The great furniture blanding: How neutral tones took over our living rooms

Beige probably rules your room. At least, that’s what a new data visualisation reveals.

A chart from The European Correspondent tracks the colour of every sofa found in Ikea’s catalogues between 1960 and 2021. The finding? Colour washed out of Ikea’s seating in 2011 and didn’t come back. The data visualisation condenses 61 years’ worth of sofas – 3500 to be exact – into a rainbow of lines that get progressively more neutral as the years wear on. By 2013, until the catalogue ended in 2021, the most common couch colour was either grey or beige.

It wasn’t always that way, though. The chart shows green and blue were the most common colours in the 1960s before tan and beige took off in the 1970s and into the 1980s. The 1990s saw the popularity of patterned sofas and colours like black, red and green. In the 2000s, blue, black and white were popular. Then the great furniture blanding happened.

Though Ikea discontinued its catalogue in 2021, its website today shows that not much has changed. There are 131 grey couches, more than any colour, followed by the runner-up, beige, at 120. Blue, with 93 couches, is the third-most popular, though it ranges widely from dark grey-blue to a light pale turquoise blue. That’s followed by brown (93), white (72), black (69), green (67), turquoise (31), yellow (27), red (12), pink (11) and orange (1).

“Our sofa colour choices have always been guided by customer preferences,” says an Ikea spokesperson. “For several years, muted and neutral tones have been the most popular choice. Today, however, we’re seeing growing interest in more colourful interiors.”

Millennial grey and “influencer beige” have been popularised online thanks to the homes of social media influencers like Kim Kardashian. But more broadly, the shift was also consistent with larger millennial visual movements of the 2010s like blanding, which favoured reduced, minimalist and monochromatic colour palettes.

Luckily for the life of a couch, such neutral pieces also had a simplicity in keeping with the quiet-luxury trend of the early 2020s, which became more prevalent following the HBO series Succession. But beyond aesthetics, they’re also highly functional choices, because neutrals can be a great base for any colour.

Even so, there are signs that colour could be coming back to couches. Some designers are already over it. Architectural Digest showed sofas in colours like dark green and red on a pair of autumn 2025 magazine covers, while Pinterest’s 2026 spring trend report found the “all-white everything” era is coming to an end with an uptick in searches for colours like “moody blue” and “vintage pink”. The “grandmacore” trend for vintage-inspired interiors, is also up, which could signal old trends on their way back.

Despite having more neutral sofas than any other colour, Ikea is reviving vintage designs and colours on its own, like its Nytillverkad collection, which includes a bright yellow textured sofa and colourful, patterned pillows. And a Pinterest-style design inspiration feed on the Ikea homepage under “living rooms” mixes in occasional green, yellow and blue sofas among its popular neutral models.

“I have a feeling that colours have been on the rise ever since [Ikea ended its catalogue],” says The European Correspondent’s Toon Vos, who counted all the Ikea catalogue couches.

“Looking at earlier fluctuations in the data, all is not lost, I think,” Vos says. “The ’80s may be remembered for a neon overload, but as far as sofas go, it was beige and tan all the way. Yet the ’90s became the era of the most colourful and outrageous patterns. Colour will find its way back into our living rooms over time.”

This article was first published by Fast Company.

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