Remember the table that Laura made from a vintage suitcase?

All across DIY-land, you see crafty 2012 folk making things out of vintage suitcases: end tables (remember Laura’s?), dog beds and recently I saw wall shelves. But our grandparents were already well ahead when it came to innovating with suitcase conversions. LoOk: Here is a true, vintage tall dresser made from suitcases — which converts to usable suitcases. In fact, the piece is branded “Lug-A-Ture“, according to reader Cindy, who spotted it in an antique shop and good girl, had her camera handy to report back. “Lug-A-Ture” — get it? — “Furni-Ture” that you can you can break apart and use as luggage when you need to get a move on. Cindy writes:

One of the most curious things I’ve ever seen, from Midway Antiques Mall in Sacramento CA. They specialize in the mid-mod stuff. A 1950′s luggage dresser by Lug-A-Ture. Take one or all pieces of luggage as needed. They have a lot more cool stuff, including a stash of pink plastic bathroom tiles.

Indeed, Cindy, not just “curious,” but one of the most odd and wonderful consumer products from midcentury America — woddities — that I have ever seen. Well, maybe just a teensy bit under push-button plumbing and of course, the Electro-Sink (bow down to the almighty E-S!)

Interestingly, I found a modern day reconception of this idea — “suitcase dressers” from the British designers JamesPlumb.  There are also “suitcase stacks”. The website explains:

A selection of old suitcases are housed individually in antiqued steel and wood cases that have been tailor made in Somerset. Every case is carefully and painstakingly repaired and repurposed – relined in Swedish linen ready to recieve their new contents.

I love upcycling and yes, this seems to be a fantastic way to repurpose vintage suitcases. Even so, I am now on the eagle-eye lookout for the one-and-only, original Lug-A-Ture.

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These Shaw styles reflect patterns that would have been available in past decades and which are also popular in today’s retro-crazed design world, Emily said:

Avedon: a very small scale diamond

Garden Walk: a non-directional vine

Backstage: a four inch square on the diagonal

Calabria: circles within square

 “We have lots of carpet styles in Shaw’s current product portfolio that have become classic looks,” Emily explained. “Although they may feature an updated color palette from what you’d find 40 years ago, these patterns would fit just as well in a 1970s ranch as in a newly constructed home.”

Do Emily and her team pay attention to the styles from the past — even avocado and harvest gold shags?? — as they look to design new styles for the years to come? Yes, she agreed: “The past is always relevant to the future.”

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And here’s another one — designed and manufactured by Air Rite Service Supply in Lakewood, Ohio, USA. It’s also powder-coated metal.

Consult with a licensed professional / check local building codes before installing, or if you have one — a reader has pointed out that in some communities, laundry chutes are considered a fire hazard.

Do we all have laundry chute stories?
“I certainly remember my first one,”
she says longingly, as if recalling a childhood sweetheart.

Here’s Ann-Marie’s:

…I do have a laundry chute story from my childhood. My sisters and I were always forgetting our keys to get in to the house after school, but we could usually borrow the spare key from the neighbor.

One day, we realized we had forgotten to return Mrs. Neighbor’s key. We puzzled and puzzled over how to get into the house without a key.
Finally, being the resourceful little schemers that we were, we figured out that my sister Lisa was probably skinny enough to go up the laundry chute (a cut out in the bathroom cupboard, with a tube like protrusion hanging from the basement rafters).

The basement was accessible from the garage, which we were able to get into, because the garage door did not lock.

We pulled an act worthy of a circus, with me standing on a box, Ginny on my shoulders, and we crammed Lisa into the chute.

Of course she got stuck, but Ginny and I didn’t care. What is the life of one little sister worth when you are missing the afternoon’s episode of original “Star Trek” rerun? (Captain Kirk was so dreamy.)

So we just twisted her and kept shoving until she popped through, and, the day was saved.

To this day, we cannot figure out why we got in so much trouble for that little escapade. My theory was that it scared my parents into seeing how easy it would be for bad guys to break into our house to steal all our stuff, of which I was sure we had plenty.

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