"Laundry chutes. In one house it was from the second floor to the basement, in another from the kitchen to the basement."

1

"China cabinets in the dining room."

2

"Maybe not particularly fancy, but the house I grew up in (from the late 1950s) had an incinerator in the basement. You could just throw in burnable items and *POOF* they were rendered into ashes.

This now sounds like a nightmare and a disaster waiting to happen, and I am pretty sure they are now illegal, or at the very least, inadvisable."

3

"Living rooms with 1-3 steps down."

4

"Glass brick —very desirable in the 1950’s."

5

"Bread warming drawers."

6

"Central vacuum.

I always thought there would be a clog in the pipe inside of a wall somewhere which would render the whole machine useless. I never had one but I had friends who did."

7

"I’ve seen photos homes built in the 70s and the living room area is kinda designed like a “conversation pit”…dude that is so cool and I would love to have a home like that"

8

"We had that intercom in our 1973 built house. We used it as a baby monitor, would put the baby’s room on listen and pipe it to the family room which was downstairs. That required a bunch of switch flipping at the central station to figure out. They weren’t exactly flexible or user friendly. Had to do everything at the central station.

That was the only practical use we got out it in over 40 years."

9

"Most of the houses built in the 1950s in “Lamorinda” area of the SF East Bay have brink fireplaces in the kitchen with a separate fireplace for a rotisserie."

10

"Floor outlets.

I actually had some installed in a condo I owned as the rooms were fairly large and to run a wired lamp across the floor would have been a real trip hazard."

11

"To show you how poor I grew up: fold away ironing boards. Ooh la la!"

12

"Trash compactors were big in new $$$ homes when I was a kid. We were impressed when people installed them in their existing homes."

13

"Phone nooks. My house has one. I use it for knick-knacks."

14

"Round beds."

15

"Plate racks built into the wall."

16

"Mirror-tile walls."

17

"I was surprised to see a motor device embedded into a friend’s house kitchen countertop. They said it’s a built-in blender motor that was there when they bought the house. Seemed like a super fancy thing."

18

"I think hand cranked dumbwaiters are pretty much gone for good."

19

"High-fidelity radios in the walls of each room. Saw that once in one of the richer towns in the SF Bay Area. Thing is that they were all early ’60s models and by the ’80s they were dated and sort of beside the point."

20

"Four-poster beds with canopies."

21

"Milk doors. Small doors usually adjacent to side entrances, where the dairymen would leave products."

22