Or did some Denver homes just never get rid of theirs?
By Nookhaven Homes | August 11, 2026
Depending on which corner of the internet you’re standing in, landlines are either a dead technology or the next big thing. The claim shows up constantly this year: young people buying corded phones on purpose, parents installing them instead of handing over a smartphone. It’s a good story. Whether it’s actually a trend, though, is worth checking before believing it.
What We Know from the Numbers
Let’s be real. The decline is not reversing. Roughly seven in ten American adults now rely on a cellphone alone, with no landline at home at all. Older adults are the exception: about four in ten people 65 and up still keep one, making them by far the most likely group to have held on.
Still, something genuinely interesting is happening underneath that overall decline. Recent national surveys have found that close to a third of Gen Z and Millennials say they actually miss having a landline growing up, and more than half of both groups describe feeling nostalgic about them, even though most never relied on one day to day. Reachability without a smartphone, one number that’s just for people who actually matter to you, a break from notifications are some of the reasons that come up again and again. It’s less a return to how phones used to work and more a reaction to how phones work now.
Denver Bungalows Never Really Left
Here’s where it gets locally interesting. Walk through a bungalow in Uptown, Chaffee Park, or Park Hill, homes built in the 1920s through ’40s, and you’ll still find a small built-in niche in a hallway or kitchen wall, sized for exactly one thing: a telephone. Most of them hold picture frames or succulents now. But they were never remodeled away, because why would you patch a perfectly good wall alcove for something that already fit? So if landlines are “coming back,” a decent chunk of Denver’s homes never really sent them away. They simply waited patiently for the rest of us to catch up.
If Your Home Is Already Wired
Most houses built before the early 2000s have phone jacks somewhere, even if no one’s used them in years. The wiring is usually still live at the jack itself; what’s often missing is active service running to the house. A quick call to your provider can tell you whether the line is still connected, and in a lot of older Denver homes, all it takes to bring a jack back to life is plugging in a corded phone and testing for a dial tone.
If It’s Not Wired at All
No jack, no problem. A couple of straightforward options exist for a home with no existing phone wiring:
- A VoIP home phone adapter connects to your Wi-Fi and gives any corded phone a working line, no wall wiring required.
- A Bluetooth landline-to-cellphone gateway pairs a vintage phone directly with your existing cell number, so the phone itself is purely aesthetic hardware plugged into a small adapter rather than a phone company account at all.
Either route means the built-in niche, or even a console table or a kitchen wall, can hold a working phone again, wiring or not.
So, Is It Really a Comeback?
Simply put: no. But, for a specific slice of younger buyers, it’s a real and growing preference, not just an aesthetic. Plus, Denver’s older homes happen to have been ready for that shift decades before anyone called it one.
Inspired by writing in Better Homes & Gardens. All writing is original, re-voiced, and locally grounded for the Nookhaven community.
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