For the past 10 years, I have been absolutely immersed in researching homes built from 1945 through 1963 — the classic, post-World-War-II baby boom years. And over the past decade — and the past two-to-three years in particular — there is no question that I’ve seen a major transformation in how mainstream media, real estate agents and — yes, prospective home buyers — view these homes. The original, high quality features… the architecture… and the wisdom of restoring, rather than gutting — yup, folks are starting to ‘get it’. To be sure, there is still serious work to do to showcase how smart appreciating and preserving these homes can be, but, we are well on our way, I am convinced. So, that gets me to thinking: What is “the next big thing”. The answer, of course: 1970s houses. And buckle your seatbelts, peoples, because I predict that the love train for 1970s architecture and interior design will be even bigger than for 1950s and 1960s homes. Why? (1) Sheer numbers. And, yes, (2) the sheer amazing style, too.
1. The Numbers: Long story short: There were more houses built in the 1970s — overall and as a percentage of population — than during any other decade in American history.
I am afraid this might bore a lot of readers, so I’ll keep this brief-ish. I have been doing research on housing growth, and this government report from 1994, is pretty informative. In one of the paragraphs above, it says:
The housing stock grew by more than 20 percent in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1970’s. Growth rates less than 20 percent occurred in the 1960’s and 1980’s.
The largest increase, 19.7 million housing units, occurred in the 1970’s, despite three economic recessions within the calendar years from 1970 to 1980s. The net gain in that decade represented an average increase of about 2 million housing units per year. Demand for housing was high in the 1970s as the leading edge of the baby boom population entered household forming years, wellin the 24-to-34 years age groups.
It. Always. Happens. About 20 years after a housing style, with its attendant interior design style — booms — we Hate it. This goes on for a while. About 50 years after, a shift starts to occur. There is a new generation — the grandkids, typically — who have fond recollections of their grandparents’ homes, and embrace they style. They also can afford these “stylistically discounted” — “dated” — houses. In addition, the larger population — including designers — has the perspective to look back and appreciate the best of a style, and let go of the rest. The 70s housing re-boom is on a trajectory to start in earnest in about eight years… and leading edge design savants are already heading there.
The housing boom of the 1970s was even greater — numerically and as a percentage of population — than in the now-infamous bubble of 2000-2010. Note: I am creating my own Excel spread sheet (shown above)(I already see how I need to fix where the 1990s tally up, but I am fed up looking at this and need to take a break). There are reports and reports, with a variety of government agencies (BLS pre-1945, and Census 1945-on), and technical slicing and dicing, to puzzle through. My numbers may not match other numbers. Unless I find someone who has done just the kind of timeline-report I am looking for, I have a bit of a journey ahead of me. Nonetheless, I believe my spreadsheet so far is directionally correct. You get the point.
(2) 1970s style rocks. Of course, 1970s style is infamous, too. The more I research and write about retro design — the more I love it. I want it. I am collecting it. And I will be writing more and more about it leading toward the big boom to come.
Jon Simons says
It’s been 40 years now so would surprise me if a good percentage of 70’s homes haven’t already had major work done. That said, some people either don’t notice their home getting rather out of style, or keep meaning to get around to it, until it can’t be ignored any more.
Jordanna says
My mom and dad love ’70s decor. My beef with it is, actually, at least in their iteration, is rather similar to Pam’s with Restoration Hardware.
It has no colour. My mom’s idea of a colour scheme is: Jute, sand, tan, chocolate. Maybe rust if she feels like going craaaazy. Wood is not allowed to be painted. Pottery is unpainted earthenware or terracotta. My dad loves gray. My dad loves industrial brick and steel.
For a pop of colour she’ll use avocado/sage. Sage is a colour I use as a neutral, she uses it as the loudest in the room. It makes me insane.
Humorless shaker and Early American furniture. Because its real, man. My mom uses “veneer” and “facade” as epithets.
I rebelled. I love colour. I love the Suburban Modern pallette. I love cheerfully painted houses (my parents say “they fight with the landscape. What about brown?”) and I love the ’50s, which enrages my ’70s mom.
pam kueber says
tee hee. We most always rebel against our mom and dads’ palette. I think it’s part of the creating-your-own-identity thing. my mom and dad’s house, built in ’71, also was super heavy on the brownssssssssss. i’ll have to blog about it sometime. 🙂
denise says
My mom LOVED the avocado, orange and gold color palette. I couldn’t stand it and now I’m drawn to it like bees to honey. It is funny how that happens.
