Retro Renovation

Nancy’s happy 4th of July house

pam kueber — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:00:54 +0000

READER NANCY (of the yellow bathroom and beautiful-but-uncleanable-brick fireplace) sends us a happy July 4 image - the wall hanging above has been by the front door all 50 years! Thanks, Nancy, and happy holiday, all!

Hi Pam - We are getting ready for the 4th of July & our granddaughter’s 2nd birthday. Wanted to show you how happy our 50’s home is. Don’t you think that the front almost looks like a happy face? Had to include the wall hanging by the front door - that has been there for all the 50 years & I love to decorate for holidays.

Have a great weekend!
Nancy

Nancy completes her yellow 50s bathroom From
Should Nancy paint her vintage wood cabinets? Glamorlux
Cindy’s midcentury Massachusetts ranch house Last July

20 images from Kristin’s midcentury garden

pam kueber — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:00:41 +0000

Kristin has been doing some retro renovation - of her garden. She has uncovered lots of shrubs and perennials under years of scrub. She has planted her built-in brick planter with retro style plants. And her neighbor Lee — another RR reader — nabbed this patio set for her off another neighbor’s curb. Dumpster divers unite! Hey, Kristin. You mention that your neighborhood is “newly popular.” Were you being serious? Tell us more….
Kristin and I exchanges several emails, I think it’s fun to read all pieced together. She writes:

So glad you like! One caveat is that the quality is beneath my standards as I took them with my iPhone. Still they are decent! The ones in the front aren’t as detailed as the sun had gone down quite a bit. Perhaps a reader can identify the shrub in the photo titled “unknown shrub”? The utility company lopped the top off a month or do ago as it was near the wires…grrrr. I when left out a number of uncovered gems but I’ll do more next Spring after we have pruned and really fixed things up. The back of the house is up against an alley with a 50’s strip mall and there is a wood privacy fence there and along the neighbors to our west, but the fence is still up all around. We were cutting crap out last weekend and discovered rounds of the original stuff cut at the height to protect beds just as if they had sat there for YEARS! We have a huge backyard…somehow it didn’t rust one round, but the other got a little rusty.

I met a neighbor through Retro Renovation who has become a friend and he just gave us a vintage set of wrought iron patio furniture his neighbor had just put on the curb! Retro Renovation equals Social Networking site! Wait til he sends pix of his ranch interior!!! Holy moley. I posted about trying to remove my vintage antenna from my chimney and I mentioned we lived in Colonial Acres. Well, Lee is an avid reader and follower of your site (as is evidenced by his time capsule home) and he lives 5 blocks south in the same newly-popular neighborhood! So he posted a response and he invited us to several parties, none that we’ve been able to make yet! But he came to my yard sale and then we became Facebook friends and there ya go! Well, it is just amazing how much stuff in his house was untouched! He has the original metal cabinets, porcelain sink, formica countertops, linoleum floor, hardwoods, all the doors are the original, unpainted wood including his pocket doors (mine were all painted white–any idea how to get that off?)…plus original crystal chandelier in the dining room, cracked brick tile mosaic add-on floor with brick fireplace….it is just a little miracle! Plus he has 1.5 baths all with original tile and the colored fixtures!

Looking around in out neighborhood at the houses for sale, I’d say we were lucky to get what we got as far as it not being chopped and remodeled to bits. My only dismay is the Home Depot tile over the lino in the kitchen, the Home Depot stainless sink and ugly replacement faux wood countertops in there and the thick white paint over every door including my fantastic pocket doors on all closets.

Thank you, Kristin! To heck with our houses, all. Let’s get out and garden!

Rachel and her 1964 Comet Caliente time capsule car

pam kueber — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:00:18 +0000

Reader Frank gets snaps for spotting this great video — a true “time capsule” car. I’m thinkin’ this is the platform just before the first-ever Mustang (a 64-1/2 model) came out. Thanks, Frank, keep ‘em coming!

Hi Pam,

The link below is not necessarily on topic of retro homes, but it is a cute story about an 89-year-old woman who still drives her immaculate 1964 Mercury Comet with 540,000 miles on the odometer. I’d guess you could call it a time capsule car. Just like the mid century ranch homes, the cars of the 1960’s had beautiful clean lines. Thanks for keeping up your great site.

