Why Were Homes So Tacky Looking in the 70s and 80s?

Bored suburban housewives with zero taste and unlimited suggestibility.

They were afraid of color, patterns, or feeling slaphappy. It was really just the 70s: the great beige crusade happened early in the 80s.

*They weren't*

The same as these current back splashes are going to look.

Im curious if any of those styles come back. 70s wild style could come back. 80s peach and aqua / Memphis maybe. I think 70s-90s construction quality was the worst. All about making it as cheaply as possible.

We had avocado colored appliances. My neighbor had carpet in her kitchen!

The color tv revolution coincided with acid experimentation among the creative types. This inspired costume designers and set designers to go all out with their kaleidoscopic color palettes and patterns to dazzle and attract more viewers. This of course, influenced homeowners to decorate their homes in bright, loud, and clashing colors. Combine this with the hippie drippy retreat to nature, rustic look, and now you have dark wood paneling and shag carpet in avocado green, rust, and harvest gold to look like the outdoors.

Remember Spanish Mediterranean furniture? I searched online, but most of the pictures were relatively tasteful. The link below is somewhat ugly like the stuff I remember: dining room sets with tall chairs, upholstered in green velvet, the wood painted black and distressed, and paintings of galleons on the walls.

We had a Mediterranean style sofa. It was tasteful. Same with the coffee table and end tables. However, the lamps were atrocious.

Fortunately, our dining room had a built in cabinet (entire wall) in a lovely walnut. So no gauche dining room table or chairs.

I grew up in that era and I hated every minute of it. The shit was ugly then and it's ugly now. For the life of me I cant understand why Gen Y or Z think its cool.

God yes R8 - I never knew there was a name for that style, but boy did it suck.

My only guess about the 70's was a complete rejection of the 'modern' and space design of the 50's and 60's.

There were definitely more concrete trends in decor and fashion - everything seemed to change a great deal every decade. Now? I feel like there hasn't been too many drastic changes the past 20 years that can be quickly updated.

Fashion and trends seem to be stuck.

Nature was everything. If you had a lot of extra money to spend on a coffee table, you probably had one of these. With extra thick shiny Lucite top coat.

Everyone had the same exact ugly beige plastic phone you got from the phone company. EVERYONE!

Only the creatives or hip families bought their own phones. No one cared about the style of a phone back then. It was just accepted as all you get.

No true 70's house would be without Macrame hanging plant holders.

Spanish-Mediterranean furniture. As homes got larger, furniture became heavier.

If you were a cool bachelor, you had one of these in your pad. Who needs chair legs when you can just bolt it to the ceiling.

From the 1975 JC Penney catalog...

I swear to god, this ugly carpet was everywhere. I think it was supposed to represent dirt, or dried leaves. One things for sure, you never saw the dirt.

That's it, r15! The really ugly stuff.

Shag carpeting looked like diseased pubic hair!

If you think Yankee Candles are bad, THIS is what Fraus of the day did to their bathrooms. I saw this many times, not kidding.

I am going to suffer from DTSD by the time this thread is over. Design Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

[quote]For the life of me I cant understand why Gen Y or Z think its cool.

Because it's completely different than what they're used to seeing.

My niece had a 90s day at school and borrowed some of my old clothes. She thought they were cool. However, she only thought they were cool since it is completely different than what they're wearing now.

"Different" doesn't equal cool or in good taste. Showing off your rosebud at a party is different, but not cool or in good taste.

I think most 70's design will never come back. The houses, furniture, buildings, clothes, cars - unique, but not something people will want again.

The 70's had some good music though.

Picture it! - harvest gold, avocado and dark bronze, throughout the kitchen and bathrooms. I worked for a custom home builder and would meet with the buyers to help them choose their bathroom and kitchen fixtures. One woman wanted a raspberry tub, fixtures and carpet in the main bathroom along with raspberry carpeting throughout the house! She was Russian. I tried to tactfully let her know that whatever she chose for the fixtures were quite permanent and perhaps she would like to keep the raspberry carpet, but change the bathroom tub, toilet and sink to a neutral beige. Also resale value is diminished. She refused so we went along with it - I am sure the glowing raspberry bathroom still sits proudly in Glenview, IL.

Some of those kitchens look like an avocado threw up all over them.

More power to raspberry.

The stupid building I live in won't allow window coverings that aren't white or beige. No joy, no soul.

My grandma had that exact hexagonal side table (#4) and coffee table (#7) in her apartment as seen at r15. The Ornately carved doors weren’t wood and weren’t carved, but were made of some kind of heavy plastic material.

Since I hadn’t experienced any other decade yet I thought the 70s stuff like carpeted kitchens and baths, fuzzy toilet seat and tank covers, and big floral patterned wallpaper were modern and classy and all the 50s and 60s stuff we now call mid-century was ugly and hopelessly out of date.

Their assholes made them ugly.

our living room furniture had the side table (#4) like you mention R29. When i was a kid i used to hide inside of it.

R7 Excellent.

It was such a change, in such a short time, from the look of the Kennedy era.

Like the look now is any better? Faux "mid century" which consists of poorly made furniture from China made out of sawdust. Lots of white walls and "clean surfaces" and bland shit bought at IKEA or more expensive designer shit that basically LOOKS like it came from IKEA.

Everyone always thinks that the recent past was hideously awful and tacky and that current styles are amazing and fresh and modern and 20 years pass and you either look at photos from now and go, "what were we thinking?" or your kids/nieces/nephews are making fun of your shitty old timey taste.

It's a cycle.

The truth is, 98% of you have awful taste....now as well as 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.

I remember the fight my mom had with the builder when they bought our new house before we moved to Florida in the mid-70s. My mom wanted white appliances because she thought goldenrod and avocado appliances were ugly, but the builder apparently only offered white appliances in shit-grade (non self-cleaning oven, no icemaker in the refrigerator, really shitty dishwasher), made you get avocado or goldenrod if you wanted the "nice" ones, and apparently there was a stupid rule enforced by the bank that new houses HAD to include appliances, so they had to go through the motions of buying the house with the shit ones, then replace them all before we even moved in.

And the kitchen cabinets... dear god. They were HIDEOUS. From what I recall, the builder gave them three choices for cabinet colors:

* White melamine, with hideous avocado or goldenrod-stenciled frilly paint on the doors. My parents held their nose, took it, then paid someone to replace all the doors with more modern-looking white melamine doors that had a wood strip at the top or bottom. Mundane, and definitely now would have screamed "late 1970s", but at least they weren't hideous.

* Burnt orange cabinets with day-glo yellow doors.

* Yellow cabinets (same color as the previous option's doors), with brown doors.

The crazy thing is, looking back on the 1970s (as someone who was a child during them), even back then, everyone thought the colors and designs were hideous. But everyone got stuck with those hideous color schemes and designs ANYWAY, because nothing better was available (or at least, anything better was extraordinarily more expensive). According to my parents, back then, you either picked the least-awful hideous choice available, or spent literally 10-20 times as much for something that was only slightly better anyway. Apparently, the arrival of DIY stores had a huge democratizing impact on home design, and enabled people to affordably push back against the hideous crap the design industry had previously gotten away with ramming down everyone's throats.

