My mom had several of these. In fact, there were owls all over the house. For my aunt, it was frogs. Frogs everywhere! There’s one for ya: when animal obsessions go bad and take over the house!
Hey, my mom had one of these too! It was hanging over her bedside table which stood next to a king size waterbed covered with a disgusting black and white faux fur throw (from some kind of faux dog, I believe). It matched beautifully with gold, green and orange big floral curtains. Blech! But hey, it was the 70s. I forgive her now that she’s ditched the owls and has an understated beigy tropical/seashore motif. Geez, I can’t even describe that without it sounding bad too, but it’s really not.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse, everywhere! Eyes, eyes little beady eyes watching you (the guest) as you sleep! Aieeee! :eek: The wife of my husband’s uncle (his aunt by marriage) LOVES Mickey Mouse, and even has a mural of him scuba diving in her guest bathroom! Almost EVERYTHING in that house has a Mickey motiff. She’s even got the tickets from their visit to Disney World framed and on display! She’s a wonderful, talented, kind woman, but sheesh. Mickey overload!
You haven’t seen hideous until you’ve seen Interior Desecrations by James Lileks. My God, the 60’s and 70’s were decades to be ashamed of, not simply forgotten.
Naked ladies be hanged. An oil-dripping-down-the-monofilaments lamp should have a WATER MILL in the middle of it. With the mill turning and some of the oil pretending to be water running through the wheel. I thought those were so cool when I was a kid. Then my parents got one while I was in high school. And there was just enough nostalgia to make it ok.
Kalhoun, my mother has started decorating with beanie babies. They’re not all over, just here and there. And she’s so tickled with them, especially because the grandaughters like them. But I have to tell you about one.
See, Mom lives in Idaho, while my sisters and I are scattered over the rest of the US. We live in New York, Texas, and California. So when she got remarried, the thing that we were all dying to ask, but couldn’t, was “does she still have Dad out on the coffee table”?
Mom and Dad had moved to Idaho when he retired, and there was no real family connection to the place. They had both grown up in a little town south of LA. And Mom wasn’t sure that she would stay in Idaho when he was gone, so he was cremated and put in this rectangular cube. It’s brushed brass on all sides but one. The last side is smoked glass with a flying eagle etched on it.
At last I went and visited. And I was able to report to my sisters that Dad was there, but he had been moved into her quilting room, onto her desk there. And she had perched an eagle beanie baby on top of him.
I still grin when I think of it. Where does that land on your tacky meter?
In my hometown in the midwest, a friend of mine lived in a house decorated by his mother. Beige carpet, beige walls, beige furniture, beige lampshades, and more beige. Not only that, but there was plastic covering on the sofa, on the lampshades and a plastic runner that ran down through the living room and godforbid you stepped off that runner when you went to their house.
A close runner-up was a nice German couple I taught in Berlin. I was invited over to their condo. They had a lot of money and no taste whatsoever. Although every piece of furniture in their condo cost a fortune, they had a Danish modern coffee table, French foo-foo couch, a knotty pine chair, velvet curtains with plastic horizontal blinds, and…well, the place looked like someone gave 30 people unlimited money to go out and each buy one piece of furniture, and then they threw it all in a room. I always wondered if these people ever stood back once and looked at that room and noticed not two things were even in the same time period, let alone the same style, color or fashion. By the way, that night the man of the house proudly poured me a cold beer - in a huge gold wine goblet.
Actually, I don’t think that’s tacky at all! She put him in her own private space, which is very considerate to her new husband. Hell, my girlfriend’s mother would carry the old man around with her while she vaccuumed. She’d be chattin’ it up with him, filling him in on the week’s events.
I scooped out a bunch of my mom’s ashes, because I was going to get an urn to keep them in, but I haven’t gotten around to it. She’s still in the cremation container, sitting on her side of the closet shelf at my dad’s. I feel kind of stuck now. It’s been so long, I feel weird about taking her down and moving her to an urn. Plus, when I was removing part of her from the container, I spilled some of her. Wiping her up with a dishrag was very strange.
In order to redeem myself, I will say that even with my lack of observational skills, I was unable to overlook the horribleness of the upstairs bathroom of the last house I lived in as a kid.
Matted red carpet. Blue fake-marble counter. Cheap red, white, and blue alternating paneling on the walls. (All centered around a moldy-looking claw-foot bathtub.) It was pretty painful, like the American flag died in there.
(The woman who lived there before us was reputed to be a neat freak. Imagine our surprise when we discovered the drapes she left in the windows were sticky.)