Jana (Berniecat) says
Jordanna,
As a teen in the ’70’s, I couldn’t stand the browns/tans/subdued greens of the decade. I, too gravitate toward the brighter colors that were popular during the ’50s and early ’60’s. I remember my mother (who is a true “individualist”) combined the dark browns of the decade with the bright oranges, yellows and oranges to create an exciting mix of decades and eclectic style. ( I still think, however, the turquoise appliances didn’t quite coordinate). Our house never reflected an entire “decade”, but was always an eccentric, exciting, eclectic mixture of several decades of color and style. I guess that is where I get my eclectic sense of style from. My mother tended to embrace brighter colors and I do too.
denise says
As I’ve mentioned here before, I am a big fan of the 70’s, I didn’t know how much, though, until Sunday when at a flea market I was trying on this super cool reddish orange leather coat from that period of time. The guy selling it says to me, “the 70’s are coming back” I smiled, then he added, “but you never left, did you?” I thought that was so funny. I’ve modified it, modernized it for myself, but I guess I’m still part of it.
I found this awesome bedspread of orange, avocado, gold and white that fortunately, the 15 year old I gifted it to was as happy as a clam receiving it as I was that I found it. Her sister was jealous. I just love that there are two teenagers in my life that not only love and want vintage things, but appreciate the 70’s, too!
J D Log says
Although the 70’s is not my cup of tea I do have respect for it. My father lives in a time capsule 70’s Spanish style place full of burnt orange and brown. To me it was the last era of individuality of style before we went into the conservitive 80’s and onwards with their bland nuetral colours.
It is in my view this is when Australia finally caught up with the rest of the world in mainstream trends (never sure if that was a good thing). I do like some of the light fittings and wallpaper from that era for being way out there rather then functional.
Jackie says
There are definitely 70s style trends other than brown/orange/gold/avocado, Early American, and disco. I can’t say I’d replicate my parents’ home, filled as it was with Harvest Gold everything (my mother had a serious thing for yellow). However, I think back fondly on how much I admired some of those wonderfully funky interiors filled with a mix of Art Nouveau posters, Arts & Crafts furniture, modernist bits, and lots of plants. The sort of thing I later came to associate with the aging hippie college professors I adored.
I don’t care for very sleek, cold modern homes, but love the sort of “modern” expressed in houses that look like a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright, a timber frame barn, a treehouse, and a Hobbit hole. Heck, yeah, I DID want to live in a Hobbit Hole–and I have the complete Sunshine Family house to prove it, including a scale-model spinning wheel I added for good measure when I was 8. (Yes, I finally got a real one in my 30s, thank you.)
On the downside, those kids buying 70s tract homes are going to have to shell out a lot of cash to replace dangerous aluminum wiring and failing early plastic plumbing. Forget knob-and-tube, it’s the aluminum stuff that scares me.
Chris H says
Pam,
I respectfully and politely disagree. I think you have the direction correct -there is always a little nostalgia boomlet a few decades later- but I think you are overestimating the size of the trend.
First, I’m not going to criticize anyone’s taste. If someone wants a very Brady house, that’s their call.
I graduated from HS in ’75 and I worked summers for a company that made panelized homes. Nothing wrong with the panel system, but I got a good look at the elevations both on the prints and as they popped up all over town. There is little that is definitive about ’70s architecture. People built salt boxes, colonials, colonial salt boxes, and nondescript 1040 ranches (one thousand forty sq ft). Yes, here and there one can find a ’70s home built as a split level with massive 2.5 car garage doors, but by and large, only the real estate documents clue most people about the build year of their ’70s pad. (Likewise many ’50s/60s homes were not built to the MCM aesthetic, they were just thrown up, or built in older styles)
There are definitive ’70s interior design elements, and I needn’t go into them here, so this is probably where most of the action will be.
Another trend of the ’70s was the absolutely massive interest in the 1950s. This was the decade of “American Graffiti”, “Happy Days”, “Laverne and Shirley”, ’50s themed car shows (they are still doing that to a large extent) “Oldies” radio stations, and on, and on. IOWs a lot of people living in the ’70s were very dissatisfied with the times and this, I think, went well beyond “normal” nostalgic remembrance. It amounted to a rejection of the times, though admittedly that won’t have the same effect on people who were very young at the time (My parents, having lived through the Great Depression, cannot begin to fathom my love of all things 1930s)
I agree with you that the grandkids of the ’70s will have fond remembrance of some of “style” of the times, but I wouldn’t bet too heavily on pleasant memories being strong enough to make someone actually install orange shag carpeting. An avocado ‘fridge, is a definite possibility.
