60s kitchen — Retro Renovation

What fun – my kitchen was featured on Apartment Therapy

Posted by: Pam Kueber • March 5, 2008

This past weekend my kitchen was featured on ApartmentTherapy.com’s Guess the Decade. This feature shows a photo, then gives readers the whole weekend to ponder – then vote – to guess what decade the room/photo came from. The vast majority of readers were on the mark, detecting the modern clues. Take a look – and be sure to click through to the original post as it contains many amusing — often scathing — comments. Although, I must admit the jury is out on whether I am OCD or not – about retro reno details, at least!

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A Mondrian kitchen for Anne and Gary?

Posted by: Pam Kueber • January 30, 2008

Anne and Gary’s 1959 ranch home in Oregon is a wonderful work in progress and I love checking in with their blog as they settle into their new old classic and continue to make it their own. Currently, they are planning a kitchen update. When I saw their existing kitchen and its layout, I thought immediately that it had “Mondrian” potential. Mondrian = color blocks, like the famous artist. This style had a following from about 1955-1965. Heck yeah there is more →

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Recreating 50s 60s birch cabinets for your retro kitchen

Posted by: Pam Kueber • January 7, 2008

<–The birch kitchen in a recent post was so very typical of the 50s and 60s.

Today, you can still get birch doors – although they will be a little thicker. Order them with a ‘radius,’ or slightly rounded edge profile. Traditional (3/4) overlay would be typical, but you can go with full overlay as well, you certainly did see that especially moving into the 60s. The photo above is 1963.

The dark tone door featured on the left is from Omega, I also think Cabico makes a good product. As you can see from the photos above, there are a number of ways to approach the color/finish – “classic” as in the thumbnail, and for a more modern look, darker and/or colored stains.

In this latter approach, once you are mixing and matching 3 or more door colors you are creating a “Mondrian” style kitchen – certainly a trend you saw in the 1955-1965 period.

Isn’t the floor great, too?… The whole kitchen provides a lot of ideas… it’s one of the greatest, one of my husband’s very favorites.

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