Decorating your home: From retro to modern day. by Guy Bell
When it comes to choosing the right wall coating, there appears to be an abundance of choices to be had. Notably, with more focus over the past few years on interior design, the DIY exterior paint industry has seen an upsurge in popularity over recent years and the home has now become a place to show off your taste and skills in this new area of fashion……….but is fashion in decorating a good thing or only for the gullible? We take a stroll down memory lane in this great article by Guy Bell, editor of “Never Paint Again”, all about decorating from the 70’s onwards.
Walls are important things: They hold up the roof of our house so we don’t get wet, they are handy to put shelves on, and also to hang works of art and suchlike, they divide and distinguish the different parts of our house and how we live our lives in our houses. Walls are also usually the first thing people want to decorate when they move in to a house, plus they are the largest area, apart from the floor, inside our homes, that we can add that “personal touch” with colour or texture, but has it always been like that?
The wall coating or covering you choose will come and go into fashion more often than the choice between t shirts or polo shirts, or diesel vs petrol, but how does this relate to DIY exterior painting or DIY decorating?
As soon as you get that trendy but garishly patterned, black wallpaper up the fashion will be for neutral emulsion before the paste has had chance to dry! Not so cool and “interesting” now eh?!
As a wall coating, wallpaper for example, has had a long and varied history. From the ornate designs of Victorian patterns through to the seventies style that has recently seen a revival; there have also been delicate pastels in stripes, flowers and sometimes a mix of both, but which should you go for? Should you go for any of those options, after all, fashions come and go don’t they?
Embossed wallpapers such as woodchip or analglypta were quite trendy for a while and are still available in some good DIY stores, and lots of bad ones too. These paper based wallcoverings have a 2nd use with their heavy texture as they can do a good job of covering over dodgy cracked plaster and hiding all manner of wall surface imperfections. This is then painted to your own preference but I've never seen an embossed paper that didn't cast shadows on itself, thus dulling any colour you may add to it. Use with caution!
Emulsion paint as a wall coating has also enjoyed periods of popularity. Different finishes have been experimented with over the years from eggshell, a breakthrough for families with kids as it made surfaces washable, through to matt wall finishes and now one that gives the appearance of a wall coating of dusted chalk. This fashion harks back to Victorian times and many people strive for that authentic look. Eggshell can still be found in public toilets (!), OAP’s homes, hospitals, schools and achingly unfashionable people’s homes (!). It gave a flecked finish that was pleasing to some, but this can now be replicated with products such as “portafleck” wall coatings which are usually resin based and applied by spray, often in 2 coats.
One of the best reasons people like to paint their interior walls with emulsion is the vast possibilities when it comes to colour. Self expression knows no bounds now that we are able to take any object down to the nearest DIY centre and get the colour matched up to put on our walls by one of their “Helpful” (using the term in the broadest possible sense) but usually teenage staff.
Of course, this doesn't guarantee good taste in wall coating but it does allow for individuality, provided you get it right. In fact stroll down to any DIY store and you will see literally thousands of paint colours available for interior decorating, but only a small handful for exterior paint. It would seem that peoples tastes haven’t changed that much over the years for traditional exterior paint, the only difference being that there are more “yellows” or shades of yellow available than there once were. The colour in the paint, or pigment, can in most cases, be broken down quite quickly with the effects of the sun, rain and so on, whereas of course that doesn’t matter if its inside, outside is a different case altogether.
Therefore most pigments used to make interior paint, are not used for exterior paints as the paint would not last very long at all on the walls outside so only the strongest pigments are used for outside paint, usually shades of white, yellow or cream, reflecting the sun and not letting it be broken down.
One of the worst decorating faux pas I have ever seen is that dreadful quick fix that was hailed as a success by the one hour decorating shows on TV. You know the ones, where everything is slapped over with a hideous coloured emulsion and what can't be ripped out is covered with MDF? These were the shows responsible for making us paint over wallpaper. Unless it's lining paper, don't do it. It gives the effect of - well, of painted over wallpaper! The worst wall coating you could possibly have some would say.
But anyway, has decorating your home always been like this?
Decorating in the 70’s: Is there life on Mars?
A period of ……..er…….”challenging” home decoration.
The word that could sum up decorating in the 70’s would be “mental”, I would hesitantly suggest. (!), although there are many other words we could use to describe interior design during this time.
• Creative?
• Bold?
• Daring?
• Fresh?
• Cool?
• Fashion conscious?
• Surreal?
• Bright?
• Optimistic?
• Weird?!
Colour and pattern was king. Who can remember orange sofas, bright purple curtains and lime green shag pile carpet? Were we all off our heads on drugs?? Saying that the 70’s was a very creative period after the austerity of the 50’s and 60’s, and therefore people were more willing to experiment with things, and boy did they experiment! Design wasn’t just related to the house inside, it was outside too.
Anyone have wooden shutters on the outside of their house? There is nothing worse than seeing a terraced house, in somewhere awful like Plymouth for example, possibly Victorian, with painted Louvre doors nailed directly onto the wall each side of the windows and complemented perhaps by an old wagon or cart wheel leaning against the wall, a reproduction one of course, from the Argos catalogue.
WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING!?
THIS WAS ENGLAND, NOT BOLIVIA!
Other decorating ideas that people thought fashionable at the time:
• Stone cladding (no, your terraced house in Barnsley does NOT all of-a-sudden resemble a fine English castle!)
• Wood effect plywood wall cladding inside.
• Pebbledash
• Leaded light windows, Tudor style in a 1960’s bungalow.
• Bold colours such as brown, avocado, various greens, including puke colour,
• Brightly patterned carpets
• A “bar” in your lounge (usually home made and stocked with Babycham, chivas regal, Martini, Noilly Pratt, Watneys party seven, Warninks advocaat (YUK) and glacé cherries!). Now all of these items would be described as “Poncey” (!)
• Knocking your lounge or sitting room, through to your dining room and putting “swinging” stable style doors in between. (Why? Oh why oh why?!)
• Ripping out period features such as fireplaces and ornate ceilings. (bet you wish you hadn’t done that now eh?)
Decorating in the 1980’s: Ashes to ashes?
We all remember the 1980's for many reasons: CND marches, channel 4 TV, Mrs Thatcher, Back to the future, Duran Duran, but what about around the home? Who could forget the dreaded eighties penchant for Artexed walls. What a total nightmare! Everybody was slapping Artex on their walls leaving you with a wall coating that had the ability to remove several layers of skin every time you passed by. It was almost like having internal pebbledash walls! Of course, this could then be painted with all manner of emulsions. This never helped make it look any better but it made you feel like the job was complete. And from an application point of view, it did not need to be finished smooth so was ideal for the budding DIY’er.
Other decorating ideas that people thought fashionable at the time:
• Pebbledash (spar dash, poor quality style)
• Stone cladding
• Artex on the ceiling
• Artex on EVERYTHING (except floors)
* Crazy paving in the garden. (oh yes, crazy man, not!)
* Warehouse style shelving
* Glass tables
* "Athena" huge wall posters
* Floor tiles & carpet tiles.
• Bright opposing colours like red and white, blue and yellow.
• BSB “squariels” satellite dishes as badges of honour outside council houses.
• Lots of metal furniture
* UPVC EVERYTHING, windows, doors, patio doors, soffits, downpipes, gutters, fascia boards, front door, back door, cladding, oh just about the LOT apart from the grass lawn, in plastic.
Decorating in the 90’s: The MTV generation
The 90’s were a tough time for homeowners in the UK, Interest rates had gone up to an eye-watering 15%, unemployment was at 3 million and thousands of homes were being repossessed. Those that did manage to keep their home, usually set about decorating their house to more sombre shades. Out went the 80’s and all it stood for in favour of 2 looks really, the traditional, and the “grunge” look.
Thankfully the latter opinion that in some cases has survived up to now, now just means you live like a pig and are very untidy.
The nineties were spent with all different methods of removing Artex being touted through interior design magazines. This is lethal stuff and it seems the best idea is to skim over it with more plaster. Ok, so it takes several inches off the overall size of your room but it makes it look about a foot bigger so you can't lose really.
Of course, wall coatings on the outside of the house are also subject to trends. Rendering, bare brick, painted brick, treated with anti burglar paint, all sorts have been available over the years. And who could consider any wall coatings without remembering the dreaded pebbledash or cladding?
To coat your house in awful pebbledash is just a seller’s nightmare today. It is assumed it is covering up all sorts of damage and decay and never, ever looked nice. If you are considering selling your pebbledashed home, it would probably be best to call in one of the exterior wall specialists available today. If this still hasn’t convinced you, take a look at a story we released a couple of years ago about painting pebbledash and tyrolean masonry walls
The problem with pebbledashed walls on the outsides of houses is that you cant really paint it (see above link), it is prone to cracking, you can hurt yourself on the sharp stones (I’ve taken half my skin off my hands before when accidentally brushing up against a pebbledash wall!), and quite honestly, its gone out of fashion! It is worth bearing in mind that pebble-dash was chiefly invented as a cheap alternative and covered up poor quality building material. This was in response to a massive house building boom in the 1920’s and 1930’s in the UK.
Of course, there are all manner of wall coatings on the market today that claim to do all manner of things for your house. But no doubt some of this this will be a passing phase too. Your best bet is to stick with traditional finishes, preferably long life, both inside and outside the home, as remember, fashions change, but classic will always be classic, so go for a traditional neutral colour palette with tasteful neutral carpets, and above all, make sure the outside looks spotless, especially if you want to sell your home in the near future.
What now?
• Wood flooring?
• Neutral short pile carpets
• Wooden double glazing units
• High tec interior wall coatings
• High tex exterior wallcoatings
• Eco living
• Housing and land shortage
• Immigration/emigration
• Recycling and re-using industrial buildings
* Back to the "make and mend" austere culture of the 50's?
* Realistic home values.
Times have most certainly changed. With the credit crunch, the very real fear of a property market crash, an exploding population thanks to the fools at the Labour party, lack of available land and so on, in hindsight, was it really worth following fashion?
This is an original article and the author asserts his rights to copyright and ownership. DO NOT COPY THIS ARTICLE.