IN 2019, Architectural Digest declared HGTV “an indispensable part of America’s home design culture” and a “juggernaut.” Then along came Covid-19 lockdowns, which radically expanded what our homes had to do for us and what we had to do in them. HGTV, a 24-7 source of interior-design and house-flipping content, became one of the country’s most watched entertainment networks, announcing a gargantuan slate of sixteen new series for 2021. As the channel expanded, so did discussions of the HGTV-ification of our spaces: a phenomenon painfully evident in real-estate listings and the TikToks of influencers buying their first homes. Most of the critiques were directed at a few aesthetic tics: sliding barn doors and farmhouse decor (blame Fixer Upper’s Chip and Joanna Gaines), blah wall colors only a landlord could love, and renos of original hardwood floors replaced with gray plank vinyl flooring. Avocado toast was joined by a rival cliché, “millennial gray”—a chromatic preference seen as a response to“the trauma of Tuscan villa decor, ivy everywhere, and farm-animal-themed kitchens” (to quote Apartment Therapy’s description of the suburban homes many millennials grew up in).
HGTV is a millennial too, born in 1994, another time in American history shaped by a virus.
While the design was categorized as homogeneous, HGTV was lauded for its diversity, specifically its ability to increase the acceptance of gays and lesbians through LGBTQ+ representation on its shows. This argument was countered—notably by Roxane Gay—and its limits examined as part of a wider scrutiny of how far queer representation really went on HGTV. In 2022, Americans’ acceptance of “gay and lesbian relations” hit its highest percentage point since Gallup started tracking this statistic in 2001, but between 2022 and 2023, the polling company showed that acceptance dropped from 71 to 64 percent, the largest percent change in any “Americans’ opinions on moral issues” category in that time period. Convincing Americans that gays love shiplap might not move the needle for LGBTQ+ acceptance (probably because, well, most gays do not love shiplap). All of which is to say that the HGTV-ification discourse could use some historical and sociopolitical contextualization.
HGTV is a millennial too, born in 1994, another time in American history shaped by a virus. It was in that year that HIV/AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans ages twenty-five to forty-four. By then, the virus had been decimating the design and architectural industries for more than a decade. Entire firms were destroyed. Many designers who brought the decadence and hedonism of the era’s queer culture into their interiors were lost and with them a liberatory sense that anything and everything was possible in both design and the world.
In the years that followed, as millennials came of age in their parents’ rooster-filled kitchens, another interior-design trend emerged: ’90s blond-wood minimalism, with its focus on muted colors and spare furnishings. Far from the high-tech minimalism replete with chrome and black leather championed in the ’70s by designers like Joseph D’Urso, this version had very different intentions. Austerity in interior design was no doubt a reaction to the loud, colorful, and unabashedly queer aspects of the two preceding decades’ aesthetics. Look at what the excess of the ’70s ran straight into in the ’80s: an ongoing plague and two recessions in three years. As the design world rushed to support those with the virus, pragmatism (read: moneymaking) won out in both the public and private sectors. The tiresome simplicity that traveled, and still travels, under the label minimalism (no real relation to the capital-M art movement) became a driving force in design, taking up space previously occupied by those lost to HIV/AIDS.
Today we find ourselves in another political moment in which we are meant to choose monochrome dullness. For every TikTok “Before and After” video about somebody painting a multicolor wave across their wall (call that dopamine decor), there’s yet another one of a Tudor Revival turned into a “modern farmhouse”: modern because it’s subdued, free of rural kitsch—in other words, minimalist. And minimalism persists not because it’s embraced by millennials per se, but because it’s embraced by homeowners, house-flippers, and landlords. Individualism is eschewed in resale, while conservative values—which are thriving, as Gallup’s polling shows—celebrate property as a facet of identity. Almost half of millennials in the United States can’t afford to buy a place to live; the modern farmhouse represents the sensibilities of America’s shrinking propertied class. HGTV tells us how to maximize the value of an asset that, for more and more of us, will remain an aspirational pipe dream. Self-expression, in this context, is perceived as frivolous. But maybe that is precisely why we need it.
