When I remodeled my kitchen I went for the glass door refrigerator by Sub Zero pictured here. I didn’t expect it to become such an attention grabber but it has become quite the attraction.
Do you have a conversation piece in your home? Tell me about it.
We have a Llama. He’s a very good conversation piece, and he keeps the grass down.
We have amelanistic corn snakes and Jungle Carpet Pythons in our living room!
We had a bearded dragon and water dragon, then two bearded dragons. They were always good for conversation.
12 foot high, two person wide, ski area chair lift for a dining room chair.
I have an entirely useless piece of furniture. It’s huge, holds no hats or coats, holds dry umbrellas I guess but a wet one would wreck the finish, has a small mrror at an odd height, and a tiny drawer. I’s all covered in carvings and flourishes. I think of it as a telephone table on steroids, or an umbrella stand made by people who don’t know what umbrellas are. It’s pretty, though.
Patty, I love your fridge!!
I have always wanted a glass-door fridge. I’ve actually always wanted an industrial high-volume restaurant kitchen, even though I barely cook. I just like the polished industrial modern we-mean-business look of it.
In my apartment conversation pieces are limited to the artwork, though…I have several of my drawings framed, and a “gallery wall” of photographs also. (I am a hobby artist and a hopefully soon-full-time photographer.)
When I have the space and money though I would LOVE to get what I saw an ad for the other day…a vintage overhauled working Coke machine. Complete with the original swirly Coke logo and accepts quarters! It was $750 and I’d have paid every penny if I had anywhere on earth to put it.
IMHO that’s a hellacious conversation piece!
I keep this autographed cricket bat by the front door. People always ask who it’s signed by and what it means. It’s a somewhat interesting story.
A ski lift chair in the dining room? 
I guess my Sellers bakers cabinet would be the conversation piece, and the noguchi coffee table.
The hoosier cabinet is totally original, with roll top compartment, art deco stencils, enamel work top, built in flour sifter, food grinder, built in bread box and it still has menu planners in the upper doors. I use it to house CDs, books and pictures. I do use it as a sideboard on occassion as well.
My house is built on a hilly street. You enter on street level through the front door, and then you have to go downstairs for the bedrooms and toilet.
That always gets me through the first five minutes. 
Also, I have this half opaque poem pasted on my window, with some semi-transparent foil around it. It’s a great way to limit passers-by from peeking in (living in the inner city, we don’t have a front yard) and I sometimes see people reding the poem and then going on their way with a smile.
Well? You have to share the story now…
My home is my conversation piece. It sucks up my life, and apart from the children I have little else to talk about.
I talk about when it was built, why the floors slope so very much on one end, why there is no ceiling in the kitchen at the moment, where the replacements are for the missing baulsters in the stairway, what we plan to do with the six fireplaces, how the clawfoot tub in the basement is slated to go upstairs in a new bathroom someday, or what we intend to do about the deck hanging half off the back and the rotted gutters.
I wouldn’t mind a llama, or better yet a very small herd of angora goats would be nice. Darned township zoning laws.
The disemboweled laser printer on the dining room table was a subject of conversation this past weekend.
Otherwise, we’ve got an antique treadle sewing machine up on what we call the cat ledge (a weird flat spot nine feet off the floor, adjacent to the stairs that would be a fine place for a cat to snooze and survey their domain, if we had a cat) that gets a lot of attention.
If some high-def programming is on, our 50" TV gets a lot of attention. “Is that one of those new TVHDs?”
Probably my favorite conversation pieces are literally conversation pieces. Almost all of our phones are vintage, mid-70s or earlier rotary-dial phones. It’s fun to see kids try to use them - usually they just jab their fingers into the holes on the dial.
The biggest conversation piece in our house has got to be the front door.
Or rather, the fact that there isn’t one. See, a previous owner decided 20 years ago that they’d enclose the entire front porch to create an extension for the living room, which of course necessitated the removal of the front door. (Before anyone asks, we have perfectly good side and back doors to pick up the slack, both of which are easily accessible given that we’re on the corner).
Granted, it means that our main floor is a full 5’ longer than it would be otherwise, which is a blessing during Canadian winters when the porch is just another surface to shovel when it snows… but that’s about it for the benefits of having no front door. Giving directions can be an ordeal when dealing with deliveries adn taxis, and it’s not uncommon for the neighbours to end up with our packages since everyone ignores the fact that other half of the semi has a giant 56 on it along with an arrow pointing to the side.
Even the cops couldn’t get it right. Apparently the neighbours were awakened one night by a uniform waving a warrant intended for our house (this being when the previous owners were in residence… we’re much more law-abiding, I swear).
Oh, and we have no TV in the living room. That tends to spark some interesting discussion, since many people can’t fathom using the living room for… well… living. :rolleyes:
Love the freezer, Patty.
Ours would have to be the painting I bought 20 years back. It’s probably 6 feet by 5 and is done in a composition similar to Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, except it’s been updated to NYC. Through an apartment window you can see Julia Child and a waiter, the waiter’s body mimicking that of a homeless man downstairs digging through her trash can. There are a number of subtle elements worked into the picture, some that are fascinating when you pick them out.
I sat spellbound over dinner listening to the artist and gallery owner about that and other works he’d done, so visitors to the house who comment on it can get the lowdown on all the hidden symbolism in the painting if they want.
It’s pretty striking and kinda hard not to wind up as part of some conversation.
Frankly, my home is a conversation piece. It’s an unusual work of architecture (thanks to “Pops” Mercotan’s eclectic design sense combined with resources and an erratic architect) situated overlooking a large body of water.
It’s no Falling Waters by any means, but it did get a lot of press during its building and after completion.
I have a life size replica of a great white shark’s head and neck that I use as the dog’s toy basket. I plant to wall mount a tv into it one day and make it look as if he’s crushing it. Nashiitashii named him “joe-nan the sharkarian” as before i finished his teeth he was “gummy Joe”
Wow some really good stuff here! Unusual pets make great conversation pieces. Some of y’all need to host a doper gathering 
One of our brothers-in-law is an artist. He did a mixed-media series of portraits of American “heroes and villains”, and gave us a portrait of Ed Gein from this series, after we admired the work. It’s an enlargement of a newspaper photograph, painted over to look like exaggerated makeup; Gein had made parts of a “woman suit” from his human taxidermy work. My husband’s dad gave him a couple mounted deer heads when he moved out, and I quite intentionally paired a deer head with the Gein portrait in our living room. 
I have a mirror in one corner of the ceiling near a bookcase that goes all the way to the mirror. By putting a thin library ladder up to it, it looks like the ladder and book case extend into “the upstairs room” but it’s a one story house.
