this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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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."
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
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn't notice the nicotine coating everything.
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.
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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
Meanwhile millennial having everything greyscale, definitely not going to be a sign of the times lol
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What a wonderful way to describe that. All you've done is make it even more appealing.
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.
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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.
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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.)
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"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:
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