Why everything in the seventies was brown
Avocado bathrooms, orange kitchens and a wall of woodchip. There are actual reasons, and they are more interesting than "people had no taste".
5 August 2026
Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy something through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we choose to write about.
The seventies palette was not an accident of taste. It came from a specific set of manufacturing, economic and cultural pressures that all pointed the same way.
Cheap pigments and new plastics
The colours that were cheapest to produce in the new melamines and laminates were in the earth-tone range. When a colour is cheap, it becomes fashionable, and then it becomes inevitable.
The back-to-nature thing
The late sixties pushed a whole aesthetic of natural materials and earth colours into the mainstream, and by 1974 it was in every branch of every furniture shop in the country.
And it lasted, because it was expensive to change
Bathroom suites were not replaced casually. An avocado suite fitted in 1975 was still there in 1995, which is why the decade looms so large in the memory of people born long after it ended.