70s and 80s = barf

The Amityville house.

I’d kill people too if I had to live in a place so ugly.

....

....

70s and 80s furniture = cheap motel rooms and hospital waiting rooms.

70s decor was awful and the 80s were even worse. However, call me crazy but I think today interiors are a little too quiet and restrained. Too much white and grey.

R7 said it perfectly regarding 1970’s style.

Styles come about through a variety of things... what’s culturally popular, what’s politically popular, the economics of the time, etc. Look at virtually any cultural trend and you’ll see it reflected in clothes, furniture, architecture, etc.

Personally, I’ve lived through the post-war simplicity of mid-century modern, the bright hippie colors of the 1960’s, the druggy mismatches of the 1970’s, the Reagan-era plushness of the 1980’s, the chrome and leather of the Disco 90’s, and now the ‘mix anything with anything look’ of the 2000’s. With Millenials coming along, with little money to spend, we are seeing minimalism, IKEA and hegge (Danish for ‘cozy’) as popular design themes.

I've lived through it all too. And as far as I'm concerned, the last ten years or so have been the best time for home decor in my life time.

At least people on a budget today can find nice simple furnishings. Affordable things were so aggressively ugly in decades past.

I believe the 70s and 80s were the first decades where young consumers really had the opportunity to pick alternative interior design options for their own homes after moving out from their parents' homes. Even when it was for their dorm rooms. Furniture made from plastic was affordable.

[quote]call me crazy but I think today interiors are a little too quiet and restrained. Too much white and grey.

Yes, I will call you crazy. Less really is more. I'd rather be in a clean minimalist space where I can think than a 70's acid trip of orange, brown, mustard, avocado and filth.

At least peeps knew how to use a phone back then.

I don’t recall which famous interior designer said it, but the advice was “take out everything in the room that’s not absolutely necessary... then take one more thing out.”

Less CAN be more...if you have exquisite taste and buy beautiful things.

Buying a fucking gun metal grey "mid century" couch and the same boring coffee table and the same boring lamps with the same boring eggshell white walls that every other asshole in the country has in their tasteful $2500 a month rabbit hutch 500 sq foot apartment is just dreary and boring.

I think the "outside" world is way too busy with all these "look at this / BUY THIS ... look at that / BUY THAT!" sensory overloads. A more neutral styled home can help to calm you and your senses down.

A minimalistic home is also easy to clean on your own if you don't want others handling your private, valuable stuff.

R43 That is a piece of high design and would have cost a lot in the 70s.

r49, wasn't it in the 70s when mass-produced, affordable, plastic furniture was introduced?

équote*Yes, I will call you crazy. Less really is more. I'd rather be in a clean minimalist space where I can think than a 70's acid trip of orange, brown, mustard, avocado and filth.

I agree. Clean neutral spaces were not popular taste in the 70s and 80s. It's so much better today.

In the 60s, it was sleek & futuristic. In the 70s, it was ghetto K-Mart.

1960’s = Cute little transistor radio 1970’s = Boombox

The Mona Lisa of kitsch.

[quote]wasn't it in the 70s when mass-produced, affordable, plastic furniture was introduced?

The pic at R43 is a 1960s Danish design and it cost a fortune. It's a museum piece today.

I don't know, OP, but step down into the conversation pit and we can rap about it!

I think to walk into ones home today and look straight back into their fucking kitchen is the worst trend going. When I watch these shows on HGTV and I see these homes torn out so you see their kitchen sink when you walk in is disgusting.

The cyclamens, like the plains, were so large then.

I can dig it, r56.

I’m hep.

Exploring the design possibilities of Plexiglas (and ignoring the fact it scratches and turns piss yellow.)

Presenting holes on the wall made it less likely your guests would notice how terrible your velveeta & kirschwasser fondue tasted.

Yeah but not for at least two weeks.

1974 House of the Year in Denver

The cultural revolution of the 1960s, fueled by manned space flight, brought with it a sensibility that was focused on new and modern ideas. Peter Max. Yellow Submarines. Psychedelics. Everything was suffused in jewel tones.

After that market was played out, jewel tones were discarded and earth tones were pressed into service everywhere. Burnt Orange, Avacado Green, Harvest Gold. Brown. Lots of Brown. Each and every one of them an abomination. The Millennials seem to see these colors with nostalgia, but that color palate was awful the first time around and there is no need to revisit it.

These jewel tone visor/headdresses are shockingly prescient.

That's quite hideous, R63, and amazing that it was built all at once yet achieved the look of seven additions attached to one another like barnacles.

Below, the heart of this Home of the Year with its view to not one, not two, not three, but four different floor surfaces. Every room a new adventure.

There was too much orange.

Oh you can never have too much oranges. Vitamins and all.

Another "beautiful" showcase house from 1975.

I hated the brown and beige everything in our house in the 70s. I very much welcomed the renovations my parents did in '86. The pastels really livened up the place. Very Over Our Heads from Facts of Life.

This 1972 House of the Year isn't so bad. Except for the mirrored dining room. I kind of like the family room and the kitchen.

I like the bedroom, r70, even if it is a little dark.

Tasteful friends, a 1969 Palm Springs time capsule with no orange to speak of. The formal arrangement of the emerald green living room is quite something though.

They even had carpet in the toilet.

I was lucky that my parents had classical tastes- dark wood furniture, dark forest green velvet couch that was very sleek, oriental rug, marble based lamps with beige shades, beige drapes. But after they divorced in 71 or 72, Mom went full 70's with lemon shag rug and bright orange bean bag chairs, while Dad went Bachelor Moderne with simple dark Scandinavian style furniture. and the classic leather and chrome Wassily chairs.

Now my grandparents were full kitsch, with PLASTIC covered furniture (including the gold Cadillac's seats, which was murder in the summer in Chicago) and this abomination:

R74: Did the post-divorce lemon shag rug and bright orange bean bag chairs snag your mom some new dick?

R74, your entire family is tacky.

Old plastic turns yellow due to the fire-retardant used on it. You can restore it using 40-volume cream-type hair-dye peroxide developer. Disassemble the device enough to separate away the yellowed plastic, coat it with the peroxide cream developer, wrap it in stretch-wrap to keep it from drying out (or put it into a ziploc-type bag), then put it in the sun for a few hours (reorienting it every hour or so to expose the nooks & crannies). Rinse it off, repeat if necessary (once is usually enough unless it dries out midway). Voila! Dingy yellow gone!

Google: ("retro-brite" OR "retrobrite")

Plexiglass gets cloudy due to surface oxidation. Buy a headlight-restoration kit... it's literaliy the problem they were made to solve.

r75, yes, she was 2 timing my Dad with 2 of his best friends, one that she was going to marry. I wish she went with him (they became friends again after he died 2 years ago), but no, she went for the big black dick, who left her after 3 years.

r76, I suppose, they were Chinese immigrants who were escaping the Communists- my grandfather worked for Chiang Kai Shek, my grandmother was from an elite family that lost everything.

Jesus, this thread. Shag toilet seat covers. How did this happen? le I think the late 60s "broke open" culture and challenged norms. The 50s and early 60s aesthetic was seen as barren, dispiriting.

And so after the late 60s hippie thing dissolved, what was left was a less-than-focused freedom.

