"Laundry chutes. In one house it was from the second floor to the basement, in another from the kitchen to the basement."
"China cabinets in the dining room."
"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."
"Living rooms with 1-3 steps down."
"Glass brick —very desirable in the 1950’s."
"Bread warming drawers."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"To show you how poor I grew up: fold away ironing boards. Ooh la la!"
"Trash compactors were big in new $$$ homes when I was a kid. We were impressed when people installed them in their existing homes."
"Phone nooks. My house has one. I use it for knick-knacks."
"Round beds."
"Plate racks built into the wall."
"Mirror-tile walls."
"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."
"I think hand cranked dumbwaiters are pretty much gone for good."
"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."
"Four-poster beds with canopies."
"Milk doors. Small doors usually adjacent to side entrances, where the dairymen would leave products."
• Don't insult other visitors. Offensive comments will be deleted without warning.
• Comments are accepted in English only.
• No swearing words in comments, otherwise such comments will be censored.
• Your nickname and avatar are randomly selected. If you don't post comments for 7 days, they both are reset.
• To choose another avatar, click the ‘Random avatar’ link.
#4 'Split Level' homes: everywhere you need to go in the house, you have to climb a couple of stairs. Not enough to be exercise and make you stronger; just enough to make you tired and give you knee problems. Plus, if you were sitting on a sofa, chair, or the floor in the right place, you would look up those 3 or 4 steps and see right up your grandmother's mothers skirt. No thank you.
#5 Better for light in some places, but cold and harsh. Basically, ugly af. Like something out of a dive bar or Liberace's house.
#8 For the millionth time: almost the only place Conversation Pits existed was in real estate brochures. I have never seen one on either coast, city-suburbs-rural, upscale-downscale, etc. No one had them. Ever.
#12 I have no idea how the OP equates a built-in ironing board with being poor. These actually existed in many houses, many areas, and most economic backgrounds. Ironically, almost the only houses you wouldn't see them in was low-income houses. The main reason you don't see them after a certain point in history is that clothes rarely need to be ironed as much or as often as they once did.
#15 Another fad which existed for about five minutes, and only in movies and brochures.
#17 Thank fecking god they only exist in the most tasteless houses. I'm sure maga people still love them, but they love mullets too, so there you go. They can also be see in cities in row houses of first-generation Americans who have never gotten over the claustrophobia of city life, because they create a sense of larger space.
#21 I (65yo guy) have a four-poster bed. I used the canopy for years, but after a recent move, I use thin drape-like tapestries which allow some light to go through but offer more of a sense of privacy and seclusion. And yes, occasionally I've gotten ribbed about being a guy with that kind of bed. My response is always that the women in my life have appreciated it more than I can or will describe here.