Something Blonde

Mr SB and I are in the throes of a home makeover. After many years, we’ve finally decided that our increasingly middle-aged spines are not being helped by sleeping on a mattress which, in its texture, resembles nothing more than a Bag For Life full of hamster cages. So we’ve decided to get a new one. And of course, that means we have to decorate the bedroom, and while we’re doing that we might as well buy some proper grown-up wardrobes instead of that ridiculous canvas thing that we bought from Argos just to tide him over when he first moved in five years ago, oh, and we need a new carpet.

Fairly early in the process, we decided that we wanted our bedroom to be ‘like a nice hotel room’. What I’ve subsequently realised is that what this means in practice is this:

It will be beige.

Everywhere we went, the same ‘choices’ were available to us. We quickly discovered that, in order to have a bed of the desired shape and size, it has to be made of brown leather. And the brown has to be referred to throughout negotiations as ‘chocolate’, or they’ll throw you out of the shop once they’ve finished trying to sell you a ‘bespoke’ mattress just because you’ve walked in straight from work and you’re wearing a suit.

how many shades of beige does the world need?

And in order to get a carpet that goes with the bed, the carpet has to be beige. They won’t call it beige, of course, they’ll call it ‘Maxwell Regal’ or ‘Rutland Heritage’, but I guarantee that if you were to walk into your nearest carpet emporium right now, about 80% of the carpets in there would be, in some degree or other, beige, but would be displayed before you as though this were some kaleidoscopic woolly wonderland.

Choosing paint is no better. Despite the best efforts of Dulux, Crown, et al to dress up their offerings as ‘Taffeta Ballgown’ and ‘Irish Cream On The Rocks’, we all know that what they really mean is ‘Might As Well Be Bare Plaster’. My favourite is this one.  I’d like to think that the choice of ‘Avantgarde’ as a name for the world’s most inoffensive colour was the product of a self-knowing, wry-smiling junior marketing executive’s ironic sense of humour, but you and I both know that it wasn’t.

~ by somethingblonde on November 7, 2010.

Posted in Life
Tags: conformity, consumerism, style