Frank

1964 time capsule gray bathroom REMEMBER t
1964 split level time capsule - great midcentury mailbox and kitchen THE ESTATE
A 1950s time capsule ranch home in Lexington, Kentucky All over

Kurt’s silver pearlescent 1952 vintage plastic tile kitchen

pam kueber — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:00:05 +0000

A READER BLITZ continues - I only have about 50 more to go. Today, one of the wildest vintage kitchens that I have ever seen. Yes: All of those 8″x8″ plastic tiles are original. Kurt explains: .

I have a 1952 kitchen that I’ve restored. The walls and ceiling are covered with 8″x8″ silver pearlescent Tilemaster tiles. It’s a mind blower. I inspect houses for a living (10,000 and counting…), and I’ve never seen anything like it. When I bought the place, I had originally planned to gut the kitchen, but once in, I became entranced with the stuff. It’s magical………I bought the house from the home’s (built in 1922), second owner, who remodeled the kitchen in 1952. The tile is held in place by the old crappy tile setting adhesive they used then; periodically, tiles will come loose, and I resecure them with modern adhesives. I put the cabinets in, and moved some of the tile around to fill in holes left from removing some stuff so I could fit in a real refrigerator. I worked pretty hard to keep the flavor of the original remodel in ‘52. I want to put in boomerang formica when I change out the countertops next year. There’s a little eating nook/banquette built into the corner (out of the photo) that’s equipped with some Thonet chairs from the early 50’s. It’s a pretty tight little composition. If I had a better camera (wide angle lens), you could get the feel of it better. Note the original Nutone fan over the door @ the left. The sink is an original Elkay Lustertone with draining sideboard. I think you get the idea. It’s pretty wild in real life with the correct lighting.

Kurt, while I have not seen a kitchen quite like this one, I have seen a few with larger, Marlite- (laminate-style) walls and ceilings. I think this was an uncommon midcentury renovation for older homes and farmhouses. Case in point: See this vintage kitchen with Marlite covering the walls and ceiling, just like yours. If, for example, you had troublesome plaster walls — you could just cover them over with these miraculous manmade plastics. Thanks so much for saving this little architectural gem - and for sharing it with us. And yes, Kurt, we also need to see your 1959 American Standard bathroom, in seafoam green when you get a chance!

1952 Willett maple furniture I‘M
Vintage 1941 Montgomery Ward metal kitchen cabinets VINTAGE EY
Gina’s 1960s mosaic splatter tile bathroom WELCOME TO

Gina’s 1960s mosaic splatter tile bathroom

pam kueber — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:00:35 +0000

WELCOME TO GinaUSA’s 1960s bathroom. I am really quite in love with this style of mosaic tile — 3/4″ or 1″ squares — and in this case, with little porcelain splatters. I generically call this “Romany Spartan” tile because that’s the company that seems to be in all my vintage magazines. I know of at least one source for tile pretty close to this, still (continue after the jump.) Ooooh, peek at GinaUSA’s door handle, too — crystal. Yes, you can add this bit of sweetness to your house, if you prefer it rather than mod metal.

Here is a close-up of Gina’s bathroom tile. Those splatters also provide a bit of slip-resistance, I bet.

Gina has nice built-in, too.

Want to replicate the look? I found this wide selection, real 60s-70s-80s colors, at S.J. Masters:

And of course, there’s pink!

Thank you, GinaUSA, for sharing your bathroom! I am so happy you love it and are not changing it. It looks to be in great shape. What a treasure.

88 mosaic tile patterns for your retro bathroom Reader bsm
Adding interest to mosaic tile in a retro renovation bathroom This bath
Porcelain mosaic floor tile in lots of colors I HAD OTHE

Jake & Barclay’s 1943 kitchen gets a retro update

pam kueber — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:00:47 +0000

DOGGIE BLOGGERS JAKE AND BARCLAY — that’s Jake at left, he’s an Eames/Saarinen fan — have a fun blog called The (dog) House. Their reader-owners recently added acrylic inserts to their “great wall of yellow” vintage kitchen cabinets, even more so if you have jigsaw and know how to use it. This is a low-cost, high-impact update for any kitchen. They also added a dose of pistachio color, and check out the checkerboard Armstrong VCT floor…. Nicely done “grandma’s redux,” as they call it. But read on, this house is very interesting for at least two more reasons.