As decade as guess we can conclude that the residue of revolution and drugs led to great movies, music and art.... and indefensible poor and lazy design.

Rugs... really the 70s left me with no ability to be in any room that has any kind of wall-to-wall carpeting. That dark brown, "sculpted" carpet up thread.... I did so much damage in seedy motels in the 80s and early 90s that had threadbare versions of that. In some of those motels the horrible smell and dirt covered by "rug deodorant".....

There's a great deal of tackiness in every decade. Just wait ten to twenty more years and people will look back on "Open concept," "stainless steel appliances, " "kitchen islands," and the 50 shades of "hardwood" and say "WTF, were we thinking?"

There was a great deal of colorful patterns in the 70s...now everything has to be a shade of grey or neutral. There was a great deal more individuality then...now we all must have shared space!

Why stop at critiquing home decor of the 70s, OP? You must have really hated the fashions of the 70s. To me, though, every woman today tries to be a clone of Jennifer Aniston or Beyoncé with straight, long hair. Give me the 70s styles!

If I really had my druthers, I'd return to Art Deco and the fashions of the 1920s and 1930s!

[quote] Shag toilet seat covers. How did this happen?

Those were everywhere. EVERYWHERE. They came in a set with a shag cover for the tank and another one for the tank lid. And if you really wanted to go crazy, some sets had a U shaped rug to go in front of the toilet and reach around the sides of the base. Of course, men just peed all over everything but the toilet tank cover and the women screamed at them for it.

This was absolutely standard in the late 50s and 60s.

I loved much of the 70s decor that everyone else now thinks is hideous. Still do.

Walmart still sells them. For $37, this can be yours. BATH MAT (!!!!), included.

Bronze is making a comeback. We had French Provincial furniture. Of course my mom was Italian so there was some plastic on the furniture and gold leaf.

Damn, those pix at r15/ r17/ r18 are triggering me! I was a kid in the 70s, and even then I recognized that the décor was uniformly hideous. I have always hated avocado and harvest gold, but brown -- every shade of brown! -- is the worst, IMO.

I was never so relieved as when the 80s came in with neon colors and I'll always have a soft spot for Memphis-style design.

Then again, today's design runs the gamut from greige to Drake's "Embassy" abomination and back to greige, so I wouldn't say taste is trending positive.

[quote]Everyone had the same exact ugly beige plastic phone you got from the phone company. EVERYONE!

We had two of those phones, but neither was beige. One was white, one black. Black was the pencil-dialer color of choice where I lived.

R86 In bedrooms were the new "Princess" phones. Often in pink or aqua.

This is what a Princess phone actually looked like, r87. It didn't have those fakey push-buttons.

The one on the right is what the push-button Princess phone actually looked like (though I imagine few princesses ordered in either of these colors).

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the Bicentennial which took place in 1976. There was a lot of excitement and lead up to the actual day ("Bicentennial Minutes") and it ushered in some of the rustic, rough-hewn taste that some people adopted in the 70s. Quasi-Early American, barrels, Minute-Men prints, etc.

Oddly, I don't remember much about 7/4/76 the day, though.

The 70s were about “earth tones.”

Brown. Orange. Gold.

The entire Bob Newhart Show was furnished in earth tones & Suzanne Pleshette, who never left the apartment, was dressed to match the paint, appliances & furniture

She always matched.

R90, it was right there in front of our eyes and yet we missed it. With hindsight, the travesty that was Bicentennial-decorated fire hydrants in every grim little town in the U.S., is the Reign of Trump really such a surprise?

She matched the sofa AND the drapes. In fact, she could not leave the apartment except to go to Bob’s office because she didn’t have clothes to match the rest of the world.

Her pajamas matched the sheets AND the bedside lamp.

It’s why she was married to a psychiatrist. Everybody else tried to change her. But Bob accepted her strange obsession with matching her clothes to her background.

The mid-century modern look was so cool and tasteful, it's a pity that didn't last.

[quote]The crazy thing is, looking back on the 1970s (as someone who was a child during them), even back then, everyone thought the colors and designs were hideous.

I wasn't around back then, but it's my understanding that you didn't have 10,000 different home design stores and other retail outlets that sell furniture like we have now. Options for buying furniture, cabinetry etc. were pretty limited. Is that correct.

There was no such thing as Design Within Reach or Room and Board for MCM, r97. If you wanted that stuff, you had to hire a licensed interior decorator.

r96, because it was so uncomfortable to sit, lounge or sleep on those chairs or sofas. They just perched on them.

Truman Capote’s summer place was cool in the 70s. Maybe because it was put together in the 60s.

You had to be willing to do something like paint your floor blue...

R97, if you have money there are always people to take it. Of course there was a wide variety options.

Before Federated destroyed the department stores in the United States, every department store sold a range of furniture. Children's furniture. Casual furniture. Garden furniture in the summer. They sold good living room and dining room furniture and had a separate department for mattresses. If they went to all that trouble, you bet your ass they had all the decorative pieces you could ever want for every room, every need, every design preference. And appliances. They sold all the appliances for the home. And the more upscale stores sold the best items. Sears, Montgomery Ward, and stores of that nature had all the items in the versions and the prices you would expect to find there.

As for paint and tile and all the things that go with that kind of home improvement, it was all available in smaller home improvement stores (Pergament, anyone?) and in paint stores and in hardware stores. There was no internet, so you dealt with the lines carried by the vendor. There were always catalogues so that you could see samples and order things not in the store's inventory.

Now we have ENORMOUS stores like Home Depot and Lowes that are filled with cheap shit lines of products that are manufactured to be sold cheaply. If you go to the big box stores for Anderson Windows, you get the big box marked down and constructed accordingly versions of their windows. All through the store it's that way. Horrible kitchen cabinets. Useless toilets that do not flush. Now you have cheap shit from China and even cheaper and more intolerable shit from China.

The shopping 40 years ago was in every way better than what we have today.

R96, I disagree with R99. There's plenty of comfort in that furniture. It's the danger inherent in that furniture! Little Noah and Olivia will crack open their little heads on the rough edges and glass.

That room is designed with adults in mind. The furniture is arranged to facilitate conversation.

Today we have the open concept so, as Mommy is cutting vegetables in preparation for all the entertaining she and her husband do, she can constantly have her eye on little Noah and Olivia. The little darlings will remain smack dab in the middle of the living space, when Mommy and Daddy gather with their friends on the sectional to watch whatever they will watch on the flatscreen, hi-def TV over what used to be a mantelpiece.

Adult conversation is dead. That spelled the end to designs such as you posted, R96!

R97: Outside of large cities, most smaller cities and towns were served still by large furniture stores, a holdout of 19thC models where an independent, family-owned business would sell furniture, rugs, carpet, lamps, accessories (and often mattresses and kitchen appliances) from different manufacturers. (The same model as for car dealerships and local department stores.) The larger the community the more choice there was among these stores and sometimes had a class hierarchy or a distinctive taste (one more modern, another more staid and traditional; sometimes they were associated with different ethnicities, Italian-American, etc.) Outside of big cities, that was mostly it. If you wanted a desk lamp, you went to the store that sold sofas and kitchen stoves , and wall-to-wall carpet. The names of furnish manufacturuers were not well known outside of a few brands - Ethan Allen sold very conservative Colonial style furniture (the same brand as today but with a different look and market); Baldwin sold good Colonial and traditional style brass lamps, etc. Brand-consciousness wasn't a factor in much of the furnishings trade.

