This is the wall everyone wants right now.
Concrete, flat, a muted gray. Sometimes with the imprint of boards, sometimes with those little indented holes, sometimes both. Brutalist. Stark. Simple.
Fashion designers love to pose models against these as backdrops. Directors love to shoot in upscale home comprised entirely of concrete and glass. This is as hip and contemporary as you can get in 2025.
But whenever I’m scouting such properties and listening to creatives fawn over them, I always think back to the mid-2000s, when I first started scouting.
At the time, this was not The Wall everyone wanted.
The Wall everyone wanted was exposed brick.
We’d bring directors and production designers through Brooklyn lofts, and there was no greater selling point than an entire wall of exposed, crumbling, dilapidated brick.
Two or three walls? Exquisite. The height of cool.
“This is sick,” was the oft-repeated compliment bestowed by film crews upon seeing these expanses of red masonry. “Sick brick.”
Suddenly, properties owners throughout New York City were ripping down drywall in hopes of revealing that authentic brick soul lurking beneath. And hey, while we’re at it, why not get rid of the ceilings to see some pipes?
Exposed pipes became almost as cool as exposed brick.
Then, something changed circa 2014: I started explicitly being told not to show any properties with exposed brick. It was suddenly considered dated and passé, like dressing a character in mid-90s baggy-wear in the 2000s age of skinny jeans.
Overnight, it seemed, brick was no longer sick.
I think about this a lot when I scout properties with concrete walls. As I hear production designers and directors gush over the simple aesthetic like they’ve stumbled upon pure gold, I wonder when the day will come (and it will) when I’m explicitly told to avoid such a look. When overnight, without warning, it will be considered antiquated, dated, a sign that the character or model is not hip and contemporary, but is in fact not keeping up with the times.
Is it a decision we make collectively as a society, an unconsciously evolving aesthetic of cool we’re all in on without knowing it? Or is it foisted upon us by those at the top of the art and entertainment world, percolating through culture until we can’t help but share in agreement on what is and isn’t contemporary?
All I know is that right now, concrete is sick. And so for the moment, I’ll continue to scout such properties, staring through my viewfinder and wondering when the day will come when the gold I’m seeing will suddenly be considered as toxic as lead.
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