First of all, I think a lot of readers will identify with Jake and Barclay’s owners’ sense of style. It’s not “dogmatic” tee hee:

…We decided that mid-century, in our house, would mean anything from the 1930’s through the late 1960’s. We don’t want to be dogmatic about style, even mid-century style. So, while the major design theme for the house is generally mid-century, we add plenty of eclectic and oddball contemporary touches too. Ironic? Sure! Earnest, geeky, obsessive….even middle class? Sure; bring it on! (Read more on the blog’s About page, and cruise through the different rooms via their Categories.)

So, cruise around the site and you’ll see a lot of inspirational ideas not necessarily pigeon-holed into a single narrow collecting decade. Hey - “real” houses are like this, aren’t they? A mix of stuff you find yourself… and which came with the significant other…or from mom or grandma or Uncle Bill or… from the dumpster, even. It’s all a big, expressive, artistic life’s collage.

Second, I think that this house is really interesting because it was built during wartime, in 1943, as defense housing. From what I’ve researched so far, pretty much the only homes being built during the war were for defense workers. This was due to widespread materials shortages. Jake & Barclay’s house is in Richmond, California — the home base of the Kaiser shipyards. So, what a history! Relatedly, it was WWII itself that really catapulted the west coast in desirability as a place to live. I guess I’d stop short of saying it was a “backwater” til then, but maybe…just for farmer’s and movie people? Think “Grapes of Wrath.” But during WWII, there was massive industrial buildup with the defense industry, which needed to stage aircraft, ships, submarines and troops to fight in the Pacific theater. After the war, people stayed because there were jobs as industry converted from wartime to consumer production. The west coast has boomed ever since. And we got everlasting legacies like ranch houses and casual style living.

Jake and Barclay’s house is 2 bedrooms, 1 bath. Defense housing was, of course, quite basic. In terms of design, their owners call the home a transitional “ranch bungalow.” Sounds right to me — forging a path between the old and the new. Thank you, Jake, Barclay, Rick and Sanh!

41 midcentury lighting ideas - post lanterns, lamp posts, wall lanterns and landscaping lights

pam kueber — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:00:31 +0000

HERE IS A REALLY GREAT SURVEY OF VINTAGE OUTDOOR LIGHTING, from my 1961 Progress Lighting catalog. I started with this photo because: Just look at the little umbrella landscape light. It is phenomenal! The careful addition of outdoor lighting can be one of the easiest and relatively cheapest ways to improve the curb appeal of your midcentury ranch house, Cape, colonial or contemporary. At minimum, think: High quality, well maintained wall lanterns adjacent to or above the entry door and garage, and a lamp post either at the front of the driveway or closer to the house next to a walkway heading toward the door. Landscape around the lamp post - this is also a great piece of ‘hardscape’ to launch a decorative fence. Light are “sentinels”. Use them to ultimately draw attention toward your front door…they are tools to make your house say a big, warm “Welcome.”

All of these lamp post styles are “around” — except, as far as know, for the decorative steel one, #3. I did feature a metal post for a mailbox that might be able to be adapted for this use. I also must say, I am not quite sure where to get a post that includes the hanger thingy shown above on all the posts. We had to drill ours in, it was a real hassle. Finally, on this topic - I know where to get a nice, heavy duty custom name-and-number plate to hang on your lamp post. We have one! It is so cool! Will do a post soon. A post post tee hee.

1961 post lanterns. SO COOL. LOVE that guy in the upper right with the house numbers included. Swoonable.

A couple more. The three colonial styles can *pretty much* be found today. See my Lighting Fast & Easy Page. I like the white and gold, so scrumptiously cheesy. Seriously, I really like it!

Oh, and here’s some more. Nice! These lanterns - hmmm, nothing like them available today, I fear. ?

Wall lanterns to match. Hanover (see Fast and Easy Page) make lanterns with the scrolly thingys, like the example at the top. This style goes over the garage, center. You need to make sure you fascia is tall enough. Be careful about scale. In fact, scale is a very Important issue regarding all these lights: You don’t want your lights to be too big, or too dinky. You want them to be just right. One of my biggest pet peeves is the houses today with their gargantuan wall lanterns. Ugh. You want people to see your House. Not your Wall Lantern. These are like jewelry. Agonize over this decision, please.

More outdoor retro lighting. P5970 at the left, middle: You can get this from Rejuvenation - see the Fast & Easy page. Love 5973! Tim Wetzel: Can we have this one, please?

The three colonial style ceiling fixtures on this page - ubiquitous in the 50s and 60s. Everywhere! Easy to find replacements today. But they can be cheap looking. Spend a little extra to get solid heavy construction. It will subconsciously comfort you even though the inexpensive big box store lights look the same. Also: I always see LOTs of outdoor lights at the Re-Store. Tim: We want P5978, too, please - a lovely ‘colonial-modern’ bridge.

