The timeless allure of an ugly green toilet

Here’s something one should probably not publicly admit: I want a new toilet.



Maybe I’m just powerless to the occasional trend. Maybe I’m yet another person with the inability to move past the resurgence of Midcentury Modernism. Maybe it just takes a specific type of nerd to ponder jettisoning their staid porcelain fixtures for a bathroom set in a 1967 archival Kohler color dubbed, “Avocado.”



[Image: Kohler]



But I’m not alone. And thanks to a legion of like-minded water closet connoisseurs bored with standard white fixtures, color is coming back—and, appropriately, the company leading that revolution is the same company that first introduced color to the bathroom back in the 1920s.



[Image: Kohler]



This year, Kohler is turning 150, and to celebrate, it is resurrecting some of its vintage colors. As for which ones, that was for the public to decide. More than 100,000 people voted for their favorite color on Kohler’s website, and while Lavender (1927), Sunrise (1953), Pink Champagne (1973), and Avocado (sigh) made a valiant stand, Peachblow (1934) and Spring Green (1927) emerged victorious, and will be hitting stores this summer.



But where did these colors go in the first place?



[Images: Kohler]



In the early 20th century, the color white dominated consumer fixtures—not for lack of imagination, but in large part because it could be produced consistently from an industrial standpoint. Kohler bills itself as “the first to bring bold color into kitchens and bathrooms,” owing to its 1927 launch of a range of colored fixtures—and that’s true. Kind of. Colored fixtures did exist at the time, but you could only get them piecemeal. What Kohler brought to the table was a breakthrough process of matching vitreous china glaze and cast-iron enamel, which allowed identical hues to be applied. As a result, for the first time ever, consumers could have a full suite of tub, sink, and toilet in the same palette.



[Image: Kohler]



“What was really innovative in that moment was the cross-category application,” says Alyssa Wilterdink, Kohler’s senior manager of brand and partnership campaigns. “The ability to deliver color across a full bathroom is something that only Kohler was able to do at that time.”



In an era of monochrome bathrooms, walking into one of Kohler’s technicolor showrooms used to market the new products would have been a visual shock to the system. “To complete the picture—Kohler colored fixtures,” the company declared in a 1927 print advertisement announcing the palette of green, blue, brown, gray, ivory, and lavender—“colors delicate as flowers, but permanent as the enamel.”



[Image: Kohler]



Wilterdink says Kohler’s marketing at the time had a targeted goal: to convince consumers to stop thinking of plumbing fixtures as utilitarian items, and rather as key elements of a design vision that could be curated.



The launch—which included Spring Green—focused on soft pastels. But as time went on and colored fixtures grew in popularity, becoming ubiquitous in the ’60s and ’70s, Kohler went all in. The company rolled out the “Bold Look of Kohler” campaign in 1967 (establishing a tagline that exists to this day), debuting a series of, ahem, bold, moody, and unapologetically striking colors. Saturated reds and oranges coexisted alongside deep blues and—yes—avocado.



[Image: Kohler]



“These were very, very prominent, strong colors that aligned well to that ‘Bold Look of Kohler’ tag,” Wilterdink says, “and they really drove the sentiment that they were worthy of being considered as sort of art pieces in and of themselves. It became the norm, which is a world I would love to go back to.”



Even into the ’80s, more than 50% of Kohler’s output was nonwhite product—but steadily, sterility began to creep back into the prevailing design aesthetic. Wilterdink says the economic recessions of the aughts informed a conservative white palette, as well; colored fixtures were perceived as a hallmark of older homes and weren’t a “safe” thing to keep around if you were trying to offload your house (or might suddenly be forced to).



Nowadays, though, “What’s so exciting is that we’re seeing the tide start to change back,” says Wilterdink, “as people change their thinking about what their homes mean to them personally, and wanting to be more expressive . . . versus designing a space that the next person might love.”



Say what you will about millennials, but according to Wilterdink, instead of buying a property and gutting it to fit the builder-grade aesthetic of the moment, they’re seizing upon the resurgence of midcentury modernism, wanting to actually preserve, and enhance, the character of their homes.



Ultimately, creating colored fixtures doesn’t make anyone at Kohler’s job easier. It’s a straightforward task to pump out white fixtures all day. But to make a small run of colored ones, Wilterdink explains that the equipment has to be fully cleaned and changed over, every time—and if a color falls out of favor, production teams make less of it and therefore become less experienced or capable with it. “It just adds a lot of time and complexity and cost to the operation,” she says. “Every time we bring more colors to our ops team to get it done, we muddy their world up, for sure.”



[Image: Kohler]



Said ops team was likely on edge when Wilterdink and co. disappeared into the company’s archive of more than 100 colors to select the array that users had voted on earlier this year. Some options were immediately off the table—like, say, deep reds containing lead. Six ultimately made the cut based on Kohler’s internal trend forecasts and other factors; though in the process, the team discovered how utterly difficult it could be to find a color’s true form, given time’s effects on the physical pieces. They studied ads from product launches, sample tiles, and original formulation specs to arrive at the final results.



[Image: Kohler]



Sure, there’s modern demand for the products, and they’ll undoubtedly sell and generate excitement around the brand (after all, here we are writing about it). But given the complexity—and, frankly, the fact that it all sounds like such an utter pain in the ass from a production standpoint—why go to the trouble at all?



[Image: Kohler]



“It’s impossible to look back and reflect on our history without seeing color routinely surface as a really critical story,” Wilterdink says.



Moreover, she hints that Peachblow and Spring Green are just the beginning.



“If you saw my calendar this week, you would know that it’s not the end for the return of bold color.”



In other words, color stans rejoice: We might just get that Avocado toilet after all.