The house my family moved into when I was fourteen had contact paper on all the kitchen counters - with giant red, orange, and yellow flowers with black centers. I now suspect it was inspired by the Marimekko poppies, but to say it was not as well done is a serious understatement. The neighbors had some fascinating stories to tell about the interior decorating habits of the former lady of the house. One thing I remember is that she had painted the kitchen red, white and blue in honor of the Bicentennial :eek:
I grew up Catholic. Catholic Kitsch should probably be considered its own genre of tackiness - church calendars in the bathroom, little cards on the kitchen door jamb showing the Blessed Mother with a dress of that fuzzy stuff that turns pink for rain and blue for fair weather, and of course the portrait triptych of the Pope, JFK and RFK in the upstairs hallway.
One more… when we were looking at houses the last time, we came across a house with reasonably tasteful furnishings, mostly subtle Scandinavian Modern with some of the acid-treated pine stuff that Norwegians are so fond of. This just made the semi-permanent stuff they’d done all the more puzzling. We were told the living room floor was solid oak in good condition - but it’s good we were told that, because they’d painted it navy blue. I don’t mean just dark blue, I mean honest-to-gosh navy blue, that looks black except in direct sunlight. The kids’ bedrooms were painted with a marbled effect, which would have been cute had they chosen the colors better. The girl’s room had a background of Pepto-Bismol pink with Barbie pink over it; the boy’s was two shades of turquoise, including one that appeared to glow with its own light…
We didn’t put a bid in on that house, for other reasons (e.g. strange bathroom layout). A few days afterwards the real estate agent called us and said they’d had no bids after the third open house - this in a market where most houses were selling the first weekend - and were lowering the price, and would we be interested…? I wonder how many potential buyers were scared off by their choice of color schemes…
Erm, I should mention that the “Catholic Kitsch” examples are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be taken as a description of my parents’ choice of interior decorating.
We never had the portrait trio, and the Blessed Mother card was taken down after her dress turned pink and refused to turn blue again.
Is that FINALLY coming out?!?! Praise Jebus! That was always my favorite part of the site.
Re Catholic Decor: Don’t forget the dried-up palm fronds tucked behind every picture, mirror and crucifix in the house. (My grandmother also had crucifixes from dozens of dead people’s coffins nailed up around the house - :brrrr!: )
My niece’s husband in into those stupid ‘collector’ knives that you see advertised in magazines. He has them all over the walls and shelves, but luckily my niece has demanded that they only be displayed in his ‘den’. What a shrewd investment these are, and sure to decline in value upon opening the box. The other thing he thinks is the height of fashion are statues of deer in various poses. Jesus with a .270…
Other members of the family are into candles and other home-decorator schlock, and they keep trying to entice us into coming to those goddamn parties where you are supposed to feel obligated to purchase something. So far we’ve avoided them all.
And gawd help you if you let on to anyone that you are even mildly interested in some piece of schlockware, cuz you’re going to start receiving them as birthday and Christmas presents until you and your sniper rifle finally end up being talked down out of a tower.
For me, it was those goddamn sea captain statues. Jesus Christ on a poop deck, I showed a wee bit of interest in a brass version of one of these and the next thing I knew, I had 20 of the fuckers, of all different sizes and materials. After my divorce, my ex sent them all to me and I promptly threw them in the trash. End of story, right? No goddamn way. Last year my daughter sends me one she painted herself. I finally had to tell them all that I collect NOTHING (not exactly true, but it seems to have stopped the flood).
I show no interest in anything around relatives now, unless it’s very expensive. Whenever someone shows me their latest piece of crap, I’m very careful to keep my face free of expression and my voice neutral, lest I end up owning one just like it.
In a previous attempt at househunting, our price range was too low for anything we would actually consider living in. We saw all kinds of hideous places - the most memorable were the house that was firmly fixed in 1972, with dark green shag carpet and dark wood paneling in the living room, and another place with several layers of peeling linoleum laid on the kitchen floor, all cracked and nasty. But the grand prize for tacky came in a condo our broker insisted we wanted to see. It was in a high-rise building, which was something I had refused to consider, but she made us see it anyway. It was being rented to an elderly couple, and it was clear that they had moved a house’s worth of junk into that two-bedroom, 800 sq. ft. place. There was also a layer of dirty scunge over everything, especially in the kitchen, which smelled really odd and looked worse.
But I haven’t yet mentioned the bathroom. The floor was a filthy yellow, and the shower curtain was also some kind of yellow - I’m afraid it might have started out white :eek: And the walls… were covered with… cheetah wallpaper. I mean cheetahs. Lots and lots of 'em, Magic-Eye style, pulsing off every wall with mad cheetahness, throbbing yellow cheetah heads and bodies, swirling, swirling - no, I was not on any controlled substances, but damn those cheetahs were moving in the sickly yellow light, moving I tell you.
