Croak couture

It’s more than that. Those colors were chosen to hide the ever-present, persistent glaze of nicotine stain over everything. There were no white walls back then, only shades of “cream”, “ecru”, and “off-white” because no shade of true white could exist in that persistent haze of cigarette smoke.

If you ever took over a house from the 70s you’d note the amber brown drips down the kitchen wall after making spaghetti or heating a tradition tea kettle on the stove. Or after a shower in the bathroom. Scrubbing, priming, and painting would help, and then you’d make another pot of spaghetti and see another amber sludge nicotine drip from somewhere on that wall.

To this day I cannot abide beige, any rendition of off-white, or pale yellow. They’re all shades on the nicotine glaze color palette.

I was sitting outside the smoking room of a Japanese airport reading your comment, and it definitely looked like the 70's in there.
That's a great band name, "Nicotine Glaze."

Idk, this has more personality to it than the beige nightmare a lot of folks live in. Even if that personality smells like stale cigarettes and Cutty Sark.

Also: Spiders. Spider god damned everywhere.
- I'm fine with that. Made it a point over the last 30 years to get used to looking at them. I let 'em run the house. Figure if there's enough food for a predator, best let them work for me.
  Funny note: My Filipino wife is disappointed we don't have house lizards. Aside from their obvious use, apparently they're lucky.
Apparently Cutty Sark is a whiskey, which presumably is what you meant, but the first DDG result is a British naval ship which ... Also kinda makes sense?
- The scotch is named after the ship
- Many liquor brands have a sailor/pirate theme. I never saw the appeal personally, but I guess it just plays off the stale "sailors drink a lot, amirite?" meme.
- Very classy back in the day, très chic.
The were saving all the pea soup green, salmon pink and sunflower yellow for the kitchen and bathrroms.

They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.

I recently bought a house that had been previously occupied by smokers. During renovation I had something happen that I've never seen before or even heard of. I tried repainting one of the walls without any prep and it seemed like the paint went on fine even a couple of hours later, but when I came back the next morning the paint had all flowed down off the walls onto the floor. As best I can tell, the nicotine and tar on the walls penetrated the partially-dried paint like a solvent and re-liquified it. Fortunately, just wiping the walls down with mineral spirits before painting fixed the problem.
- When my aunt was alive and chain smoking her life away, we hesitantly visited wearing our oldest clothes that could be disposed of. There was no opening windows or anything like that, you just sat with your eyes watering and endured for an hour, during which she'd have smoked 7 cigarettes. Finally my eye started to swell from the smoke because I'm so sensitive to it, and my aunt noticed and got mad I hadn't told her.
  In the meantime my ex wandered through to use the bathroom, but he touched one wall and it was dripping nicotine and tar. What an awful habit. I lived through the 70s and 80s, where everyone smoked everywhere all of the time, and there's nothing like riding with your parents in the car with the windows rolled up and them lighting a fresh one every ten minutes or so.
- I've had that happen with trying to paint oil-stained (as a finish, not like motor oil or something) wood with interior latex. It really doesn't like this and will let the oil bleed through, cure improperly, anything but go on and look like fresh paint. My guess is the cigarette tars/oils on the walls did the same thing. I read up on this (was years ago) and I think there's products designed for this (maybe a oil/latex interface primer of some kind). Or you just clean really hard, or use oil-based paint.
Yep my grandmother, and parents had all that shit. And everyone smoked. It was no surprise of 15 years of second hand smoke if I didn't become a smoker too. Now 2025 we are all non smokers. Except for my mother she refuses to give it up.
I was told that the brown and puke green of the 70s were the result of backlash the bright hippie colors of the 60s. Dirty, earthly colors were more "natural" and "organic". There's probably truth to both

Cozy as all hell though. Better than the drab gray cookie-cutter-prison aesthetic for sure.

Bring back carpet, earth tones, and separated rooms please 😭 I want a good hidey hole to curl up in.