There are many places where ’70s homes were never built. They were largely a suburban phenomenon, and though many will choose to buy a home in an “old” ’70s subdivision, it goes counter to the other modern trend of re-urbanization.
My neighborhood was built in the late ‘teens and through to 1929. Here and there, a vacant lot was filled in with a post war ranch, but there have been virtually no houses built in a several block radius since the late ’40s. Mostly, none since the Great Crash. My neighborhood continues to be a place people choose because of proximity to work and play, but ’70s decor would be wildly out of place in most of these houses. While you correctly identify a building boom in the ’70s, it still remains a fact that most housing stock either pre-dates or post-dates the ’70s.
It also seems that my generation was the last to come out of college w/o a severe debt load. I doubt the up and coming generation, who have fond memories of Grandma’s harvest gold kitchen, are going to have the spare cash to decorate in period correct fashion. They’ll being paying for college until they start collecting SS.
Finally, I’m not sure how long nostalgic or “period” decorating will last, as a craze. In past decades homes were mostly built and/or decorated to be “with it”, modern, up to date. My mother wasn’t trying to capture a ’40s aesthetic in our post war ranch, she wanted the 60s and later ’70s look. There is something profoundly different (and a bit un-American? ) about wanting to live in the past. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but even then, there are many eras to choose from.
Sorry to be such a downer. Again, I don’t knock anyone for wanting to live in that ’70s house, but I suspect the trend will be small compared to interest in the 50s/60s.
BlueJay says
There was also a rekindled interest in Art Deco in both the 50s and the 70s. The 50s reinterpretation features more chrome and brighter colors, whereas the 70s went for earthier tones, if I’m not mistaken. All of these eras ultimately draw influence from those that came before!
Genevieve says
I think you have a point about the dangers of becoming so derivative there is nothing new or innovative or timely. It can point to a lack of optimism and a bit of defeatism– hence “grey” as the “new” neutral. Yuck!
That being said,
1) all eras have derivative elements– from the 100 year colonial revival starting in the 1870’s to the interest in medieval in the Craftsman era, the old west revivals in the 1940s and 1950s–
2) Necessity is the mother of invention. Just prior to the Great Depression, 3 out of 4 Americans rented their home from someone else. Most of these homes did not have indoor plumbing or electricity. While the wealthiest could afford homes built with standards we might envy even today, most single family houses were substandard and not available when demand skyrocketed after WWII. In 1950, families didn’t have a huge stock of 50 year old homes to choose from, much less 50 year homes of high quality. Homes had to be new and modern and radically different than what came before; they were the first with electricity, central heating, indoor plumbing and hundreds of other things we take for granted but are huge leaps in basic health and safety.
3) The generation of Americans forming new families today might be considered the “Baby Busters.” Baby Boomers grew up in neighborhoods overflowing with children. Baby Busters grew up with neighborhoods overflowing with retirees and seniors. There just aren’t as many of us, and for the last 30 years, in many areas more new homes have been built than new families formed. It doesn’t make much sense to build new and innovate when there is such an extensive, high quality stock of existing homes.
4) It no longer makes sense to constantly “update” with mainly superficial stylistic changes just to be “with it.” Americans had gotten into the habit of “updating” or moving out of homes every 7 to 15 years. Renovating and changing for functional improvements is great and needed to make the older stock livable. But making cosmetics a huge industry that we are now dependent on is a bit of a mistake. The generation that came out of WWII didn’t focus so much on their own homes that they neglected their community institutions. They were so much more active than we are today! Active in their schools, churches, fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, you name it and they were more involved. Quantitatively more involved. We have schools and communities that need functional updates and improvement and the old habit of simply moving to a newer home, in a newer town, with newer schools and leaving to older to literally rot doesn’t work anymore.
5) Derivative styles at their worst can indeed be a form of hiding from the present, or a form of laziness. But they can also free creative energy better used elsewhere, make the best use of resources. Nostalgic styles are more about welcoming your guests and neighbors and making them smile than about impressing or competing with them.
