The furniture in any BOQ I ever lived it. It was always sturdy ‘handmade’ looking A Brandt Ranch Oak furniture. There was a furniture company in TX that turned it out. It looked like the furniture you’d put in a little boy’s room in the 50’s. Also they seemed to have two upholstery schemes: maroon fake leather, and a maroon/blue plaid.
And only single beds, just to discourage you from getting lucky in the comfort of your own room.
Selections of its hideousness is found here. It’s collectible apparently
Why was the controversial Victorian furniture added to Bayou Bend? In 2004, the first Curator retired; she’d began working at the River Oaks mansion very young, in 1965. Just before Miss Ima turned it over to the MFAH.
Here’s a picture of the Belter Parlor–on a site labeled as a class project, not Official Bayou Bend. The house-museum is known for its exquisite collection of colonial masterpieces & lovely things from the early 19th century. The Rococo Revival stuff sticks out like a sore thumb–but Miss Ima thought it was important.
Rocketeer you’re right! Besides, it’s easier than trying to change. Although I do like Sahirrnee’s mermaid table, too. (We live next to the beach, okAY? )
Dung Beetle, Balance, did you all know my mother? In their last house, everything was blue. It didn’t matter what shade, it just had to be blue. :eek: Even the big things that would be hard to change: the kitchen tile floor, tubs, toilets and sinks, light fixtures… And she used flocked wallpaper (that velvety stuff) in their previous home. Here’s the kicker—every time she decided to redecorate she would paint the furniture. But only the parts that showed, where it already sat. When my parents died we inherited items that had two sides blue and one side “antiqued Colonial red.” And green (my favorite phase of hers) couches still backed with zebra print.
And I had to laugh at the pineapple & cherub lamp. She would have loved it! Right now, because we’re moving and it’s chaos here, there’s a lamp of hers on the dry sink: tall skinny green base that looks like a Roman column (?) with two gold cherubs on a white square marble base. (Very “uptown.”)
This is going from memory of course but my parents had a lounge setting (2x 2-seaters and a single seat) that had black vinyl on the arms/sides and along the front. The cushions were covered in a bright orange fabric with a sort of green speckling.
On the wall was a ‘star’ clock (do an image search for “1960’s star clock”, you’ll see what I mean).
Next to the couch was a floor lamp. The center pillar was turned wood, out of the top rose a pair of brass ‘bendy’ arms, the ends of which were adorned with large blue/green conical lamp shades.
“To keep it nice” apparently. I had an aunt who kept the plastic cover on her sofa “to keep it nice”. I guess that would make sense if you were planning to resell it soon. I was too young and shy to say “but it isn’t nice! We’re sitting on plastic bags”
Thankfully, neither my parents nor my grandparents covered any furniture in plastic. We did have fabric slipcovers, but with all of us grubby little kids, that was more self-defense, I suspect. The only “nice” unused room I recall was the front room of my paternal grandparents. They had a sofa and chair upholstered in velvet - one piece was deep blue and the other was a rich burgundy color. As kids, we’d sneak into that room just to rub the fabric, but we didn’t sit there.
I have to admit that when I bought my first house, I got velour furniture with a golden-beige background and some ridiculous print all over it, plus the requisite hexagon end table. OK, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was young and dumb. Don’t judge! I don’t know if I have any pictures of it in any old albums, but it was pretty hideous, and since it was 1980, it almost counts as 70s, right?
My grandparents were the Utah branch of the New Jersey chic club. They
were the most insanely clean – "think ‘Masters Degree’ in OCD - clean. And this they managed to accomplish with five of their own kids and 18 grandkids.
EVERYTHING within there sphere was immaculate – including the horse barn. (I’m kind of surprised the horses weren’t covered in protective plastic).
Another for my childhood home: builders didn’t just spray cool cottage cheee-lumpy white stuff on the ceiling – they overcoated it GOLDEN SPARKLIES!!! Snowstorms! Princess coronations! Fog effect for our laser shows . . . fun times, fun times, but maybe I should pay attention to those slimy lawyer asbestos advertisements. Coff Coff
When I went shopping for my first sofa, we went to one furniture store that had a very odd side chair for sale. It looked just like Old Sparky. My mom and I got the giggles badly enough that my stepfather pretended not to know us.
I went back a month or so later to buy that chair for an art installation project. Sadly, it was gone.
My parents had a spoon and fork set too. Each piece was probably two feet long, ceramic painted to look like wood. Mom said that it used to have a knife in the set but it fell off the wall and broke.