Cozy but hard as hell to clean. The patterns are meant to make that not particularly obvious until it gets really bad, but if dust is a health concern it gets to be a bit much.
- For a while the fashion was shag carpet with a random splotchy pattern in earth tones. Yes, it did a good job of hiding the dirt, but it was too good at that. I can remember hearing the cat throw up in the other room, going in to clean it up and not being able to find it until, after searching for ages, stepping in it.
- why is it harder to clean than any current material?
  Soap and water and a brush, that’s it.
No, we must open-concept everything! That way, when people come over, you have to clean one giant room (instead of just whatever small rooms people are likely to be in.)
I wish I could just tidy up the living room without needing to tidy up the kitchen and the computer room, but with my apartment floor plan the only inside doors I have are for the bedroom and the bathroom. So all the excess crap I have no space for gets shoved into the bedroom, every time.
My new home was built in the 50s and the biggest take away was "whoa, all the rooms are separate!" It's glorious.
- Never thought of that! I'm on my PC in the living room, wife is eating behind me at the kitchen table, which surprisingly enough, is in the kitchen. House dob: 2018 Total walls: 4
  In the home I grew up in (dob: 1956), those were three separate rooms.
I’m good with bringing back all of it. Except carpet. Carpet needs stay away.
- Why? It muffles sound and is much nicer to walk across. Extra layer of insulation on the floor too.
- I used to live in a house that had multiple layers of carpet ... in the bathroom. It was somehow even more disgusting than you would imagine.
It just needs a white sparingly patterned rug under the couch for contrast
It’s manufacturing shades, beige and grey. Color costs extra in the age of squeezing working class out of anything but the daily grind. You’ll have a colorless domicile you do not own and you’ll like it.
Bring back the '70s babes with it like Joyce DeWitt or Jan Smithers.
- Give me Sally Field.
Having one room like this is enough tbh. I love my concrete walls and ceramic tile.
- I don't want to live in a parking garage

I can smell this picture. Mildew, thousands of cigarettes, and whatever gas-soaked disaster grandpa has on his basement workbench around the corner. It's the same era that brought us matching ceramic ash-trays for the coffee table, and bi-centennial themed kitsch like pewter minutemen that are actually cigarette lighters in disguise.

Of note. The paneling from this era is actually wood, not Masonite. You can flip it over and use it as 1/8” smooth ply, depending, for those of you into recycling materials.
- If it was used in a smokers house, it will always reek unless heavily treated. At which point you've probably spent more than just buying new wood.

These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn't notice the nicotine coating everything.

As a guy who grew up in the 70s - this looks perfect. I'll take it

Just roll in some labatts stubbies and shitty weed oil in a beer cap and we're locked in for life

Meanwhile millennial having everything greyscale, definitely not going to be a sign of the times lol

Don't you talk shit about my grayscale. I got a gray cat to match and he blends perfectly into the couch, thank you.

This was an attempt to emulate the rich, wood-paneled, dark, rich luxury of old money.

I visited Konopiste castle in the Czech Republic that had a moat with a bear living in it. Inside, most of the place was covered in beautiful walnut. Hand carved patterning, and filigree. It was actually beautiful. And the ceilings were like 20 feet tall. A bunch of animal busts, linens, and furs. They even had the real white and blue fine China that Boomers are so obsessed with.
I remember thinking as I walked through there: "Wow, this is what it's supposed to look like"
- Did the bear still live in the moat or was the bear only in the moat historically. Regardless I am disappointed that there are no pictures of the moat.
- Oh wow. Thank you for sharing these with everyone.
  To be completely fair, great grandma's pattern china set probably did not include multiple 24" serving platters. Those pieces on the wall are a different class of china completely, and are probably way older and more valuable.
- Exactly!
I think it also somewhat closely matched a lot of the clothing being worn at the time too.
Reading Vonnegut's Dead Eye Dick and the top photo is how I pictured his dad's attic. :)

These colors and the vibe felt the best. I was too poor in one way or the other to have this. I’d love to have this now.

What's the other way to be poor?
- I’m not that person, but I’d say space poor. Even upper middle class people in the middle of densely populated cities are unable to afford large enough homes to have a room like this.