Midcentury modern post lantern from Besa Lighting Jennifer g
Retro lighting: Square recessed can lights - reproductions The reces
Jimmy - and Tikimama - both like Primelight’s outdoor lighting Our serie

Midcentury modern post lantern from Besa Lighting

pam kueber — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:00:22 +0000

Jennifer gets snaps for sending us this very nice midcentury style post lantern, with matching wall lantern. to consider for out front. Finding appropriate outdoor lighting is always a hot topic, with not *that many* resources on our list yet. So this is a very welcome addition. Here’s what Jennifer writes:

I’ve been searching for a nice mid-century outdoor post lamp for a long time and finally found one that fits the bill perfectly. It’s made by Besa Lighting, model 3356. Here’s a link to it. I haven’t ordered it so I can’t speak to the quality but I was so excited about it, I thought it’d be nice to share with others. - Jennifer

Yes, you are nice to share, Jennifer, thank you! I poked around the site - and I agree that you have nailed the model that has the best a retro/midcentury feel. It’s that hood-umbrella thingy - you see those in midcentury homes. The other Besa lighting fixtures (while appealing and I especially like their ribbed glass globes, so cool) are too contemporary/Euro-style/today for our older houses, I tend to think. Good eye, J.

Hey, you have me all inspired. I have some 1961 Progress outdoor lighting in my archive - I’ll run it tomorrow/Sunday.

Why do people stay in their time capsule houses?

pam kueber — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:00:02 +0000

STEVEN KURUTZ OF THE NEW YORK TIMES has written a terrific story about time capsule houses — not empty ones, but ones people still live in today, original furniture and all. The basic question of his story was: Why do people choose to live in homes that they never change for 20…30…40…50 years? He interviewed couples living in four such homes, and it is fascinating, interesting and funny, even, to read their stories. In his research, Steven came across this site and all our interest in time capsules, so he contacted me and ultimately interviewed me for the story.

What do you think? If they fit the bill, why did your grandparents, aunt and uncle, parents, or neighbors stay in their house and never change it?

Why do people stay in their time capsules? From my experience — in particular regarding more modest, middle-class homes, I answered and was quoted:

In many cases, she said, the homes were occupied by elderly couples who were immensely proud of them. “I think the owners of these homes were tremendously invested in them emotionally, as well as financially,” she said. “They came from an era where a house was very hard won.” As a rule, she said, the homes were well cared for, and the belief was “Why change something if it’s not worn out?”

He also asked two psychologists. One said:

Lots of people become frozen to a time in their past,” said Gail Thoen, a psychologist who has done research on aging. The breakup of a marriage or the death of a spouse are two of the most common reasons people hang on to a particular time, she said, which is sometimes reflected in their environment.

Another:

Leon Hoffman, a psychoanalyst in Manhattan, said a house can provide a “secure base” — a bulwark against change. “Some people are more stuck in their ways,” Dr. Hoffman explained. “There’s a bit of anxiety about what the new stuff brings.”

And then, there were the four true-life stories.

What do you think? I think this is a very interesting question indeed.

Oh, and be sure to read the complete story here. You must register, but it’s free — and I assure you: It’s worth it! I also want to acknowledge: Photo above is from the Times; it is hotlinked directly back to their most excellent slide show.

xoxo to all time capsule hunters, retro recon detectives, and STPB ambassadors

pam kueber — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:59:35 +0000

The New York Times story also spotlighted the efforts of so many blog readers — who are awesome “reporters” on the scene bringing time capsules (and all the retro-love) to the surface. Here’s that part of the story:

Identifying exactly when a home became stuck is easier. “Pink-tile bathrooms, Dishmaster faucets, colors like aquamarine and sunbeam yellow — all very 1950s,” said Pam Kueber, who runs retrorenovation.com, a Web site devoted to midcentury design. Shag carpet and avocado appliances indicate the ’70s. Lava rock and ultrasuede? As ’80s as a Rubik’s Cube.

Ms. Kueber posts midcentury time capsules on her site, with photos provided by readers, often taken from real estate listings.

Take a bow, Retro Renovation Time Capsule Hunters, Retro Recon Detectives and STPB Ambassadors. You are the best. Thank you so much. And keep ‘em coming: retrorenovation @ gmail dot com.