Major cities had variety and hierarchies of furnishings stores and also specialty lamp stores, dining room stores, mattress and bedding stores, etc, For other places it was all under one roof shopping. People tended to keep furniture much longer, and the construction using solid woods ailowed for this. Furniture repair and reupholstery shops were more commonplace; there was a terrible and popular phase of "antiquing" furniture around the time of the Bicentennial, in which your old maple or walnut furniture could be painted to look like your kitchen appliances: avocado green with a smear of brown shoe polish on it, beaten with heavy tools to give an "old" look, and then varnished.

I read “homes” as “homos!”

Baldwin, jeez, DL is old.

Ikea came to the U.S. in 1985, outside Philadelphia which was important for attracting a younger set of shoppers who tended to buy piecemeal: a sofa, a chair for another room, a bed for a third, with the price and portability a contrast to the deathly quiet of old fashioned furniture stores with their salesmen and promises that the furniture would last years and years and could be bought in sets by the roomful: living room, dining room, bedroom...

r72's Palm Springs house is so unbelievably hideous I kind of love it.

[quote]Everyone had the same exact ugly beige plastic phone you got from the phone company. EVERYONE!

My grandmother's was avocado green. My parents had the beige model well into the 1980s, until cordless phones came along.

My aunt and uncle still have their 1970s banana yellow rotary phone of the wall of their kitchen, with the cord that's 10,000 feet long. Everything else in their house is modern, but they've just never been able to give up the banana yellow rotary phone.

One wonders what IKEA meant by "Barbara Bush prices."

The 1961 PARENT TRAP had Princess phones all over the California house. Hayley’s was turquoise blue.

That "Spanish-Mediterranean" furniture at R15 is truly ugly. I was helping my brother paint his rental house. New tenant couldn't wait to move in. Brother allowed new tenant to start moving in furniture. I saw an end table in that "Spanish-Mediterranean" style and asked my brother: "Who the hell is moving in?"

Sure enough, bad tenants. Lied about the #s of occupants and animals. Police came twice (domestic violence calls).

Point is: bad taste in furniture --> maybe bad tenants.

Don’t forget the amount of people who smokes in these homes. Gross all around.

My parents smoked, R112. We had huge, glass ashtrays around the house. Plus some smaller, bar-type ashtrays here and there (e.g., next to the phone).

[quote]Everyone had the same exact ugly beige plastic phone you got from the phone company.

Ours was harvest gold. Along with everything else in the kitchen. And the bathrooms.

I forgot about the ashtrays on every surface. I grew up in the 80s and that was still a thing then. What's amazing is that non-smokers (like my parents) had ashtrays and put them out for guests who smoked. Nobody went outside to smoke back then, that didn't become a thing until the early 90s, IIRC. If you were a non-smoker, you let guests smoke in your house because it was the socially correct thing to do. Asking a guest to go outside was a social faux pas and considered rude, and being an ungracious host/hostess.

My, how times have changed.

R107, R72 That thing is majestically foul. Truly, needs to be captured in some time capsule for the ages. And the details are not just the grandeur, but it's seasoned by the horridly banal.. the cottage cheese ceilings next to the dark wood paneling. Breathtaking.

[quote]Nobody went outside to smoke back then, that didn't become a thing until the early 90s, IIRC.

I started seeing people smoking outside of office buildings in the winter of 1986-87. I didn't want to be one of those people, so I quit in the summer of '87.

I loved those heavy glass ashtrays. They were everywhere, and despite them, and a thin layer of cigarette ash coated every coffee and end table.

In 1983, my great grandfather was in the hospital dying of lung cancer and still lighting up in his hospital bed (though he wasn’t supposed to). My mother tried to get him to stop and he said “What the hell difference does it make now?”

One of my business associates had a heart attack during a meeting. He was a smoker. And he smoked the whole way to the hospital!

In the mid 1980s, I worked in a large office in midtown Manhattan. Smoking was still allowed by law, but it was certainly not appreciated by the non-smokers. One woman was adamant about smoking at her desk. She would not give it up. It was necessary to smoke to be able to do her best job. She bought an annoying little fan to place on her desk. The smoke went everywhere, but it was dispersed.

And then one day she was diagnosed with lung cancer and she disappeared from the office.

Say it with me, everyone. And then she died.

All over her fucking awful tobacco addiction.

[quote]One of my business associates had a heart attack during a meeting. He was a smoker. And he smoked the whole way to the hospital!

I know a woman who had a heart attack 17 years ago and she's still fucking smoking! Crazy.

People who worked with Jackie O at the book publishing house (I forget which one it was) said that she smoked like a chimney in the office, all day long.

[quote]Before Federated destroyed the department stores in the United States, every department store sold a range of furniture. Children's furniture. Casual furniture. Garden furniture in the summer. They sold good living room and dining room furniture and had a separate department for mattresses. If they went to all that trouble, you bet your ass they had all the decorative pieces you could ever want for every room, every need, every design preference.

So not true. The taste level was horrid.

I remember living in NYC and trying to find a decent sofa in 1975: Gimbels, Macy's, Bloomingdales, B. Altman etc...I could find nothing that was simple and modern. Lots of garish patterns and textures and styles.

You couldn't find a clean modern Knoll type knock-off at a decent price the way you can today.

I finally wound up going to a guy who made sofas and had what I wanted.

And that was NYC, imagine the rest of the country. People wanted false historical styles: Colonial, Mediterranean, Provincial and that's what department stores sold. There was no room for sophisticated tastes.

It's so much better today.

I think the modern look that's popular today is much nicer than what I've seen of 70s furnishings. And it's not too expensive and there are lots of places to choose from. People don't hold on to furniture for decades like they used to, they like to change it up every few years.

If you're looking for a knock-off, R124, you do not have sophisticated taste.

R111 That was typical department store style furniture back in the day.

[quote]If you're looking for a knock-off, [R124], you do not have sophisticated taste.

You know nothing about design.

Pick me out a good knockoff tulip table, r128, please. 42", white.

You have to remember how fucking old these DL queens are. They're still living in mid-century WASPland where Jayne Wrightsman and French Provincial are the last world on everything. They don't understand modern tastes at all, and refuse to accept that certain styles once considered "classy" are terribly dated and no one is interested in them anymore.

Ugh. I hate “clean, modern” furniture. I want fussy, damn it! Carved wood and lace doilies everywhere!

R129, I bought this tulip end table from Amazon a year ago, and love it!

R129. This might be what you’re looking for. When I lived in the desert, I bought this tulip dining table and four matching chairs, although I don’t recall paying this much. Maybe I got it on sale because I think the whole bundle was around $500.

Build quality was excellent, btw.

R129. This might be what you’re looking for. When I lived in the desert, I bought this tulip dining table and four matching chairs, although I don’t recall paying this much. Maybe I got it on sale because I think the whole bundle was around $500.

Build quality was excellent, btw.

