alt Hacker NewsI think it's like millennial grey. Not only is it more expensive to add ornamentation, it also hurts resale and repurposing of buildings. Ideally you want mostly identical boxes where you could change the sign to make it a church, a McDonalds, a clothing store, etc every few years.
Or that seems like the goal of commercial builders now, right?
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When we built our house a few years back, our builder gave us 3 total paint colors, for the entire house. Anything above that was $500/room. So, we let our kids pick out their own room colors, leaving us with one color for the rest of the house.
We chose Millennial Gray because it goes with anything, not because we especially liked it. It was a perfectly acceptable option for free.
By now we've repainted half the house or so. But the rooms where the gray remains are just fine.
This is the crux. Houses used to be built to be lived in, so ornamentation added value. Now they are commodities to be traded and sold, and variation makes a portfolio harder to manage/less uniform.
This is very sad to read.
Alas, each time I pass Passeig de Gràcia I lament there are no more interesting buildings... everything is soo f* bland :|
"Ideally you want mostly identical boxes"
I get your point, but I still feel the need to say here clearly: No, I don't. Identical interchangable boxes are not what I would call a ideal standard for housing.
I wish people would stop calling it millennial grey. It's Gen-X grey. Kim K and Kanye were the ones who built the logical conclusion in their contrast-less white casa; millennials are born maximalists who pair tech accoutrements with actual wood grain because their fondest memory is of being sat in front of a PS1 and a CRT housed in a stained oak cabinet in their childhood den, wires, manuals, remotes, and jewel cases hither and thither.
re commerical buildings today, absolutely. Most developments, especially retail ones have the goal of being wrapped up in a commerical real estate portfolio. That might be a REIT or held by a private investor. Their goal is to collect buildings with the widest marketability for retail. They are not generally curating locations with intent. Though some owners specialize in that in high density tourist or luxury retail spaces.
To be fair, this isn't entirely new. The American West was strewn with cheap wooden structures that all looked alike with big fake fonts with hand painted signs. Those mostly rotted so they're uncommon in our lexicon outside of movies.
Does it actually hurt resale value? Anything with style won't be universally loved, but will make something more attractive and valuable to some. It certainly hasn't stopped fashion and design in other products. Is the solution for "This won't be to everyone's tastes" to make everything into something that nobody actually likes?