This '90s Kitchen Design Trend Needs To Stay In The Past - Here's Why

Overall, we would describe ourselves as big fans of reliving the 1990s, whether that means including Dunkaroos as the throwback snack at our dinner party or basking blissfully in the nostalgia of an old-school Olive Garden menu. There's at least one '90s revival that we can't get behind, however, and that's the kitchen design trend of the "plate wall," consisting of decorative dinner plates affixed to the wall in an ornamental fashion.

The plate wall actually has a long pedigree, which does nothing for our fondness for it but is interesting to note. In the 1600s and 1700s, well-traveled Europeans would display pretty plates from places they'd traveled, sort of like an in-your-face vacation scrapbook. The plate wall stuck around and, in America, hit its peak in the middle of the 20th century. Gracious homemakers considered plate walls the epitome of taste and sophistication. By the 1990s, however, they'd sort of rotted into an unfavorable association with old, out-of-date spaces, like those belonging to grandmas who still covered their parlor furniture in plastic.

There are those who say that plate walls are due for a renaissance, thanks to the old maxim that everything old is new again, but we vehemently disagree. We may love old-school kitchen trends from the '80s, but plate walls need to stay in the past because they are impossible to keep clean and, when they inevitably fall back out of fashion, will hopelessly date your décor.

Picture, if you will, a wallful of ceramic or porcelain plates arranged oh-so-artfully. Sure, the aesthetic value may be there, but so will the airborne cooking grease and household dust. What we predict is that your plates will eventually get coated in sticky grime that requires all sorts of scrubbing to remove. And who wants to deep-clean their wall decorations? The plates that are popular now in contemporary plate walls are usually antique or, at the very least, rare and unusual specimens. Few are really slapping up Command strips and putting Dollar Tree plates on the walls, even if that store carries some pretty dinnerware. Do you want to risk dropping plates and breaking them every time you have to clean them, which we promise you will do often? Who has the time, energy, or patience for that?

Furthermore, we cannot stress enough that plate walls are a liminal design trend. Just like bold colored cabinets and aggressively themed rooms, both of which had a moment in the mid-20th century and came back around only to fall off again, plate walls are going to date themselves eventually. Moreover, you will be left with umpteen little holes in your wall that need to be plastered and just as many breakable plates that either need to be packed carefully for storage, donated, or sold. Our advice is to choose a trend with longer legs.