Stop! Enough already with the 'adobe colors', and the earthtones, and the stucco and EFIS in hotel renovations! . . .

The patron saint of bad hotel exterior renovation, rest her soul. (I never hated Tammy Faye or really held her past association with Jim Bakker and The PTL Club scandal back in the 1980's against her, I just think her 'extremism is no vice in the war against aging' approach to the application of cheap cosmetics was a bit extreme, and has since been a bad influence on hotel renovation architecture . . .)

My current exterior design scheme of choice is to paint it white. White symbolizes purity.

And more to the point, nobody can argue with white.

(Well, obviously, someone could and did, given a recent design trend in hotel exteriors. I could see it as a fad, but it's gone on for ten years now and gotten to be too much. I'm sharing this piece on Twitter, where I'm followed by a few more people in the design field, so that in a year or two, hopefully, I can be credited with putting an end to it . . .)

Perhaps it's unimaginative, but someone out there must be getting pretty sick of that disgusting earth-tone yellow (especially combined with a blah brown) that it's become fashionable to paint stucco/EFIS hotels these days . . .



That burnt orange would be more credible in Albuquerque, but this hotel isn't in Albuquerque. (Did anyone imagine what that disgusting color would look like in a few years after the paint job gets old and starts discoloring?)










I once rented an apartment where the interior walls were this shade of yellow - and spent two days myself, at my own expense, before I moved in, painting it, because the darn color was so hard to look at that I couldn't stand to be in the same room with it...






We call this a "Tammy Faye" renovation.






It's an older prototype Hampton Inn that originally looked more like this . . .






. . . but the liberal application of stucco and/or EFIS didn't do any more to improve the appearance of it than the application of makeup (which probably also occurred with a foam insulation sprayer) did to improve the attractiveness of the famous wife of an '80's-era televangelist. Shoot, neither the older Hampton Inn nor (probably) Tammy Faye Bakker looked that bad without "renovation".

The sick, sad thing about it is that, now that older Hampton Inns must be 'updated' in such a way, newly designed Hampton Inns must be built that way to match . . .










And Hampton Inns are by no means the only hotel chain that is guilty of it.





























"Doctors bury their mistakes. Architects just grow ivy", went the old saying when I was in college majoring in design and architectural technology.

Then, someone --  having not the fear of God in his heart, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil  -- invented EFIS, stucco, and sprayed-on texturing . . .

If Howark Roark had really lived, he'd be mixing up the explosives.

Originally appeared on Quora