Great point about how cyclical the trends can be and how they come around again all the time. True for some things...seems like not so much for other things, though. Those weird shell-shaped bathroom sinks...it's kind of hard to imagine them being in style again.
Freedomin5 I love the pictures of the old appliances. How cool that they're still functional!
Oh, for sure, some trends stay stuck in the past. But the more important point is that no trends stay stuck in the present, so there's no point in ruining perfectly good house features just to chase trends that will be out of style shockingly fast.
Now that's not to say that no one should renovate their home, but no, they shouldn't do it *just* because something is dated, because whatever they replace it with is just a few years from being dated anyway.
If someone has a shell sink and just hates it, then replacing a sink isn't really that big a deal, nor is it very expensive to do, and certainly doesn't necessitate a whole bathroom gut job.
My current bathroom was a vomit-inducing eyesore when I bought it. Fake wood panel cabinets, yellow countertops, yellow square shower tiles in a different shade of yellow, yellow walls in a clashing shade of orangey yellow, a crusty old cheap looking stained sink with crusty old cheap looking faucet, and an almond toilet that clashed with the ivory tub and sink.
My realtor was like "obviously the bathroom needs to be completely redone" and I was like "why???"
The only colour I was stuck with was the shower tile, which was only ugly against everything else. I painted the faux wood and walls a dark royal blue, replaced all of the handles and hinges, covered the yellow countertop with dark blue marble pattern, replaced the toilet because it didn't work, and swapped out the sink and faucet.
Replacing the toilet was the only expensive part because the valve was seized and I needed to hire a plumber to fix it.
So even when something is painfully, nausea-inducingly dated and ugly. It's usually not all that involved or expensive to make it reasonably nice.
It's only when stuff really doesn't function optimally that structural changes are unavoidable. My friends recently redid their entire main floor because the layout was so heinously bad that it was non-functional, which is fucking hilarious since they had the house built that way.
Why? Because when they were young, dumb, making good money, and trying to impress people, the big trend at the time was massive "statement" entrances with huge staircases right when you walk in. That was the dream, but they didn't understand architecture enough to grasp what they were sacrificing to get such a ridiculous, ostentatious feature in a house that was not quite big enough to support it.
Thankfully the fucking Dynasty stairs trend died out, but not before absolutely fucking a whole bunch of suburban home layouts along the way.