Why no one has a fun couch anymore
Beige probably rules your room. At least, that’s what a new data visualization reveals. A chart from the European Correspondent tracks the color of every sofa found in Ikea’s catalogs between 1960 and 2021. The finding? Color washed out of Ikea’s seating in 2011, and didn’t come back. The data visualization condenses 61 years’ worth of sofas—3,500 to be exact—into a rainbow of lines that get…
Ikea's furniture catalogs have dwindled the rainbow of sofa colors over the past six decades. A chart from the European Correspondent traces the hues of every sofa sold by Ikea from 1960 to 2021, revealing a stark shift from vibrant greens and blues to subdued grays and beiges. In the 1960s, green and blue were the most common sofa colors, followed by tan and beige in the 1970s and 1980s.
The 1990s saw an explosion of patterned sofas in black, red, and green, while the 2000s favored blue, black, and white. However, this period of color proliferation came to an end in 2011, when the catalogs were discontinued, and the trend continued on the Ikea website. Today, 131 gray couches dominate the selection, followed by 120 beige models, with blue, brown, white, black, green, turquoise, yellow, red, pink, and orange rounding out the palette.
The shift towards neutral tones is attributed to customer preferences, as well as the broader millennial movement towards minimalist, monochromatic color schemes. While some designers are already reintroducing bolder colors into their designs, Ikea has also begun offering more vibrant options, such as bright yellow textured sofas and colorful patterned pillows.
With the rise of "grandma core" interiors and vintage-inspired trends, it seems that color may be making a comeback in the world of sofas.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
