Forgive me for stealing the title of one of the drop-dead funniest satirical take-downs of 1970s-era American interior decorating trends, as expressed in then-contemporary decorating magazines and such of that ilk. I giggled myself nearly sick reading the book back then, because I recognized so very many of the once-popular trends. Like the mad pash for avocado green and harvest gold. No, I thought they were vomitus then, and when the minor gods of home-goods retail marketing tried to bring them back by calling them lime green and lemon yellow, they were still vomitus.

This train of thought departed the station because I have been watching a lot of Toob of Yew channels about furniture and house restoration, construction or design lately. The house renovation videos largely in the time-lapse versions, just to get a sense of what a wreck the various owners/designers started with and what they finished with, and to skip over the tedious bits of breaking up concrete and tearing down sagging roofs. A lot of these are European, English, or Russian, even – renovating and renewing old farmhouses, barns, châteaux of ages antique to near-modern, or even just half a century … which by the European scale of time is modern. There is something vicariously satisfying about watching a tumbledown old barn, farmhouse, an ordinary residence or a ruinous but once-grand mansion, long abandoned to weeds, junk and general decay being cleaned up, cleared out and repurposed into a fresh and functional dwelling with all the modern bells and whistles. Floor heating systems, ultra-modern plumbing, efficient insulation and windows. Some of these projects are being done piecemeal by families as a long-term project, and some by commercial concerns, as nearly as I can tell. (A dead giveaway that it’s a long-term project undertaken by a family is the presence of a large RV or single-wide trailer lurking in the background. My parents and a lot of their nearest neighbors did that very thing – living quarters in an RV or trailer, while completing the main house project.)

The trouble is, though – I have usually been deeply disappointed by the final reveal, especially when the original building is pre-20^th century, and old enough to be considered historic. There a handful of exceptions in Brits or Australians renovating the occasional chateau, and bringing back something of a period appearance to a historical building … but the remainder are just … ugh. Usually stark, sleek, chic and very, very ultra-to-the-minute modern. A greater incongruity to the outside structure can hardly be imagined. It’s most often strikes me as appearing like an Ikea display room wedged into an 18^th or 19^th century exterior, and that is just … wrong. In my opinion, the inside of a building should have some kind of aesthetic relationship to the outside, even if only a remote one. If you’re living in a late 18^th century farmhouse, with authentic exposed beams, half-timbering and rustic natural stone fireplaces … oughtn’t the interior reflect that a little more, without going all whole-hog in recreating the original dim, cramped and drafty original.  It’s perfectly OK for someone to want all the domestic convenience and comfort that modern technology and development can bring to bear, but if that’s what you want, why not build all new while you’re going through all the trouble.

So many of the final results of these renovations just did not appeal. It did seem to be a trend among the European renovators. I suppose that if you have lived all your life in and among old buildings, you might be completely blasé about fitting one out with all mod cons, but the final reveals on so many of these projects were … dispiriting. As Dolly Parton remarked, in a completely different context, “You have to spend a lot of money to look this cheap!” And aluminum-framed thermal windows, vinyl plank flooring and ultra-modern hanging light fixtures … expensive as they probably are, do look cheap, installed in a two-hundred year old cottage in the Loire, or the Rhineland.