It was a reaction to the artificial colors that got popular in the 60s.

Then we flipped the script in the 80s, continued in the 90s. Then The Matrix came out and we reinvented black and white clothes, went froggy again.
- Ugh, the second link. These goddamn windbreakers... T-T

In this example image, those be some "earth" colors. Used to be a big thing. Lots of dark green, dark yellows, oranges and browns.

And they liked that.

It's a whole vibe. I don't know who vibes with that, but it definitely has a vibe.

Covered up cigarette smoke.
I don't know, seems like every era has it's own overwhelming monotonic style. There was the mint green of the '50s. Harvest Gold of the '70s. Shitty pastels of the '90s. Living in a white box is extremely popular now.
- Fuck I can't stand living in a white box, but can't get away from it
I can definitely get down with some earth tones, but not every single one next to each other

Looks cozy af

Back in the 70's brown was considered neutral, neither oppressive or energetic, selected to not stand out.

Also, everything would be that colour soon anyway, on account of the cigarettes
- Yes! This is vital context -- in every photo taken by/with my grandparents, every single person was smoking.
As a young child, that is exactly how I felt about that style. I knew I really hated it. There was no openness to rooms and everything felt drab. It was a style that felt outdated even before I knew what "outdated" even meant.
The smell is the biggest thing I remember. The wood paneling and those types of carpets always had that smell. Well, it was either that smell or the lingering odor of old cigarette smoke and spilled scotch.
By the time I started becoming truly self-aware, the 90's hit and I was awakened with a blast of neon colors. (My brain doesn't want to remember anything much from the late 80's other than my Velcro shoes and jean jacket.)
- Rooms don't need to be open. My parents have an open concept modern home in Texas and it sucks. You can't hear the TV if someone is soing anything in the kitchen, but anyone upstairs hears EVERYTHING that goes on downstairs. Having dedicated spaces for different activities is nice
- that smell
  They have managed to reproduce that smell in modern times with Febreze.

What a wonderful way to describe that. All you've done is make it even more appealing.

I recently bought a house that had used that '70s paneling as a sort of wainscoting in the kitchen; the panels had been cut to 4' and applied in various ways (everything except just fucking nails) around the base of the walls. It had been painted white so it wasn't quite as hideous as its original state and I didn't feel like replacing it all, but I did have to repair one section of it that had been badly water-damaged. I was surprised to find that Lowe's still has that shit in stock so I bought a piece of it and brought it home ... and discovered that it wasn't really like the original stuff. It looked the same but the grooves between the alleged "boards" were not recessed, they were just printed on the surface, so once it was painted it would have just looked like flat board. So I ended up having to rip that shit into fake planks and nail them up separately with small grooves between them. All that work just to simulate '70s hideousness.

Thank god there was no shag carpet in that house.

are you talking about bead board? I'm surprised that the blue store doesn't have that. the orange store does.
- No, I'm talking about the '70s faux-wood paneling, like what's in the picture on this post. Nobody makes it any more.

Wow, I can smell that. Musty basement with a Tyco slot car race track in it.

And years of stale cigarette smoke baked into every surface in the house.
And a ping pong table with tons of shit stacked on top of it.

I kinda like it, feels cozy :)

Same! Its comfy, natural and “worn in” much better than empty gray or beige

I remember the wood paneling from when I was a wee lad.

Remember how it smelled?
- No, but my dad was a smoker and I remember how the air smelled in the new place later. He worked constantly though, so it didn't really stick the same way as the amount going into the air was small.

"Ahh yes, this will hide the cigarette stains."

elimination of wood, cotton, and wool as materials and fast fashion/plastic fashion means that classical fabric (or finish, or furniture) looks have been forced out, so that race-to-the-bottom Chinese goods can replace them.

now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam. And every wall is “agreeable gray”.

