Lowri Griffiths on the great herringbone flooring consensus and what it says about how this city decides taste for itself

I have been in six kitchens in the last month, across four postcodes and roughly a nine hundred thousand pound spread in property value, and every single one of them had the same floor. Pale herringbone, the wood slightly too grey to be honest oak, laid in the same direction, meeting the same shade of off-white cabinetry at the same skirting height. Nobody planned this. That is what I find genuinely interesting about it.

The Algorithm Did This, Not a Committee

There is no design authority issuing guidance to North London renovators. There is, instead, a feed. Everyone renovating a kitchen right now is looking at the same six accounts, saving the same handful of images, briefing the same shortlist of contractors who have themselves seen the same images from their last four jobs, and the result is a city quietly converging on a single aesthetic without a single meeting ever taking place.

I asked a friend who fits kitchens in Crouch End and Highbury whether he’d noticed it. He laughed for slightly too long and said he could fit the current look with his eyes closed, and that the request he now dreads most is a client asking for something different, because different requires him to think, and thinking is not what the day rate covers.

The Money Behind the Sameness Is Real

None of this is cheap. A proper renovation in this stretch of the city, structural work included, regularly runs past six figures, and the flooring alone can be a five figure line item once you include the underfloor heating everyone now assumes is included. Regional property price data, including the premium commanded by recently renovated stock, is published by the HM Land Registry, and building materials cost inflation over the past several years is tracked by the Office for National Statistics.

What that data doesn’t capture is the social pressure underneath it. A kitchen that looks noticeably different from the consensus reads, to a certain kind of North London buyer, as a risk. Estate agents I’ve spoken to are candid about this in a way they’re rarely candid about anything: buyers trust what they’ve already seen work elsewhere, and a kitchen that looks like everyone else’s kitchen sells faster than one that doesn’t, regardless of whether it’s actually better designed.

I Went Looking for the Rebels and Found About Four

In the interest of balance I tried to find people who’d deliberately gone the other way, and there are a small number, mostly further out toward Walthamstow and Tottenham where the price pressure to conform is slightly lower and the culture is, frankly, a bit more willing to take the mick out of anyone who spends nine grand on a floor to look like everybody else’s floor.

One woman in Walthamstow had gone full 1970s, orange laminate and all, entirely on purpose, and told me she’d had three separate viewings where prospective buyers physically recoiled before recovering themselves. She’s not selling. She just wanted me to know that reaction happened, repeatedly, and that she considered it evidence she’d made the correct decision.

What This Actually Tells You About the City

• Taste in this city has become genuinely algorithmic, and nobody involved in the process, from homeowner to contractor to estate agent, is fully in control of the outcome.
• The herringbone floor is not a preference. It’s a hedge against the possibility of being thought to have made a mistake, which is a very North London anxiety and always has been.
• Contractors are, reasonably, optimising for repeatable jobs they can price accurately, which rewards sameness on their end regardless of what any individual client actually wants.
• The people breaking the pattern are doing it furthest from the price pressure, which suggests the pattern isn’t really about taste at all. It’s about money and what money is scared of.

My Own Kitchen, for the Record

I have not renovated anything. I rent a flat in Finsbury Park with a kitchen floor that predates the current government by three governments, and I have started to feel a strange sort of pride about that, which I recognise is its own form of the same anxiety wearing a different coat.

For more of this kind of thing, including a piece I keep meaning to finish about the North London obsession with a specific shade of sage green paint, have a look at my author page at The London Prat, where I keep everything filed under things I have opinions about that nobody asked for.

This piece leans on satirical cousins in the London press for tonal company: read the coverage of a government opening a second seat of administration rather than fixing the first one for the civic version of the same instinct to copy rather than decide, and the piece on a heatwave triggering a synchronised national wardrobe emergency for the consumer version.

I asked the estate agent showing the Walthamstow house whether she’d seen the orange kitchen put anyone off entirely, and she said, after a long pause, that it had put off exactly the buyers who wouldn’t have made an offer anyway, which is either the most honest thing an estate agent has ever said to me or the most cynical, and I genuinely cannot decide which.

Further browsing at the capital’s wider reporting archive and the humour desk at Bohiney Magazine.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/