This is not my house. It is the first room in Huckleberry’s Chair Fetish – a midcentury modern shop near the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Regular readers will recall that I visited Lexington last Thanksgiving to meet up with Sumac Sue aka Judi for a look at her house, her neighborhood, a pink bathroom, an aqua bathroom — and yes, a little side trip to this mid mod furniture shop she had recently discovered. Even though it’s taken me a while to get to this post, it is not for lack of immediate love of the place starting with the name, Huckleberry’s Chair Fetish. First there’s the surname Huckleberry, it goes with Earlene – the proprietress.  Then there’s Chair Fetish. Earlene is calibrated as nutso as the rest of us for this mid mod stuff. Her eyes had that wild look when she talked about her store and all its contents. Fetish. That  just about sums it up. And I bet that putting it into the headline of this post is going to bring me a whole new slew of readers. Oh joy.

The sign out front. Please note, I do think that mid-century with the hyphen is the correct spelling. I usually write midcentury, though. Because it’s my blog, and hyphens annoy me. I also am really trying to lay off the exclamation points, as well as the excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. Em dashes, though, I’m all about em dashes.

This is my my sister Jenni driving, she gets major snaps for coming along, and despite the fact I made her pose in the pink bathroom shot here, I think she even had fun. That’s Judi in the passenger seat. I don’t for a minute believe they are both natural blondes at this point, but who am I to talk? I plan to never ever know what my natural hair color is again.

This is Earlene. She basically told us that she had recently discovered mid century modern , and was immediately, irrevocably sucked into the retro vortex. There was no stopping it. She had to open the shop and seek out all she could find. Earlene is a force of nature to be reckoned with. The shop is normally closed on Sundays, the day we came, and Judi had called her ahead of time to see if we could get in. Thanks, Earlene, for hosting us! You get an exclamation point!

This white leather lounge chair was definitely my #1 object of desire. So impractical.

A lucite bar and matching bar stools.

This upholstered Danish club chair (I think you’d call it) was upstairs. I really like the stripes and the pukey colors. Really.

Thayer-Coggin, maybe? I’m just starting to get to know the high style designers. These kind of remind me of baseball mitts.

Earlene had a collection of tiny chairs. See the label inside? That’s a 3/4″-1″ price tag. So it gives you a sense of the size of this piece. As I recall, this miniature was worth more than most of us would consider paying for a fullsized chair…

There were other kinds of furniture, too, like this poster bed. 80s? So fabulous. And I like how Earlene backs the whole thing with a mirror to play up the silvery metal. I am not keen on the placement in a real life bedroom, though — bad feng shui, as I recall.  For that matter, feng shui masters wouldn’t advise a metal bed, anyway. Too cold. Beds must be made of natural materials, as I recall. Oh well.

Sweet lamp and shade. As you can begin to tell, it doesn’t appear that Earlene is a slave to any one niche. Just quality, wonderful stuff.

This buffet was in the entry way. Darnit, I think I noted the maker somewhere. Usually I just take a photo of any labels I see, but hmmmm, not there.

And of course I snooped around. Out the upstairs back window I spotted stuff out back waiting to be brought inside. If you look closely – there are some fab looking mod orange pinch pleats in a pile by the blue containers. I hinted to Earlene about taking a look. But she didn’t bite. So, I restrained myself. Drats.

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• Introduced at the turn of the 20th century, the Hoosier cabinet was a huge step forward for homemakers and the first move toward “fitted kitchens.” Not only did it bring commonly used tools into one cabinet, it included containers and a table surface of porcelain enamel steel — much easier to keep food fresh and clean. 2 million Hoosier cabinets were in action by 1920.
• In the first half of the 20th century, efficiency experts promoted small, step-saving kitchens. But as domestic servants left for factory jobs and mom moved definitively into the kitchen nearly fulltime, the kitchen got bigger. This reflected her desire for a pleasant work space and the fact that everyone wanted to gather there.
• By 1940 only a third of farm households were electrified.
• As late as 1945, three out of five farm households did not have a sink with a drain, and any water carried in had to be carried out.
• In 1942 sugar became the first rationed food item…followed by coffee, meat and canned foods (to save tin.) A year later, ration books were issued to every man, woman and child….Hence our Victory Gardens.
• The percentage of American families who owned a mechanical refrigerator jumped from 44 to 80 percent between 1940 and 1950.

“America’s Kitchens” is available via Pamazon

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Longtime readers may recognize this photo, it’s one of my favorite images of idealized 50s family life ever. And ooooh, I like that colonial-modern kitchen, too! But look, it also includes pots of red geraniums on the window sill. In my detail-focused time travels back into retroworld, I have most definitively noticed a trend to include red geraniums in postwar kitchen designs. I have a few theories why: 1) Geraniums are big and bold – in synch with the times. 2) They are middle class… egalitarian. 3) They need sun, and we were California-livin’. 4) They look really good with cool colors like aqua and robin’s egg blue. 5) They also play into the patriotic sensibilities of the time. I run a flickr group called Midcentury Modern Red Geraniums -  take a look at about 50 images in all. The majority of them come from flickr friend American Vintage Home, who has quite an online archive of vintage photography. Thank, you American Vintage!

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