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.”
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’m a school bus driver now and about half of my coworkers smoke. It’s just fucking revolting because they always stink of that shit.
I know of someone who has seizures, and recently gave themselves a stay in the burn unit because they lit a cigarette after a seizure when they were postictal (meaning they are recovering from the seizure but still have no awareness). That was bad news bears as my friend likes to say. Just the risk of falling asleep with a lit cigarette would be enough to keep me from it, not to mention the way you stink, the cost, the way people avoid you, and the inevitable damage to your health. You can have quit cigarettes decades beforehand, and still end up with emphysema.
But just plain stinking would be enough for me! Ugh that’s awful for you.
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.
use oil-based paint
Oh dear god no. I’d rather have a root canal without anesthetic.
I don’t blame you. Stuff is terrible.
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
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.
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
Before the ship it was an old scottish folkstory about a guy going home on a stormy night, encountering a coven of witches, calling out out to one that had a really small shirt (cutty sark) and never being seen again Ichabod Crane style. The figurehead on the ship is what gave the ship it’s name, because it was based on that story.
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.
I cannot decide whether I’d call my parents classy. I don’t think they were deficient in that manner but I’m not sure whether they had a lot, either.
The were saving all the pea soup green, salmon pink and sunflower yellow for the kitchen and bathrroms.
Removed by mod
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
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.
Is this one of those things where sarcasm doesn’t carry over the Internet, or…?
do you mean you can’t tell if it’s clean?
When I moved into my house it had a concrete coloured lino floor in the kitchen, you could never tell if that thing was clean or not. Is that bit of brown part of the design, or is it a crushed bran flake? So you’d get the Hoover out and it would turn out to be part of the bloody design.
I know somebody who used a marbley surface for their kitchen and every time I’m at their place I’m thrown by a part of the pattern that looks just like someone spilled chocolate milk and let it dry in place.
Admittedly that’s because it’s particularly large dark patch. 70s floral patterns in fuzzy materials were way too busy to identify any one thing as a stain. It all became this noisy blur. If anything it had the opposite problem of sitting down on top of the crushed barn flakes because they camouflaged perfectly on your sofa cushions.
Cats, too.
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.
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.
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.
Because no matter how much you clean it, it is intensely more disgusting than tile/faux-wood/wood floors ever will be.
Its the floor. You walk on it, not eat your dinner off it.
Right, and since my feet are arguably at least as important to me as my mouth, I would prefer to contact cleaner surfaces.
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
Bring back the '70s babes with it like Joyce DeWitt or Jan Smithers.
Give me Sally Field.
Reluctantly.
Understood.
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 don’t want to live in an allergen trap.
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.
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.
Looks cozy af
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
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.
Bear was sleeping, it was at night. Only pic I have is this, it was not very impressive but it smelled like a bear lived there.
Thank you I am now contented. Also bears are fucking great I don’t care if it was asleep or not.
Was it a panda bear or a polar bear?
Internet says: “The area’s most famous resident is Medvěd Jiří (George the Bear). He is a black and brown Himalayan bear that lives in the enclosures at the castle’s base. His appearances are rare, but his entrances are always sure to cause a stir among visitors.”
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. :)
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.
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
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.