R1 I would say the opposite, since both men and women were entering the workforce at this time. It probably has more to do with nobody being home or having time to give a shit about what the house looked like. Clothing wasn’t any better. Everybody looked like a sleazy porn star in the seventies and better part of the eighties.

Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating

R13 Nuh uh! Mom got a PINK one from Ma Bell for the master bedroom!

A lot of this stuff is 1960s, not 1970s. The 60s decor was worse, IMO.

I remember furniture shopping in Macy’s & Bloomingdales. I also bought a TV set, stereo system & camera from Macy’s and a pair of binoculars from A&S for $100. I bought a computer and printer from Sears around 1999.

[quote]Buying a fucking gun metal grey "mid century" couch and the same boring coffee table and the same boring lamps with the same boring eggshell white walls that every other asshole in the country has in their tasteful $2500 a month rabbit hutch 500 sq foot apartment is just dreary and boring.

Not any worse than your Tiffany lamp and matching Caftan Grampa.

My father’s aunt had “Danish modern” back in the 60s & was really uncomfortable. The seats were too deep & the backs were slanted the wrong way.

All my Jewish friends had the best houses design wise...lots of art and Scandinavian furniture

[quote]You have to remember how fucking old these DL queens are. They're still living in mid-century WASPland where Jayne Wrightsman and French Provincial are the last world on everything. They don't understand modern tastes at all, and refuse to accept that certain styles once considered "classy" are terribly dated and no one is interested in them anymore.

FYI we are not all like that. I am 55 and have NEVER liked that ugly dated shit. My taste is very modern, minimal and always has been. But yeah, I cringe when I go to most of my friends houses who are the same age. Filled with frilly antiques and doilies. China cabinets full of grandmas dishes and silver tea sets... and they are still collecting them! I am pleasantly surprised with I meet someone my age or older who is up to date with current styles.

R136 That's exactly what I was talking about. That's the kind of crap you'd be faced with at department stores in the 1970s.

Design today is much better.

I loved the apartment in A New Leaf

^You have to click on it to get the full effect

R145 With little change a room like that would still look good nearly 50 years later. But that kind of style was only understood by, and could only be afforded by, a small elite.

I refuse to believe the 70s really happened.

The 1970s teak furniture (very heavyweight) trend holds up a lot better than the more gothic-looking stuff posted upthread (e.g., that so-called "Spanish-Mediterranean."

R143 "up to date" with styles that originally were seen in the 50s

R149 I'd not thought of that teak furniture as 70s, but you're right. Often seen in offices, waiting rooms etc. Lasted forever.

Houses used to be showplaces that reflected a persons own style and sensibility. Between the fact that so much of society today is creatively bankrupt as well as both spouses having to work, there isn't much time to invest in decorating. Thus a "no fuss, no muss" style that is less than grandiose as well as cold and impersonal. Because we're also in the reality TV age as well, so many just want to copy the designs featured on a home and garden network competition show, which again has to be assembly line decorating because they have to fill out a season worth of shows.

Modern bathrooms are the worst. Those thin panes of glass that pass as shower doors? Because nothing is more attractive than accidently losing your balance in the shower and hurtling through glass cutting your whole body up.

Um, no they don't R149. Your taste is dated if you think that. At least Spanish Gothic still looks good in a Spanish style house.

[quote]Houses used to be showplaces that reflected a persons own style and sensibility

Only for the rich Dear. Middle class bought cookie cutter cracker boxes after WW2 or tract houses. Decor from Sears.

[quote]Modern bathrooms are the worst. Those thin panes of glass that pass as shower doors? Because nothing is more attractive than accidentally losing your balance in the shower and hurtling through glass cutting your whole body up.

As opposed the the very thin glass doors with tacky rotting aluminum frames with tracks full of black mold? That glass will shatter if you bump into it wrong. The modern frame-less glass panel type you are talking about is much thicker and usually tempered. Do try to keep up Dear.

R151 Not sure the world you live in... likely a Ross Hunter movie. Most "decorating", at least for the middle and lower middle classes, was very conformist. No latitude, or encouragement, to set your own personal style

An earlier style not talked about in the thread was "Early American", great for the bourgeoisie from the 40s to 50s.... it was not in style in the 70s, but the residue was there.

Don't forget about colonial style.

[quote]Houses used to be showplaces that reflected a persons own style and sensibility

I burst out laughing over that.

After the war a good portion of America was living in small modest Levittown style houses. Hardly showplaces.

Style and sensibility? People bought furniture sets from Sears and Montgomery Ward.

[quote]Because nothing is more attractive than accidently losing your balance in the shower and hurtling through glass cutting your whole body up.

Really, how old are you?

Have you ever heard of safety glass? Of safety standards. Of consumer protection laws?

Lucy’s house in Connecticut was Colonial done right!

[quote]An earlier style not talked about in the thread was "Early American",

I'd say it was the most popular style in the 50s and 60s.

Young people think the 50s was all about Scandinavian mid-century modern. But popular taste was more into faux historic styles. "Early American" is one style that will never have a revival.

There's a big difference between late 60s & then 70s interior design, and 1980s design. The former is earth tones, golden rod, orange, avocado, shag, woods, horrible carpets.

The latter: 1980s design in the link below. Cleaner and brighter, more sanitized.

R158 You beat me to it!

[quote]R118 I loved those heavy glass ashtrays. They were everywhere, and despite them, and a thin layer of cigarette ash coated every coffee and end table.

Along the California Coastline we used big abalone shells for ashtrays.

Not entirely practical, but picturesque. I’m sure there were some crafty steps that could make them better (erase the holes with wood-fill, level them out with feet), but no one did.

[R145] Those lounge chair look like the were designed by Poul Kjærholm. They’re now about $5500 a piece. I can’t tell who the designer is of the couch. Probably just as expensive but timeless.

r54 I'd kill to have that on black velvet.

We were lucky to grow up with a lot of my grandparents’ old New England furniture. We had new love seats, and a horrible table in that Spanish-Mediterranean style.... but at least it was painted yellow.

That mass of it in the r111 pic truly frightens me. It’s what you’d see waking up drugged in a skeevy motel.

Rainbow decor were popular for a while.

[quote]r166 Rainbow decor were popular for a while.

Yes. Even Candice Bergen had a (stupidass) rainbow.

HOLY SHIT r136. It's hard to believe those rooms were even real. Unbelievable how taste seemed to disappear in the 70s, home decor was shockingly ugly.

Remember that Laura Ashley phase in the 80's?

This was a teenaged girl’s bedroom.

R158 .... well, you've been generous with the specs for "done right"....

My childhood home was Early American.... still recovering from the damage.

My childhood home was done in poverty. Ripped upholstery. Couldn’t even afford a headboard of cement blocks with a piece of cheap panel in betweeen. I remember when milk crates were popular decor. I saved for a year to buy a wire fan from sears. It was so hot in summer. I put the fan on the end of my bed & aimed it directly at me. My parents didn’t buy an air conditioner until my father was dying of cancer in 1991. Yeah, our decor reflected who we were.

The only thing worse than the Spanish/Mediterranean furniture pictured in the above threads... was when it was made of moulded hard plastic, not wood. When I was a teen, we had a pair of S/M end tables that kind of looked real from across the room, but were actually “wood-look” plastic. Think my mother bought them at the Sears Outlet Store in the late Sixties. She said no one would notice they were not real. Ugh.

