Retro Renovation

I have 100+ draft posts in the wings - and this is one of them. New reader Anita says that she’s been looking through the site for retro cabinet pulls - so I thought that I’d better get this one up. It’s a beautiful - admittedly expensive @ $23.90 — atomic pull from Crown [...]

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St. Louis Elizabeth writes:
Dear Pam:
I wanted to alert you and forum readers to a recent find.
After the Palm Beach restorer’s comments on rechroming hardware, I decided to seek a modern, replacement pull with the right retro feel for my slab-front cabinet doors. (I’ll need ~36 and couldn’t afford vintage items at $8-12 each.)
It took [...]

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“Meet the Austins” recently linked to my site saying they liked one of my living room post illustrations. So, I dug up these two 1957 kitchens for them, too. What do you think, Austins?
Like so many other elements of postwar homes, these kitchens very often had a Colonial flair. The paint colors are like colonial [...]

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Julie from Seattle recently sent a photo (immediately above) of the original built-in from her new home in Seattle, and asked for some help with a couple of issues. Here’s what she had to say:
Hi, Pam. I love your blog. We just moved into a 1950’s ranch in Seattle and have this amazing huge built-in [...]

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These kitchen cabinets are SO TYPICAL of the postwar era. Birch with three-quarter (or traditional) overlay doors. The three-quarter or traditional means that the doors do not entirely cover (”full overlay”) the cabinet box, which is what you see with most vintage steel kitchen cabinets.
What I really like about this 1961 kitchen is how they’ve [...]

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Steel kitchen cabinets are what started me on this road to the retroblogosphere. But I also completely admire the look of nicely executed wood cabinetry. In reality, it was a Steel vs. Wood dual for most of the 50s with the two industries duking it out for the heart of the mid century housewife. [...]

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My brick, ranch-style home has a colonial feel, especially on the exterior. I am dressing it up with black-iron hardware and lighting — and it looks terrific.
In fact, if you look at a lot of the classic “California ranches” you see these kinds of colonial touches, with the black forged iron really making the wood [...]

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The catalog just arrived and I see that Van Dyke’s Restorers also has several good cabinet knobs and pulls in their most recent catalog. I really like one pull in the catalog - p. 176 - an asymmetric aircraft-style design. It’s not on the website, and it’s not expensive ($5.99). Check it out. I also [...]

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Some of my favorite pulls and knobs:

Photos with gray-green background: All from Rejuvenation Lighting.
Gold pull: From Mac the Antique Plumber — but go for the chrome instead!

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