FairyChatMom’s mushroom wallpaper reminded me of a house I went to look at with my mom when she was downsizing. The wallpaper was big flowers instead of mushrooms, but the colors and pattern size was similar. Mom and I walked into that kitchen, looked at each other and said “Oh hell no!” at the same time.
Growing up, my parents furnished our house in a style called “whatever they could afford” so though some of it was kinda awful, it wasn’t really a design choice.
My aunt that babysat me though had this a chair that I loved. But looking back it was hideous. Google 's shaped lounge chair". See those pretty sleek stylish things? Imagine one covered in a brown shaggy fabric, like something on a very expensive stuffed animal. (I don’t mean taxidermied; I mean a toy.) And then, imagine it has a head rest pillow in the same fabric with straps. Then imagine a 7 year old snuggling up in it b/c it reminds her of Chewbacca.
When my husband and I were house-hunting, we came across a house in a nice neighbourhood that looked lovely from the outside and was priced pretty cheaply for what it was–a decent-sized century home with a huge yard and an above-ground pool. So we went to go check it out.
Imagine if you will, a home dating from about 1900 with the expected smaller rooms and the odd addition dating from the 50s and 80s tacked on. Only imagine that every single room had been painted BRIGHT BRIGHT COLOURS–primary colours–and the whole home furnished with absolutely enormous carved-wood furniture that would be more at home in some type of manor house on an English estate. The dining room was painted bright sunshine yellow with a monstrous twelve-seat dining table and twelve elaborate carved wooden chairs. It took up every bit of space in the room and they’d somehow squeezed a huge china cabinet in there as well. You couldn’t possibly fit twelve diners in there unless they were Borrowers.
The living room had stark red walls and enormous modern furniture–a huge super-modern entertainment unit, cubes as coffee and side tables, uber-modern curving chairs and the like.
Upstairs was even worse–each (small) bedroom was painted a different bright colour (jungle green, teal blue, candy pink) and furnished with gigantic four-poster and canopy beds. One bedroom had–I swear to God–a carousel horse lurking in the corner, complete with the pole still through it, looking onto the bed like he was rearing to join the occupant.
The basement smelled heavily of mold and cat boxes, which is where we learned the occupants had four cats and kept four cat boxes in the unventilated storage room, which they scooped somewhat infrequently. This was compounded by a mold problem in the basement and topped off by the fact that they had decorated the finished section with a safari motif, including several taxidermied animals and skins on the wall, and furnished with that kind of furniture that is supposed to look like it was made out of raw logs and trussed together with twine or whatever. They had one whole wall painted with zebra stripes and another painted with leopard spots.
It was surreal. There was a $3,000 decorating bonus to the buyer payable on closing, but all we could think was that it $3k would probably cover the cost of the many coats of paint necessary to cover that mess but wouldn’t do anything to the days and days of labour it would take. What a shame someone did that to a beautiful old home.
When I was stationed in Germany, a friend and I were looking for a place to live off base. We visited a house in a small German town that was two stories. We went and talked to the little old lady who owned the house who said she was renting out the upstairs, which is where her daughter had lived before she got married. The lower floor was typical, old German style. The upstairs was … chrome and white and fluorescent. I felt that if I lived there I would go blind.
The furniture itself probably wasn’t so bad within being polyester shine (what little I could actually see), but it was mostly invisible.
It’s the home of one of my mother’s neighbors. I’ve only been to the entrance and the living room, but every single piece of furniture I could see was covered in crochet covers; for the armchairs, chair seats and sofa, these covers were over the transparent, stiff plastic covers. Every horizontal surface was covered in Lladró and Swaroski figures: the neighbor collects them, not because she likes them, but because they’re collectible. And the furniture was way too close together. I was terrified that my sleeve’s button would snatch on a crochet cover and send several dozen figures to the big landfill in the sky…
And you can always tell when the living room furniture of a Spanish couple my age is a hand-me-down: polyester shine, oh yeah! One of my neighbors even had the same figurines her mother had kept in it, in the same positions
confused Googling “wooden hand chairs”, I get images of chairs which are wooden hands. Unusual, but I suspect comfier than they look. But in your own search I see a mixture of sevillanas (the ones with the seat that looks like hay) and all-wood ladderbacks.
ETA: OK, it eventually finished loading and one of those that are hands was what you were talking about.
and one side “antiqued Colonial red.” And green (my favorite phase of hers) couches still backed with zebra print.