6) That being said, the 70’s was a fairly traumatic time for many families and for the nation. While other decades had extreme changes and divisions, there were always moderates to help soften the edges and integrate the best (and sometime worst) of the extremes. We always came to some sort of collective agreement and grew stronger. Until the 1970’s. In the 1970’s we saw, at the family level, record splits in the form of divorces. Before the 1970s, most denominations, although functionally split since the civil war, contained a mixture of moderates and conservatives, and moderates and liberals. In the 70’s those permanently divorced. Today you can mainly go to conservative churches or liberal churches and the moderates get turned off and mostly stay home. There were splits over Watergate, over the War and our role in the world, about abortion, about so many things that haven’t healed with time. The 70s was the start of the Culture Wars. They get papered over sometimes– but those divisions remain. The split level house is so indicative of all the splits of the era. 70’s fashions may make a comeback, but it won’t be without detractors. Every era has problems, but for the 1930’s through even the mid 1960’s, most of those problems are at least somewhat resolved.
pam kueber says
You have made some excellent points, Genevieve — thank you!
Genevieve says
Avocado and olive are three different but related colors; sage is totally unrelated and can’t be remotely confused with the other three. Greens can be more yellow, more blue, or neutral; they can be light, medium or dark, and they can be pure or impure–impure greens have some red in them. Olive can indicate a fairly dark, neutral to slightly yellow, impure green. Army green– very popular in every decade because it is fairly balanced between blue and yellow and has quite a bit of red in it, like the color of most leaves in good health. It is one of the most common shades in nature– of course there is a large range in nature, but the deeper army green olive is well within that. As a deeper color it is grounding; it plays well with other colors and stays in the background. Sage is a muted blue-green and also popular through the decades, sometimes more blue, sometimes more neutral. Most of the blue-greens are popular in every decade, Sage, Kelly green, hunter green— they have all had moments when they are particularly popular, but they never go away. They might inspire boredom, but never hatred. Sage is common in drought-tolerant and alpine plant. There is a range of shades from the late 60’s through the mid 1970’s that are very particular to that decade that are called olive and avocado. They are mid-tones with a fair amount of red in them and a lot of yellow. Some of the undertones are objectionable in that they are the same undertones in sickly people and in sickly plants. Harvest gold, brown, cream and olive all have yellow-orange in them; they beg to be cooled down with some blue. They are not appropriate for rooms with southern exposures. Because of that yellow undertone, the 70s colors can look dingy and cigarette stained. When 70s colors are found in other decades, they are balanced with cooler tones or bookended with red and purple, or they are used very sparingly for spice. Although individually the 70’s colors are very warm, as a group have a lot of unresolved tension. Unconsciously we expect to either see purple and red, or alternatively blue. It isn’t just fashion; colors may come and go, but how they work together or don’t work together are hardwired into our brains. Elements of the 70’s may come back, but a lot of the 70’s style is atypical color and design theory.
gavin hastings says
I love 1970’s decor.
Good interior design frome 70’s is usually quite “era-less”. Forward and backward looking at the same time.
Forget Gradma’s house….or even the Brady’s. Go to your local library and thumb through a 1975 issue of Architechural Digest ot the original Metropolitan Home. These images are as clean and fresh as when new.
Sadly, much of it is already long gone. Most public buildings have been stripped of any reference to the decade.
gavin hastings says
Actually, if you Google Image Architechural Digest 1973 you can see what I mean about “timeless, past and future”. all rolled together.
This was the heyday of the DECORATOR….aka designer.
ELK says
So funny – I was just surfing over at the Sunset Magazine website and they have a pictorial all about incorporating that 70’s style into your decor.
The headline reads –
8 ways to embrace ’70s style at home The Disco Decade is having a surprising revival, but never fear––no mirrored balls here
Personally my mother’s house in the 70’s was a study in a sort of Moorish revival. Lots of cut work velvet on the couches and brown and harvest gold everywhere with orange and avocado as the accents. Can’t say I can really get behind any of the colors other than orange. She did have lots of Mexican clay tchotchkes. I loved the Mexican pieces not so much the harvest gold!
Jill says
Call me a killjoy, but the day that the kind of yellow striped vinyl Sanitas wallpaper, yellow mottled design countertops, dark plastic laminate cabinet veneers, and gold-and-yellow geometric floors that have plagued my kitchen for lo these fifteen years we’ve lived here (and at least 10 years before that), and the dark paneling with rust-colored carpet and vinyl-padded bar that used to be my basement family room, become coveted retro design elements, is the day I will lose all hope.