I've always hated wall-to-wall carpeting with a passion, god it's so fucking ugly. Can't stand it.

R174, I condole you. However, IIRC, the "real Spanish-Mediterranean" furniture was heavy as hell. Somehow, I think it was made out of an early form of particle board. At least with the molded hard plastic, it was probably lighter and easier to move around / rearrange.

TV's were ugly as fuck too. Always in some tacky wood cabinet with the intent to look like nice furniture. Almost always brown wood. Big, bulky and heavy, you can imagine how ancient the electronics were inside. The cathode ray tube was actually dangerous to sit very close to because it shot electrons right at the screen. Or so they said. Picture quality was somewhat blurry and colors were over saturated.

I think they just didn't know what to do with the technology back then so they tried to hide it within furniture cabinets. America was just not ready for a product to be a product of its own.

R177: That's it, exactly. When radios appeared in living rooms it was an odd thing, to invite a large electric stranger to take pride of place and for the family to sit around this electronic hearth listening to tubes amplify airwaves. Radios were encased in furniture to make them more warm and welcome into their new place.

Same with TVs, the giant heart of which was a sort of boxy glass lightbulb, a bit deeper than it was wide or tall at the front. Furniture was the package that make this alien looking thing transition as part of the home. The earliest TVs were odd things, with small screens in big boxes, purely mechanical for the most part, then dressed up as washing machines, then given 50s-60s atomic age tapered legs, then the giant cabinets that my parents favored for way too long - complaining into the 21st Century that "you can't find a nice looking TV in a good wood cabinet!"

I think the main reason homes looked so tacky back then is also do with social class. Unlike today, with design shows, geared towards the average Karen, back then hiring a designer was only for the rich or well to do. It was unheard of in a typical middle class neighborhood to hire a professional. There was nothing on TV either, the only content you could pull from was from design books or magazines which most didn't have. Interior design existed to the extent of one trip to Sears or some other furniture store and making all the decision that day in less than an hour. Like picking up groceries.

You know I used to hate all the HGTV shows because the design process was so fake and misleading. Most REAL designers would not hang out with hose Frau Karen and help her sand down her old furniture so she can give it another coat of white to make it shabby chic. Most would not be able to afford a designer in the first place. Worst of all, no Designer sends their client off to a hotel for the weekend and when the client returns a surprise reveal. It takes way long then that to do a house and every designer I know labors through every piece of furniture, paint color and swatch with the client in advance so they get what they want and guarantee a positive outcome.

So even though it gave the public a false sense of how design works, in the long run I think it inspired a lot of people to thing about the space they live in and realize they can do a lot better even if they don't have endless amounts of money to higher a real Interior Designer. With all the resources out there it's much easier to access good ideas and advice from professionals people in the 70's never had.

I'm a Boomer and both my parents were each in high school during the Great Depression. They both survived long years of great economic deprivation. Having done so, they would not have thrown hard earned dollars at "good design." My father earned enough to support his family. I wanted for nothing, except maybe "good design." We just had furniture.

Today, they might be said to have had an eclectic style. That would miss the point. They laid claim to no style at all and would tell many of you here you were 'just wasting your money.'

The interior photos linked in this thread from books and magazines were all staged and styled by the same sort of self-styled gurus who on this thread are whingeing about horrible design. They can be found in every era and are a fickle bunch. The reason for all of these published photos it is to sell product. That's all. Some product. Any product. Puff and powder it. Light it beautifully. And sell, sell, sell! And for those of you who fall for it... buy, buy buy!!!

I actually LOVE some of the rooms in r136's link (though not the one at the top). That surprises me, because I generally hate 70s design, but a good number of the rooms in the Bloomingdale's link are timeless, or would be with just a few small tweaks.

And some of the rooms themselves -- the spaces, I mean -- are simply gorgeous. They must have shot in some European manors.

This apartment is in Singapore, a renovation in 1980s style (using some furnishings collected by the client.) If there are some details that give it away as a retro-inspired rather than an actual 1980s spaces, the y are fairly subtle.

In the upper right image, that fat band of stripes, a spectrum of shit brown to sunshine yellow making the corner with a bit fat rounded corner, like a toy race car track has to be one of the very ugliest design motifs of an overall hideously ugly decade. I can't see that shape and not cringe for its association with 1980s design.

[quote]but a good number of the rooms in the Bloomingdale's link are timeless, or would be with just a few small tweaks. And some of the rooms themselves -- the spaces, I mean -- are simply gorgeous. They must have shot in some European manors.

You must be high.

[quote]They laid claim to no style at all and would tell many of you here you were 'just wasting your money.'

Oh FFS, what good is life if all you care about is utilitarian existence? Good design makes people happy, and most people spend the majority of their life indoors inside their own homes. Sure, your parents lived through hard time, I heard that story a million times from old folks growing up. The problem with that thinking is that it was appropriate then but not appropriate now. Even as we head into recession it will never be anything like what your parents lived through.

One thing your parents never though about was it's effect on mental health. Not something they cared about back then to any degree. We know now that a physical environment can in fact really affect someones mental state on a subconscious level. Being in a depressing environment can actually make people depressed if the are stuck in it long enough.

Bottom line, if you have the money, make your place the nicest it can be to make you happy. If you don't have the money, then DIY and you will still reap the same rewards.

My great grandmother had a TV like just like r177 that ended up my grandmother's basement rec room TV. Forty years of cable and digital TV I can't see how we watched anything with the lousy reception these old sets got over the air.

Grandma's TV in the living room was this 1964 model. It caught fire shortly after it was bought and filled the house with smoke. Before my time but the set was repaired and in use all my young life. It gave you a static shock when you touched the channel knob. She kept it because it was a "beautiful piece of furniture" and when it stopped working a boring 80s model TV sat on top of it.

The kitchen is 1980s style, r182, but that fat band of stripes in truly vomitorious colors and shapes is pure 1970s.

This page is a treasure trove (if you will) of 1970s homes. Probably best enjoyed in small doses.

[quote]R184 Being in a depressing environment can actually make people depressed if the are stuck in it long enough.

But r180 never said anyone was depressed by his childhood home.

I have desperately wanted this laundry room for a long time. It would be like a little time travel experience each time you went in there.

Yes, R189. Brink back pink applicances. Turquoise, too!

Look! You can get all your Colonial AND Mediterranean furniture in one place!

I think the “Mediterranean” furniture craze must have been partially sparked by the loosening public morals that took place the 1960s/70s. (Don’t mean to sound like the Maiden Aunts Brigade!)

The warm areas that inspired the pieces were supposedly mellow and relaxed (?)

R180 Thanks. That's an accurate analysis of the majority of homes in the 50s - less so in the 70s, even with the economic downturns folks had a sense of more economic freedom - and poor design as products pushed to the consumers was like a virus (ok, I'll stop)...

My mother, a bright and well educated women, living in a household with limited resources in the 50s and 60s, happily called our decorating style "Early Necessity."

R189: Whatever will you wear to do your laundry?

