Beige mania: the color defining the interiors of the TikTok Generation

For years, millennial grey was the skin of Generation Y’s homes. Pearl grey, anthracite, microcement, uniform fabrics: a grey aesthetic suited to feeds and photos, to temporary rentals as well as thirty-year mortgages. Now a new color is taking over—on social media, in interior design projects, and in domestic spaces—replacing the fifty (and more) shades of grey we’ve seen in recent years.

That color is beige. Warm tones, natural fibers, surfaces that embrace light. Yet behind this chromatic shift lies the same old logic: the search for a neutral that works, that doesn’t offend, that always fits.

A quick search on Airbnb is enough to see how pervasive the change has already become. Looking for an apartment for two in Paris next weekend, the results page reads like a manifesto of #millennialbeige. Photo after photo, interiors oscillate between sand, ivory, taupe, and cream—a warm palette that has definitively replaced the cold tones of the previous decade. The same chromatic language now permeates furniture catalogues, interior designers’ Instagram profiles, and boutique hotel virtual tours. Beige has become the new shared code for communicating contemporary domesticity.

It’s no coincidence that one of the laboratories for this tonal shift is Greenpoint, the Brooklyn neighborhood now synonymous with creative living and a warm, lived-in, industrial aesthetic. Here, in converted lofts and restored townhouses, pale wood, exposed brick, natural textiles, and earthy hues form a new kind of neutral—less showroom, more storytelling. Homes where beige floors and whitewashed walls host vintage furniture, ceramics, and rich details. Or waterfront developments blending glass and brick, light and vegetation, transforming an ex-industrial district into a layered domestic landscape.

This choice stems from a visual culture but desperately seeks to break free from seriality: sand-colored plaster instead of cold grey walls, natural fiber rugs instead of synthetic micro-patterns, soft textiles and wooden chairs instead of rigid geometries. The key lies in contrast, to avoid falling back into the cliché of flat neutrality—a total rejection of beige-on-beige. Still, the risk remains that this new language will also become a formula. If grey was “market safe,” beige risks turning into the “warm standard” of the algorithms. 

For now, though, millennial beige—as it’s already been dubbed—reveals a deeper need: to inhabit not only space but time, to let materials age, colors shift with light, and the home become not just a backdrop, but a living organism.