Inspired by the “Giant Wedding Photo on Living Room Wall” thread,
i’d like to know some of the worst home decorating you have seen.
My brother’s fiance’s parents had someone paint a giant mural on their living room wall of the countryside. In the distance are two female figures riding horses which are of course supposed to be their daughters.
:eek:
I’ve often asked my future sister-in-law “Why the long face?”
My mom has a whole stack of craft & decor books and magazines from the 1970s. Apparently at the time there was a big movement to make nature into art. A lot of stuff like gluing rocks to driftwood, wrapping yarn around sticks, making logs into lamps, etc. Blech! Who wants a bunch of crappy, buggy, moldy rocks and sticks lying around your house! The other horrible craft/decor trend in the 70s was “recyclecraft.” Making windchimes and drinking glasses out of old wine bottles, making piggy banks and toilet-paper cozies (!!!) out of empty bleach bottles. Ugh! The thing was, I actually SAW things like this in people’s houses when I was growing up. (My mom actually had flat rocks painted to look like owls glued onto an old piece of barn wood. Lovely!)
The single most hideous piece of decor I’ve ever seen though was a lamp that was a statue of a naked lady surrounded by thin wires at a diagonal which secreted little drops of oil so it looked like the naked lady was bathing in the rain or something. EWWWWWW! I remember they used to be in (I think) the Sears catalog, so it wasn’t some specialty item. I imagine there were hundreds of them in people’s homes. (Did I mention “EWWWWWW!”?)
My mother-in-law has fucking BEANIE BABIES all over her house. She’s a doll, and all…but god…sometimes my husband just knocks them all down. Just to drive her nuts.
My mother has one of those on her mantle. It’s really pretty when lit up. Or maybe we both just have horrible, horrible taste. :smack:
My parents actually bought one of the naked-lady-in-oil hanging lamps a few years ago. But mineral oil was “too expensive” so after a while, Mom used canola oil.
Which went rancid. And the naked lady went away. awwwww.
My great aunt has had shelving installed about 20" down from the ceiling in all of her rooms in order to display her QVC doll collection, strollers, park-benches, lamp-posts, cradles and all.
It’s possibly the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen.
My ex-boyfriend mom had SO. MANY. DOLLS. everywhere! Like porcelain dolls in little frilly lacy outfits everywhere! On every flat surface. There must have been thousands and thousands of dollars worth of dolls in there. So damn tacky.
When were you at my grandmother’s house?!!! She has one - really. I’ve always hated it, even when I was little and had no taste. Imagine my horror when I found out that my parents bought her the horrid thing. In my family, it’s standard operating procedure that whomever gave you a gift gets it back when you’re done with it, which means my parents are getting the thing back eventually. Mom jokes that she’s going to give it to me :eek:
Snicks
When we were looking at houses 8 years ago, we walked in one that had a huge color picture of the wife as a bride over the mantle (must have been 4 feet by 6), just her, and the entire rest of the house was all in just black & white… the furniture, decorations, everything! Even the walls were grey. It was the most butt ugly home I’ve ever seen.
Now, who can resist the giant wooden silverware (remember that episode in “Everybody Loves Raymond?”). My friend bought a house about a year ago, and the former owners must have been smokers because you could see the outlines of everything they had hanging on their walls … including the giant silverware.
I went with a friend to one of her friends’ home. The mother had a reputation for having impeccable taste.
The walls and ceiling were stucco’d. All pointy and sharp. Then she put mirrors on some walls and glitter on the ceiling. This place was such a shithole I truly don’t believe I’ve seen anything worse. You could mark it as a stop on a Tour of Bad Taste. You could sell tickets. It was breathtaking…in a bad way.
Way back in the 70s it seemed every other house had a wet bar.
The most unique home bar I can remember was one that a friend’s father had built in his family room. It ran the entire length of the room, and it was named “Ron’s Panty Bar,” because he had a couple of dozen pairs of women’s panties hanging from the top of the bar. And they were from the dad’s friends. Kind of like – Mike and Carol Brady were here last night, and they hung a pair of Carol’s panties from the bar while they were waiting for dinner.
At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing. But in retrospect, that had to be one of the tackiest home decorations I’ve ever seen.
Let that be a lesson in decorating. If a High School boy likes something, get a second opinion.
Cackle
I think the Panty Bar will be hard to beat. I just remembered though a house our family looked at when I was a young’n. It was an actual, original Frank Lloyd Wright house, and at some point during the 60s or 70s someone had painted all the woodwork with red laquer paint and all the walls were covered with that hideous metallic and velvet-flocked op-art wallpaper. Any probable Mission-style or Arts & Crafts fixtures or lighting had been ripped out and replaced with those hideous swag lights with the cord running through gaudy gold chains. It was a tragedy. We all ran out gasping for air. I was only like 12 at the time but even then I knew you did not treat an architectural landmark like that.
I’m shocked how many people had those oil rain lamps! I’m positive I’d only seen the one in person. (That family also had one of those Bicentennial red, white & blue candlestick phones, which I thought was totally badass. I wouldn’t mind having one of those!)
One of my best friends mother is a very craft-intensive person. There are little fluffy bunnies and flower-pot angels all over their house. And bunny flower-pot angels.
I love her, but it’s so cutesy it makes me gag.
Back in the late 60’s, my wife was in a Junior Women’s Club in Cincinnati. As a money maker they decided to have a tour of famous people’s homes. They were real excited about the fact that Carolyn Rose (wife of Pete) offered their home. They went to see it and it was atrocious. It had lots of animal skin designs, loud colors and cheap stuff, but the worst part was the porno items in the master bedroom. After convincing her to hide those items they went ahead with it and of course lots of people paid to see the home of Pete Rose. 
When we bought our family home in the early 70s, the previous owners had done some rather interesting painting in the bedroom area of the house. Standing in the den, you looked down a hallway which all the bedrooms were off of…
On the left was the master bedroom, which was BRIGHT PURPLE. And that meant that the entire wall that that bedroom door was on was painted purple, as was the door, and the door frame. And the carpeting was the same purple. The room at the end of the hallway was RED. Bright, fire engine red. Including the entire exterior wall, door and door frame, as well as the interior carpeting. On the right, at the far end, that room was that bedroom was BRIGHT YELLOW. Yellow exterior wall, door and door frame, as well as interior carpeting. And last, but certainly not to be outdone by all the other rainbow beauty, the closest bedroom on the right was BRIGHT BLUE. Electric blue. Entire length of the exterior wall, door, door frame and interior carpeting.
Needless to say we had a bit of work to do on the house before it was in move-in condition.
Oh, yeah, the mural-on-the-wall-thing!
My boyfriend’s vacation house has one of those things in the breakfast room… it’s painted in pastels to look like you’re sitting on the lawn of an old southern plantation, looking back across a brook and a bridge at the house. It’s actually wallpaper… hilarious and charming at the same time.
The house was inherited, and Boyfriend decided to keep everything that came with it. The rest of the house is a hoot as well… rooms done in such perfectly coordinated colors (with elaborate curtains to match: think yards of sheers and stiff shiny folds of cloth), that I call them “Green Room”, “Pink Room”, etc.
My personal favorite is a bedroom done in dark red. I call it “Redrum”, of course.
Two words: Black Lacquer.
ugh.