This is also a response to the 1950s:

And 1960s:

The other thing about these designs is that people tend to keep stuff for as long as it still works or looks good. So, while the kinds of photos you'd find of a "modern living room" in a magazine in the 1970s would look a certain way:
An actual living room would include furniture and decor from the 1950s and 1960s because it was still fine and didn't need to be replaced yet. IMO the image in this post looks to have a lot of 1960s in it to me.
People think of the 90s as being the era of neon, and while it's true that you might see a neon living room on Miami Vice, most people's living rooms in the 1990s were still orange and brown because the furniture and rugs from the 1970s were still good.
That 60s one looks awesome
- I'm partial to the 50's. They figured out the sleek Nordic cabinet look early - they just painted everything bright colors.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam.
When I was converting my school bus into a motorhome, I acquired (luckily for free) two pieces from one of those massive $4000 sectional couch things. I took them apart to rebuild them in a way that would fit in the bus, and HOLY SHIT are those things made cheaply. No cardboard, but the flat parts were made from leftover bits of chipped OSB, the sloped backs were formed from randomly-applied scraps of that nylon webbing they used to use on folding lawn chairs, and the frame was made from wood that you wouldn't even want to use for firewood. All of this was covered with decent-quality fabric and the cushions and pillows used OK foam, so a normal customer who wasn't deconstructing the thing would never know about the awfulness underneath.
Those both look pretty friggin sweet tbh
Interesting. The top pic is borderline Art Deco.

"And the brown and the beige and the brown and the beige and the brown!"

Documentary Now - Co-Op

That first step is a doozy.

I remember looking at estate agent photos of my parents home when they first bought it back in the 1980s. It looked very much like this. I remember when I was very young they had a carpet with a similar sort of dead plant motif, I remember crawling along and following the plant stems.

That's just how everybody seemed to decorate things back then, people used to wear a lot of brown as well. Perhaps we all depressed or something

You got a remember, back then smoking inside was a normal thing to do. There is a color pallet that nicotine stains just sink into without notice. This picture is a prime example of said color pallet.
- Right, my first reaction was “I can smell this picture.”
My parents had the exact same upholstery as that couch in the living room growing up.

Design and style changes throughout the decades. The style now is basically to keep a blank slate for eventually re-sale. That's why everything is beige and white. If you alter your colors or style too much, then you'll be reverting back to beige/white when you go to sell.

So sure, throw in that shag carpet, brown walls, and wood paneling. But lose about 50k-100k value on your home.

everything is beige and white
And the floors are those fucking fake gray wood 3' long vinyl planks. I don't even know what they're trying to emulate there - real wood isn't gray.

I have lived with that carpet. It was horrible and thin.

That carpet was my parent's basement rug for the majority of my life. Maybe my standards are low, but I thought it was fine. Not excellent but fine.
- We had it in a kitchen.

I miss it

This looks like it'd be alot of fun whole tripping lol

This was my family room.

"Earth tones"

I like dark wood but it does make rooms looks smaller if it is all dark colours

I always love the picture showing the different ways to contrast walls/ceiling/floor colors to push different feelings. Found it, or at least something similar to what I remember.
Small is cozy, it doesn't actually make it smaller so it shouldn't matter.
- Small can be cozy but small can also be cramped or even oppressing to some. That's why some prefer lighter colours, more natural light/windows and so on.
  Matter of taste really

90% of my furniture comes from them, at least it's repairable and high quality.

A million times better than what the average person buys nowadays

The furniture is great. If not wood, it’s still paint worthy. The hexagon end table is a great item in any color. If it’s paint grade, you can slap a little bondo in any dings, paint, poly, and it will likely last another 30yrs.

It does fit with the surroundings, to be fair.

My grandma had that same couch.

literally the look of a new cocktail bar here in town

Is that a fucking problem, Nicholas?

It's the time - of the season... When love runs high

After a few bad lsd trips, this is calming.

It's...so....drab

And still more than we'll ever achieve

Something tells me you picked the wrong house foo'

Milliard reaction irl

some vintage story shit

other then the carpet I like it

Yeah, the upholstery is just too 'matched' with the walls. I would imagine if it was a light colored tile, and the couch was a solid color, it would almost seem like a modernish house.