Why no one has a fun couch anymore

Beige probably rules your room. At least, that’s what a new data visualization reveals. A chart from the European Correspondent tracks the color of every sofa found in Ikea’s catalogs between 1960 and 2021. The finding? Color washed out of Ikea’s seating in 2011, and didn’t come back. The data visualization condenses 61 years’ worth of sofas—3,500 to be exact—into a rainbow of lines that get progressively more neutral as the years wear on. By 2013, until the catalog ended in 2021, the most common couch color was either gray or beige. [Screenshot: Toon Vos/The European Correspondent] It wasn...