Editor’s Letter: The Tyranny of Taupe

According to a Zillow study, painting your walls gray will entice potential buyers to offer up to $2,512 more for your home. When the company released that figure earlier this year, some homeowners living among gray walls professed paralysis, claiming online with varied degrees of irony that they wouldn’t dare paint their home any other color for fear of devaluing their property.

I get it. If you’re lucky enough to own a home right now, it’s likely your biggest, most unpredictable asset and a constant source of anxiety in a market that doesn’t seem to be following any kind of inherited logic. But even joking about living under the tyranny of a trend as simple as a paint color seems like a particularly cruel form of alienation from the place that should reflect, well, you. If you rent your place, you know the feeling. The sense of precarity—that the owner can always demand more than you can afford when it comes time to renew your lease—means that where you sleep can’t truly be your safe space. Particularly here in the U.S., where there are very few protections for you.

But remember that it took more than 40 years for avocado green and wood paneling to become the right kind of outré. The same cycle will come for oatmeal minimalism, modern farmhouse kitsch, millennial pastels—currently breathing their last, dusty gasp—and, yes, those gray walls that signal taste, but no particular taste, to prospective buyers.

So, go wild? Or at least make your place your own. For inspiration, we have a few examples of renovations uninterested in convention: a playfully layered townhouse in Lisbon, an apartment in Kosovo that feels open without an open plan, and a 19th-century house in Chicago that contains a riotous index of its owners’ obsessions. And, so that you can furnish your own home in a way that only you would, we’re announcing this year’s Dwell 24, our annual list of emerging designers making the most exciting furniture, light fixtures, and other objects out there right now.

Don’t apologize for your glass bricks, your apron sink, your wall-to-wall carpeting (old or newly on trend), or whatever makes your home yours. Maybe make sure you can dial back all of that terrazzo when you decide to sell—or cover that trompe l’oeil mural well enough to get your security deposit back. The breeze shifts. But don’t be afraid of your decor. You deserve to live in whatever style you choose.

Top photo by Lyndon French.

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