R29, R174, We had a godawful Spanish Med living room set growing up. A coffee table, a square end table, and a hexagonal end table with intricate carvings on the doors set against mustard yellow velour backing boards that could be removed like picture frame backings. The pieces were made of wood or some wood composite, but those doors were plastic-y. So they were hybrids. My parents still have the square end table tucked in a corner of their family room where it's not so visible. Funny how some pieces survived all these decades and others didn't.

If you're going to go garish, go Hollywood Regency:

Not every 1970s interior was frightful.

R197... we used to call that look, “California Fern Bar.”

As a boomer, I don’t think younger people understand that in the 1950-1970’s, there wasn’t the selection of decor items available, nor the low made-in-China prices, nor the stores to buy things like there are today. Most shopping was done locally or perhaps by catalog. Regular people didn’t worry about design very much. It was about what you could afford and what was comfortable. And if there was such a thing as design influences, was people copying what their neighbors were doing. The U.S. was very utilitarian.

It’s really only since the birth of HGTV that the average person has had any interest in home decor.

I think in the '70s and '80s, my parents bought most of their furniture from local shops, the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs, or from Wickes. And back then, anything made from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, etc., were dismissed as low quality junk. Everything had to be made in the good ol' USA.

Yes, home design wasn't a thing at all in previous decades. No tv shows, no magazines etc. People just bought the furniture that was available to them, and of course there were limited places to choose from. There's weren't showrooms and dozens of places to buy furniture that there are now.

That Early American shit was hideous, but ubiquitous.

[quote]But [R180] never said anyone was depressed by his childhood home.

I never said R180 specifically was depressed. I was talking about society in general living a utilitarian existence. Think Russia for example. That is what his parents were advocating we should do. Never spend money if you don't have to even is you live in a ugly shit hole.

Criticizing the worst of an evolution does not equate to being conversant. This example is definitively 1970s, but enduring in its affable sophistication.

Another example:

R203 and 204 still look horribly dated to me. Guarantee if a Realtor walked me through those space he or she would be doing verbal flips about how easy it would be to remodel.

R204 Gorgeous. That would have been the home of very serious design people. Perhaps an architect.

See those simple cone shaped hanging lights? Something that's all over the place today? Back then you would have had to have them custom made.

There's just as many tacky homes today.

But, we have access to all the real estate and interior decor porn sites so it seems like there's a ton of homes that aren't tacky.

Nah r203, that's still ugly as shit.

R197 R198 Yikes, I've been exposed. That's still what my house is like today. Fucking old hippie....

[quote]That Early American shit was hideous, but ubiquitous.

My mother ruined my life with it. I have been a fan of modern since as long as I can remember.

Can’t stop laughing at R210!

Really, r211? You think having to live with wallpaper like this is funny?

What was it with the fucking brown everywhere? Brown walls, brown furniture, brown floors. It made the houses so dark and dungeon-like.

R213 And shit brown cars too.

R213 R214 You all have missed an essential thing about the 70s.... some sativa, several hours of good blow, a valium or quaalude to cut the edge... all that brown (with a little burnt orange, or sick green) looks just right.

There was good AND bad design in EVERY decade. If you think that everything in the 1970s was god-awful, then you didn't have enough exposure to some of the nicest stuff.

R177 Is that a Zenith? My parents had one of those. My mom hated it, but if you wanted a 25" TV in 1975-- that's what you got.

R182 That living room is 100% 1970s. I'm not seeing much 1980s in that kitchen, either.

[quote]Brown walls, brown furniture, brown floors. It made the houses so dark and dungeon-like.

Worked for me.

As awful as that colonial furniture was, some of it was made to last. My grandmother purchased a small table with a top divided into 2 areas that could lift up. Yarn or magazines could be stored in it. That table was made of solid maple, and built to last. Decades later, it was still sturdy and in great shape, little brass eagle and all. I can't imagine something from Ikea or some particle board creation lasting as long.

The funny thing is, with the brass tone eagle removed, and painted, that table would look not so bad today.

^^ Forgot to add that she bought that table at a discount department store called Barkers, now long gone. We had them in the northeast.

R212, I see. I’m so sorry for you. I shouldn’t have laughed.

Watch Moon Boy & Derry Girls. That’s the kind of decor my family had - whatever fit in the space & had a purpose. If it was a dining table that fit the space, it was fine. Nothing matched.

Interesting thread - a couple of thoughts:

The 1950s was about gentility after the rough effects of war. Furniture was indeed meant to be politely perched on. The 1970s were about sex and drugs after the rough effect of war. Shag carpeting was meant to be fucked on.

The 1950s represented an obsession with cleanliness and order. The Old World, the inspiration for much of American design up until then, had been reduced to a heap of irrelevant rubble. Light, fresh air, simplicity and either the American Colonial (a tasteful backward glance) or American Modernism (a sensible plan for the future) was the acceptable standard. Things were elemental: chrome, glass, steel, wood. The 1970s had lost faith in either the future or the past (specifically the American past) and was mired down in synthetics. Cleanliness and order were tools of The Man. Earth colors represented nature even while the materials used were about as unnatural as you could get.

The hideous interiors in the designer homes cited above reflect that the 1970s closest design kin was not the decades that immediately preceded it, but the 1870s, which were also a time of disillusionment and faddish technology. 62 contrasting colors and surfaces in one room? Hello, Hill House.

The best architecture of the 1950s stands as a testament to the idea of a total plan - the houses and skyscrapers and public buildings that look alike because they're supposed to, the architectural equivalent of black tie. The best architecture of the 1970s (I'm thinking the wackier organic stuff, some of which is truly brilliant) is about the piecemeal, the handmade, and the individual apart from the crowd. Society appeared to be fracturing and so did aesthetics.

The posters who seem to think that home decor was only of interest in the last 30 years appear not to have ever heard of the Craftsman movement, the first American Colonial Revival, the Mission Style, the Queen Anne period or the architecture of Alexander Jackson Downing. American have been obsessed with home design since Americans had homes. The idea that there was never an attempt to provide middle-class or even working class Americans with architectural distinction is discredited by a stroll in any early 20th Century suburb.

r222 nobody argued that Americans were uninterested in home design, they just commented that it just wasn't a huge industry like it is now, and choices were very limited compared to what's available now. If you were middle class, you didn't have an interior decorator and there were only a few stores to choose from.

[R223], [R199], for one, seems to think this and there were others chiming in.

r224 Americans were interested in design to a point, but their options were limited. They wanted things to "look nice" and that was basically it. There just wasn't that much out there. r199 was getting at that.

[quote]That would have been the home of very serious design people. Perhaps an architect. See those simple cone shaped hanging lights?

Wow! Cones! How groundbreaking! Think I saw one of those on it's way to the moon a few years earlier.

FYI, not all architects are good at what they do. In fact, most architects are notorious bad at interiors. Just look at the shit Frank Lloyd Wright did. No one wanted to live in his houses, not human friendly. Mostly show places for his exteriors.

[quote]Wow! Cones! How groundbreaking! Think I saw one of those on it's way to the moon a few years earlier.

What a dumb, uninformed comment.

Do you have any idea of what the selection of commercially available ceiling lamps looked like 50 years ago?

To have something modern and simple like those, something in an industrial style, was indeed a rarity.

