Rubenerd: Whitegoods that aren’t, but should be

Whitegoods that aren’t, but should be

Friday 10 July 2026

Did any of you play The Sims or The Sims 2? I can’t speak to the latter iterations of the game, but I did spend a not insignificant amount of my childhood designing and building houses. That worked out well in my family, because my sister was far more interested in designing the people who would end up living in the aforementioned dwellings.

A neverending source of frustration was just how often something that looked better had lower stats. In particular, kitchen goods such as fridges that were constructed in a fetching white were often relegated to being budget models. In the games’ mechanics, this meant the white fridge offered fewer hunger and “room” points, and so on. At least, I think that’s how that worked, it’s been a while.

Point is, this was a reflection of the world more broadly. Finding whitegoods today that are…you know, white, has proven more difficult than I first thought or expected.

Now I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking but Ruben, the world made the switch to brushed steel fingerprint magnets and black dust collectors at least a decade ago, get with the times! And you know what? In the words of logician and boolean algebra professor Billy Joel, you may be right. However, unlike those Sims characters, I don’t live my life replacing whitegoods on a regular or even semi-regular basis. This is for three key reasons:

I’ve been lucky enough to have kept whitegoods for extended periods, because they’ve worked for a long time. I attribute this to always buying models without redundant extra features like Wi-Fi, ice makers, and time machines, but it’s probably also down to luck.

I was a renter until relatively recently, so I had to use whatever built-in appliances my landlord had installed. This meant using the same old dishwashers and dryers that seemingly everyone installed on the cheap in the 90s, much to the chagrin of our power bills and ears as they shook, rattled, and rolled with our crockery and linen.

Is a number that precedes four.

This means, the trend towards whitegoods that aren’t white largely slipped me by until recently. I wasn’t aware that people decided to make their kitchens and laundries look worse for some reason. Fashion has an odd habit of not making sense, which will always perplex someone as unfashionable as me.

Fortunately, some still do exist if you’re willing to go digging and filter through results. And best of all, and we’re now in a position to buy them. I mean, just look at the majesty of this freestanding dishwasher:

Oh, that angle not dynamic enough for you? Well take a look at this:

How clean! How minimal! How classy!

There’s something supremely, stupendously satisfying about a clean white fridge, or a dishwasher, or a dryer, or air conditioner, or portable cold fusion reactor; something being silver can’t ever match.

Now I know what you’re thinking again. You’re thinking: but Ruben, we prefer fingerprint magnets and dust collectors. Well you’re in luck, because the majority of the whitegoods sold today are! But some of us prefer having the option to have ones that look nice instead. I mean, we’re going to be living with them for hopefully a decade at least, so I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.

This was a meanering public service announcement for the Society of Whitegoods. Thank you.

Tagged: hardware appliances colour design

Who wrote this?

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person.

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