We live in a time when individuality and customization are the norm. Rarely, if ever in today’s myriad of buying decisions do you find a ‘one size fits most’ model, or the ‘you can have any color, as long as it’s black’ mentality. Ease of customization and the resulting abundance of choice means that every individual can be the curator of their own style.
My three year-old niece Charlotte knows most people’s favorite color. I doubt she’s heard an answer of ‘gray’ too often, though it is a line in a great Counting Crows song. Of course Adam Duritz is not the norm; however, gray has been rapidly growing in popularity and prevalence in home décor for years.
It is perhaps because of the abundance of choices that gray has emerged as the most prevalent color for upholstery base cloths, as a sort of median of preferences. Gray is neutral, steadying, balanced. Neither black nor white, it is the color of indecision – or better yet, of compromise. Light gray is soothing and calm. Dark gray is conservative, conventional, serious. Not only as a median of choice, gray can go with just about anything else. Gray as a backdrop allows for simple changes in accent colors to really alter the mood of any setting, allowing every purchaser of gray to add their own personality.
Here at Regal we’ve seen a big shift in color trends from first half of the decade into the latter half and a big push towards gray, shown in the accompanying charts from both 2014 and then 2018. We’ve seen a stark difference in popularity of browns (among the most popular back in ’14) and light grays (nearer the middle and now by far most popular). Our most popular color of the past 5 years has been ‘ash’, a light gray with flecks of black. It’s unclear how long this gray cloud will reign over the home décor industry, but as it’s become a backdrop for easily changeable accent colors – grays will likely be a mainstay in many environments for years to come.