[quote]FYI, not all architects are good at what they do.

Did someone here say all architects are good at what they do?

They had a lot more than cones in the 50's nitwit.

Pre-internet commerce, things like semi-unique lighting fixtures basically didn't exist unless you were a designer or a very wealthy diy-er. At least, anywhere besides *maybe* a city like New York or Los Angeles. Your second-tier city might have had a lighting store or two within 10-25 miles... and its selection was approximately half of what you'd find in a SMALL Home Depot today... at four times the relative cost.

Oh... the manufacturers' catalogs certainly existed... but you'd never be allowed to touch them. Or, if you sucked the salesman's dick, he'd humor you, then inform you that the fixture you liked wasn't available from the distributor. Or had a thousand-dollar minimum order. Or could only be sold to a licensed interior decorator.

It was a fucking medieval guild, with 2 or 3 layers of middlemen, each one doubling the markup, until a light fixture that wholesaled for $49 ended up billed to a wealthy client at $600.

And pretty much EVERYTHING was like that.

If you want an idea what it used to be like shopping for lighting fixtures, take a look at Walmart and Ace Hardware. That's pretty much the selection a non-wealthy diy'er had available in the 1970s (with the selection doubling every decade or so as big-box stores arrived, but pre-Amazon & Wayfair).

It was truly dire. There's a REASON why it seems like old homes all have the same dozen or so fixtures from a given 20th-century decade... they DID. What LITTLE variety existed was almost entirely limited to dining room lights. Even track lights were hard to find at affordable prices... ESPECIALLY halogen.

R222 That was really well observed, well stated.

Made me remember that the ubiquitous Early American of the 50s (my childhood house), is done with taste and certain resource ($), was airy, not oppressive with the dust-catching ruffs on the lampshades etc.

I think a point you were responding to was that "design" was the domain of the elite. Everyone's access to "design" was consumer choice to mass-produced objects. The line between "elite design" and "the common man's purchased products" narrowed in the 70s.

In short, the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman style choices et. al. were available to a narrower demographic of those who had resources. As it always was I suppose (palazzi in Italy weren't designed by the working classes). But the mass production of materials brought some choice to folks (1840) that eventually let to blurring the lines between elite design and deposable replicants of that (2020).

[quote]Pre-internet commerce, things like semi-unique lighting fixtures basically didn't exist unless you were a designer or a very wealthy diy-er. At least, anywhere besides *maybe* a city like New York or Los Angeles.

True.

And In the 1970s interior designers and architects started the trend of using lighting designed for industry, photographer studios, and stage lighting.

We should also remember that there was a movement in the 70s of "high-tech" design, a rebuttal of color and clutter.

Halston's house in NYC. Calvin Klien's house designed by Joe D'Urso. It was very NYC, Very minimal and clean as if you were living in an art gallery. A very elite style for the time.

Calvin Klein's place:

[quote]R223 If you were middle class, you didn't have an interior decorator and there were only a few stores to choose from.

Though that’s not the whole picture. Magazines like Woman’s Day, House & Garden, Good Housekeeping, and Family Circle had regular layouts on do-it-yourself decorating projects. Plus, a reader could get inspiration from the ads.

One of my favorite design books, which is from the late 40s, is all about where housewives should place a rug in a room, should you wallpaper dormer window recesses, how to group hanging pictures, etc. etc. (And it’s not a book for professionals.) It’s basically a huge picture book with 8 examples a page, all labeled DO and DON’T.

The 1960’s Better Homes and Gardens magazines always had excellent feature stories on interior design. As a young gayling, I read them cover to cover and still have favorite stories and images stuck in my head.

A little context - a lot of those women's magazines in the 40s and 50s were for upper middle class woman, or those who aspired to it. Just a few steps down from Town and Country. By the 60s and 70s the middle class, and lower middle class, had enough $ and time to buy magazines of "personal interest" and self-improvment.

The 70's were Harvest Gold, Avocado Green, and Burnt Orange. I remember it. Also caught an episode of Green Acres and he appliances were Pink. Pink I said.

But then in the 1960's color started everywhere. My grandparents house was built then and had purple fixtures, tub, sink, toilet in the bathroom. Pretty funky. Try finding color bathroom fixtures today.

Yes, a wonderful world of colored toilets. Turquoise. Pink. Black. Yellow. Mint green. Beige. Plum. White. Later came Harvest Gold and Avocado Green, of course.

^^ Erna

Every so often we'll have a "Tasteful Friends" thread that features a house that was obviously owned by an elderly person who died, and nothing in the house had been touched in decades. Vintage 50s. 60s, and 70s houses. It's always startling to see in modern times, the houses look so alien.

Right r238? Remember when we were discussing that condo in Chicago that was untouched from the 70's?

Thanks, R239. I didn't see the Chicago apartment until now.

The Edvard Munch, 'The Scream' effect in the dining room mirror tops it off nicely.

In the late 70's they sold these in Sears. High class.

My parents still have apricot coloured bedroom walls from the mid-80s.

That colonial revival (or whatever you call it) furniture was all over the place back then. It was SO fucking ugly, but so popular. Why?

Factory-made Colonial was cleverly marketed as craftsman quality, it tied in nicely and nostalgically with the lead up to the Bicentennial, and it was something different that was available everywhere for reasonable prices.

Yes, [R230], the Colonial Revival of the 1950s was closer in look to the actual thing, in part because of a resurgence of interest in American antiques. I have some pieces that were my great-grandmothers, and while they are nothing special, they are very restrained and functional and "play well" with other furniture. The later 1970s Bicentennial stuff was more a free-wheeling fantasy on Colonial themes and incorporated patterns, colors and fabric treatments that would never have been consider 20 years prior.

Think of the difference between an early 1950s Cape Cod and the mishmash that was developer's colonial by the time 1976 rolled around. The first is staid and unassuming - and the better ones can sometimes pass for the real thing. The latter is invariably a horror show of bizarre proportions.

[quote]That colonial revival (or whatever you call it) furniture was all over the place back then. It was SO fucking ugly, but so popular. Why?

It started right after the War and became very popular from the 1950s through the mid 70s.

The reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, the reporting on it and popularity of it was probably the catalyst. Furniture companies began producing knock-offs of American antiques and slowly a decor movement was born. And it evolved into the kitschy mess it became.

There's a terrific interior designer in Washington by the name of Darryl Carter who does modern interiors with an "Early American" influence. I like his work.

I have a book from around 1955 or so called "The Most Beautiful Rooms in America" and nearly every one of them is an austere high-style example of a restored Colonial or Greek Revival house. The antiques were real, but it is clear that such projects inspired period revivals in the suburbs.

By the 1970s such a book would have been unthinkable - for political as well as aesthetic reasons.

[quote]My parents still have apricot coloured bedroom walls from the mid-80s.

It was called Peach. Everyone wanted peach walls after 2 decades of apartment house beige.

Mustard, Avocado, bright Orange and Brown =70's AKA earth tones

Peach, Turquoise, Mauve = 80's AKA shades and tints

Blue, green, orange, pink, and yellow = 90's AKA bright colors, jewel tones

Is anyone dying from covid19, and wants to give away their (discontinued) Emily desk, from Maine Cottage Furniture?

TIA