Our penultimate day of pink kitchens. I love that word, penultimate!
41. TGIF, it’s party time and these 1961 Hotpoint kitchen-goers are ready!
42. This 1955 Geneva kitchen is more sedate but setting the pace nonetheless.
43. Pink and yellow, what a spring-y combination. And, this seems like quite the 1957 groove pad! Note the wall-cabinet fridge, every ReRe reader’s favorite, it seems!:
44. Oops. Another formerly used Flashback Kitchen with the numbers stuck in it. But I had to show this pink-lavendar-blue combo. Lavendar for kitchens was promoted later in the 50s. It looks nice here, be clearly never caught on. I think there’s something fundamentally icky about purple+food, grapes and eggplant notwithstanding.
45. A 1952 Youngstown kitchen – you can see the rosy pink cabinet at the right, so this made the list.
46. Religious readers will recognize this amazing kitchen. You gotta give those Formica interior designers credit:
47. A 1955 St. Charles kitchen combining pink, aquamarine and birch (I believe.) Pretty snazzy:
48. An honorary pink kitchen: pink + classic birch plywood cabinets with a darkish stain:
49. Another (painted) pink and birch kitchen, from Coppes-Nappanee:
50. And another all-time favorite, a Dow Styron tile ad with a kitchen that I christen pink because of the wall cabinet refrigerator. Awesome kitchen!
Vive la wall cabinet fridge!
Excellent assortment of pink combos here. The dark wood with pink is oddly appealing.
Could someone clue me in to the ‘religious’ reference in #46?
Maggie, I think Pam just meant religious readers of this blog, or those of us who read everyday.
Yes, everyday readers = ‘religious’ readers. Oopsy. Sorry for the confusion. All denominations welcome here!
oh my! One of them looks like a carousel! I DO wish our kitchens now-adays were laid out like these were – they look so much more spacious.
Ohhhh, “Those who religiously read ReRe…” I think our current social climate is making me paranoid.
You wouldn’t believe how scrupulously I pored over that photo, looking for religious symbols. Teeheehee.
These kitchens were the highlight of my week! I wish we still had the sense of fun and whimsy in our lives, and our home decor, that people did then (of course, that’s the whole purpose of this site, right?:) Now everything is so commercial and serious, with cold stainless steel and granite and colors that don’t surprise or shock. The sense of innocence and optimism you see here is gone. Sad.
Sarah’s so right — but it’s not only the innocence and optimism that’s gone out of kitchen design (and home design in general). One of the worst things that’s happened is the “home-as-bankable-asset” mindset that prevails now. People no longer design their kitchens in a manner to just make themselves happy; the major consideration is “What will add resale value for the house’s NEXT buyer?” And they’re told at every turn, by every Candace-Olsen-wannabe, that the next buyer will want granite and stainless steel.
The viewers of these vintage advertisements weren’t thinking of their homes as just another consumable purchase. They planned to live in them a long time, and personalized them accordingly.
Sorry for the rant — but this one of my major pet peeves about our increasingly sad, increasingly disposable consumerist society.
Maggie,
YOU are right! No one in the 60s could probably imagine “flipping” houses and making improvements or design decisions with anyone in mind besides their own families.
In my neighborhood of much older homes (lots of Victorians, four-squares, bungalows, and Dutch Colonials), you basically HAVE to invest the $30K for an upscale kitchen if you don’t want your house to be considered a fixer-upper. (Mine came with one, or I wouldn’t have it.) When I do sell my home, hopefully this spring or summer, I am going to make my new place (a 60s ranch or tri-level, with any luck) an ode to the values of our parents’ generation that are espoused on this site. If I want a pink steel kitchen, pinch-pleat curtains and a paneled rec room in the basement, no one is going to stop me!
In our day, the current mortgage lending crisis may result in people beginning to consider their houses as less of an investment and more of a place to live. Of course, in my parents’ day, men (mostly) had jobs that would last the course of their careers. People didn’t move as much. That ranch or colonial would be the family home for a long time. I doubt if we’ll see a return to that time.
Also, remember here that we’re looking at illustrations for advertising purposes. Their slickness and design are akin to the way middle-class houses were portrayed in 1990s-2000s TV programs. I don’t think most people had such expansive and beautiful kitchens. It’s a consumer culture, and one way to get people to buy things is to make them think that other people who are just like them live with fold-down ranges and refrigerator walls. We appreciate these ads for their cool design ideas, but I don’t think they necessarily reflect the reality of the bulk of homes in that era.
You can see advertising changing its focus from the postwar “make Mom’s life easier” type of of ads to more subtle psychological pressure in the sixties. More striving for “the good life.”
Next to pink bathrooms, LOL, pink kitchens get a big thumbs up from me!
I looked at a house years back that had all pink appliances, and a built-in dining booth, the seats in aqua and the tabletop in laminate or formica pink! Lovely!
My parents bought a model home in 1960 with a kitchen that included pickled white cabinets and gray countertops that had white and pink boomerang design. The GE appliances were pink. I still remember! So cool!