I Love Lucy Furnishings & Decor

The sofa is very 1950s. There was also a Chinese influence which you see in some of her costumes. When they moved to Connecticut, that decor was very 1960s which moved into the "colonial" period.

Mid-century Vance

R2- That's one of the BEST and funniest comments on dl in quite a while.

The apartment was decorated very much like my parents' apartment in NJ during that period.

OP- I like that couch. It's VERY 1950's. It looks like a couch in the smoking lounge on a cross country train ca.1956 like the Ricardo's took home from Los Angeles to New York.

R5 And the curtains? The pleats seem a little fussy as accompaniment to such a sleek Modern-style sofa.

My mom had a sofa just like that until we got a long curved sofa like the Petrie's...

R1, it’s Chinese Modern.

The apartments were cozy and comfortable.

By contrast, the Connecticut house was awful. So impersonal and the furniture was sparse and uncomfortable looking. It did not look like something that Lucy Ricardo would have fought tooth and nail to get.

The house from the early seasons of The Lucy Show would have been more up her alley.

R9- I agree. Their suburban house looked DREARY and empty. I don't think Lucy is to blame here. It's her new neighbor Betty Ramsey who influenced her to get that Salvation Army Thrift shop early American CRAP.

Outside of the furniture the dreariness of the house reminds me of the dreariness of the Bunker's house on All In The Family- a show which Lucille Ball actually tried to get taken off the air. She was vehemently against it. By 1971 Lucille Ball had ZERO power in show biz.

Colonial really came into vogue in the 1950s and was ubiquitous in the 60s.

Colonial Williamsburg was the reason. After the war it really took off as a tourist attraction. Furniture manufacturers began making furniture in the faux colonial style. Suddenly it became all the rage.

Drexel 1959

That was the look of everybody's grandparents' house when I was growing up (1960s and 70s). Modern look for the furniture for the most part, but traditional touches here and there.

R11- That chair on the far left looks like a chair that Archie Bunker would find comfortable.

The patterned sofa was weird. Late 40s?

Awful mid century stuff. Americans have always done that style of decor badly. ILL sets were like the lobby in a Howard Johnson’s.

Shades of Upson Downs.

I guess I'm a cliche GenX, 50 year old gay man. I love Midcentury . My decor looks like it's right out of a West Elm showroom and it makes me happy. Lucy's second apartment and the furniture was great, except for the double beds

A carefully researched site identifying just about all the paintings featured in I LOVE LUCY and later Lucy Shows.

Wow, I never noticed all the ballet paintings and never made out all the California landscapes.

I heard a radio discussion with Lucille and Vivian and at least one of them said collecting art was her passion.

The breakfast dishes in I LOVE LUCY are the Franciscan "Ivy" pattern by Gladding McBean Company, Los Angeles, a major California pottery company of the 1940s-1960s.

(Franciscan "Apple" and "Desert Rose" dinnerware of the same period is much more common. "Apple" is as popular as "Ivy" but nobody wants "Desert Rose" - you can't give it away)

Ballet makes sense. Lucille worked as a dancing actress for over a decade. One of her best friends was Ginger Rogers. And she danced often in I Love Lucy.

Her lower body was paralyzed in her late teens by 'juvenile rheumatoid arthritis' that was cured with 'experimental horse shots.' (I suspect she had an infection like Lyme and received a whopping dose of an early antibiotic.) She had to learn how to walk again, and that made her really grateful to be able to dance.

R20- That's a LOVELY set.

@r15, "Awful mid century stuff."

It was fine if you had a mid-century modern house. I grew up in a house like the Bradys, so that kind of furniture worked