do with a not one but a few generations weaned on a complete absence of visual taste, a super-internationalization/homogenizaton of taste so that any reasonably properous digs in Abu Dhabi or London or Paris or Berlin or Chicago or Los Angeles or Copenhagen looks more or less like any Four Seasons Hotel junior suite anywhere.