I was recently in a house that was so ‘kountry’ I was stunned at the ‘kuteness’ of it all. I mean, country is not my style but I can appreciate that some people like it and I am fine with that. But this house…my god. Every inch was covered in checks, ruffles, doilies, krafty krap, etc. Hand-painted signs declaring “home is where you hang your heart”, “Mom’s kitchen”, stencils of hearts, geese in costumes, all of it. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to flush the toilet because it was covered in so many cozies and fuzzy things. Later in the car my husband confessed he couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet at first either. When I went in there someone had peed and not flushed so I think that someone else must have just given up.
Everything had a custom holder, every shelf a cut-out heart. It was truly amazing in its excess. I have no idea why people have so much stuff. After one day of dusting I would go insane. This is a look that takes a lot of work to maintain so to me it is more puzzling than when people have decor that is just out of style or something.
Oh man… I STILL have a picture of a benevolent Jesus that was given to me one Christmas by my father’s boss at the time. Don’t ask me where it is, I’d asked mom to get rid of it but she can’t. It’s not hanging up anywhere at least.
My Nanna’s home has a stained glass window of Mary on the landing leading to the second floor. It actually sounds worse than it is, it’s really pretty, but I recall always having the uncompromising urge to cross myself as I go up the stairs…
As to the collecting thing. Believe me, I know what that’s like. My FATHER still buys me stuffed animals (okay I actually love a lot of them) and when I showed an interest in porcelain dolls as a youngster… well I now have a collection of a dozen give or take one or two porcelain dust collectors. My aunt’s and Grandma are crafters so they make a lot of those country things (crying babies, bell animals/elves, bunnies made from blocks and pompoms and felt) They are nice enough but I’ve ended up with some and I feel like I can’t get rid of them. I’m going to though. They’re packed away right now. When I have the space I’m going through all my things and just dumping whatever I won’t miss.
Start by outlining all of your garden beds and trees in the yard with marble tiles (nice idea, makes the mowing much easier.)
Add 2 marble blocks in the front yard, with portraits of the husband/wife etched on to them (maybe they wanted to be able to enjoy their tombstones before they die??). Sprinkle in some plastic flowers. (The cemetary feel is getting stong out here).
Now we move into the garage. Marble tiling on the whole floor.
House - Marble tile wainscotting in the kitchen, hallway and living room. (I have heard that the floor had to be reinforced). Add a rocking chair, a chandelier and a few other items handmade out of deer antler. Top this all off with lots more plastic flowers.
I don’t even know where to begin with this because people are a* train wreck * when it comes to decorating.
My buddy moved back from Chicago to the East and his wife couldn’t home shop with him, so I went on his trips back here (yeah, we looked gay…and there is nothing wrong with that).
We saw several farm style houses…with Craftsmen style finishes for all mouldings, cabinets and trim…just beautiful for people who know about Craftsmen stlyle…and all three had ultra contemporary neo modern crap furniture and fixtures! All new…like they just bought it. Some stuff replaced the farm house style fixtures that were there.
Hideous! Purple walls, track lighting in chrome and stainless…laminate flooring in rooms connected to pine flooring. Beautufiul maple or cherry cabinets painted - gasp - RED! Hardwoods covered by wall to wall carpet!
I laughed, but wanted to cry. Big beautiful porches with outdoor fans…except picture the most metalic looking new wave ceiling fans. BLECH! I mean, move into a condo or Miami Vice looking house if you like that. Don’t ruin a farm house or Craftsmen style home!
MARBLE tiles in the bedroom! Getting the idea here?!
Somewhere in East Texas right now there is a little old lady who is wallpapering her den with photocopies.
She ran out of the actual wallpaper and couldn’t find any more, so she came in and paid us an unearthly sum to make umpteen 11x17 copies (on plain white paper) of what she had left, which she is going to patch together, attempting to make the pattern repeat properly, and glue to her wall.
Good lord, Velma, you must know my step-grandmother. But moving on…
After moving into their current house, my parents had to do all kinds of work. First of all, everything in the main area of the house was some shade of brown. Floors, walls, cabinets, countertops, bathroom fixtures…It was drab and depressing as all hell.
Then there was the matter of the mural in my sister’s bedroom. The previous owners had had somebody paint the thing for their little girl…it was a “window” looking out on a beach. They had draped gauzy white curtains as though the window were real. All of this might have been sort of okay (maybe), had the mural not been done by some high school talent with no talent whatsoever.
Also, every single thing in that room’s bathroom is sickeningly pink. I feel sorry for my sister, since my parents decided they weren’t going to spend the money to replace the rose-colored bathtub, toilet, countertop, sink, mirror frame, wall tiles, and cabinets. gags
