Ideas for Vintage Decor

[poetman]

I've been looking for some ideas on how to setup an office/man-room with a vintage 40's feel. My problem is I don't what resources to look for. I took out a few books on Art Deco and 1940's interiors and found nothing useful to decorating this room. What resources have you all used to vintagize your room or home? Instead of hunting antique stores for random objects, I'd like to have some direction: what brands, styles, types of things should I look for? As of now I'm thinking of replacing store bought (but nice dark brown) particle boad bookcases with a few built-in-shelves. I'm hoping this will allow the room to breathe and allow me to get some vintage style shelves. But what? I have my eye on a 40's style desk, but what kind of lamps and other accessories should I consider? How do you get inspiration for this type of project?

Thanks All!

 

[Talbot]

http://retrorenovation.com/

 

[Atomic]

I find a lot of it is the little things that really sets the feel. Things like the lamps, the staplers, the pen holders. Yes, getting a vintage desk itself with bookshelves is a huge part, but its all the little things you pick up and use that give you the vibes. I have a few books laying around, some fountain pens, an old stapler, a crazy lamp, an old desk fan, etc. I'll get a desk one of these days when I buy a house and get a dedicated office.

Here are some things I have:

Antique shop find, but easily found on ebay:

Same shop find (please ignore the random garbage around the lamp)
*Note: this lamp is awesome as the little white boxes are actually windows with a scroller that has musical cord info on it. Random but very cool!

Ebay, like 6 dollars shipped and it works (superbly even by todays standards) with standard staples. The top broke while being shipped and I JB Welded it back together and still need to clean off the excess gray stuff:

 

[Shangas]

Essentials for a 1940s office...

Large, pedestal or partner's desk. (The older-style rolltop or slant-top desks of the 1900s-1920s were waaaay out of date by this period).

Desktop typewriter.

Desk-set, or at least a pen-tray for vintage fountain pens (Parker '51's, Sheaffer Balances, Parker Duofolds, Wahl Eversharp Skylines, etc).

Banker's lamp.

Inkwells or ink-bottles of the 1940s or earlier.

Stapler.

Fan.

Paperweights made of glass that look pretty.

Rocker-blotter.

Blotting-paper.

Optionals for 1940s office...

Mechanical clock or a quartz clock that looks mechanical. Personally, I'd go for a vintage carriage clock.

If not a desk-clock, then a pocketwatch stand so that you can put your watch and chain there to serve as a desk-clock.

Wire wastepaper basket.

Old-fashioned swivel-chair.

Black rotary telephone.

Hat-rack/coat-stand near the door.

Spitoon?

Desk cigarette lighter.

Ashtray.

What have I missed?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don't forget the calculator --

 

[Argee]

You're going to need a wall calendar, '26 '37 and '43 match 2010 and '21, '27, and '38 are a match for 2011

 

[Nathan Dodge]

You're going to need a wall calendar, '26 '37 and '43 match 2010 and '21, '27, and '38 are a match for 2011

Thanks for the useful info! I'm on the hunt for a 1937 calendar...

 

[Carlisle Blues]

Radio

 

[Carlisle Blues]

I had art deco sconces in my office similar to these:

 

[Argee]

Thanks for the useful info! I'm on the hunt for a 1937 calendar...

Remember the holidays might not match exactly, but other than that it should be perfectly usable.

 

[Carlisle Blues]

I also had two wing back leather chairs. Very comfy (the clock never faced the clients )

 

[poetman]

Thanks for all the great post--especially the photos!

I have two questions: 1) what should I do with my bookcases? What would provide a more vintage atmosphere built-in shelves or standard bookcases? (What type of wood/color? I don't want to overdo the browns?) I tend to lean toward the former but only because the construction allows for a bit more space and lets the room breathe a little.

2) What kind of magazines, books, and other resources do you all uses to acquire information on how to get your room/place period correct?

Thanks!

 

[Shangas]

Hey Poetman,

You're welcome!!

I think stand-alone bookcases would look better in an office, I dunno why, I jus think they do. As for resources, I would suggest looking at old photographs...actually wait...there's a website...

http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/

The Early Office Museum website. Check that joint out. There's literally hundreds of photographs, postcards, sketches, drawings and diagrams of furniture, offices, desk-accessories and a billion other things to drool over. Go nuts.

 

[MPicciotto]

Movies!! I'm a big fan of watching vintage flicks to get a feel for what was then. Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers are my preferred venues of study. Eventually you will develop a "feel" for the style and you'll be able to breeze through antique malls, flea markets, auctions etc with great rapidity picking out the items that will fit. There is a great thread on here concerning offices. But man-caves. I don't know of a thread here on them.

Matt

 

[poetman]

Thanks for the recommendations. I try to pick up ideas from old films, but I guess it depends on the movie. I saw End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore--a fantastic film--and Fiennes' apartment is really great. In fact, I got the idea for the built-in bookcases from that film.

 

[Shangas]

I suggest watching the "Poirot" (pronouced "Pwa-roh" if you've never heard it) and "Jeeves & Wooster" TV series (they're on YouTube). They're both TV series set in 1930s London and there are some great, interior-decoration ideas that can be gleamed from these shows, which both feature beautifully-decorated 1930s, Art-Decoy styled interiors.

 

[MPicciotto]

My preferred magazine for ideas is Architectural Forum. But I'm biased towards that when I stumbled upon six months worth in bound edition format from middle of the war!! Still you might take a look at architectural magazines, and possibly the big catalogs like Montgomery Wards and Sears. I positively identified a desk that I suspected was vintage that way. That EXACT design and type of wood was in the 1941 Montgomery Wards catalog. I've since seen that desk many times and not all the drawers are interchangeable. So more then one maker was probably involved.

One caveat about architectural magazines and is sometimes the case with film too. You may get a "too modern" effect. People didn't actually change as fast as designers (be it fashion, buildings or houseware) would like. So some things you see in magazines and film would have been the latest, greatest, most outlandish. My house is mostly decorated in what I feel is late 40's to 50's. But each piece could be traced to war-era. Yet it doesn't have that feel. Does this make sense?

Matt

 

[Shangas]

Matt,

I think what you're saying is not to take films and/or photos/magazines as being strictly definitive of an era's fashion and style and that the truth was often significantly different from what was depicted by popular culture, and to keep this in-mind when period-decorating.

Yes?

 

[LizzieMaine]

One caveat about architectural magazines and is sometimes the case with film too. You may get a "too modern" effect. People didn't actually change as fast as designers (be it fashion, buildings or houseware) would like. So some things you see in magazines and film would have been the latest, greatest, most outlandish. My house is mostly decorated in what I feel is late 40's to 50's. But each piece could be traced to war-era. Yet it doesn't have that feel. Does this make sense?

This is exactly right. Especially during the depression and war eras, you would have very very rarely seen a home or office furnished entirely in, say, a "Modernistic" style (which is what most people called Deco at the time), unless you were at the World's Fair. Real-world homes and offices would have had a melange of styles -- some of which would likely date back to the teens or twenties, depending on how old the home or company was. THis would be especially true of durable goods -- in an typical office setting, it would not at all be uncommon for a 1939 secretary to be punching away at a 1915 typewriter, with a 1905 addressograph standing over in the corner, and banged-up wooden desks and filing cabinets that dated back to the days of Grover Cleveland.

The best source, I think, for seeing what the average home or office might have had in it is the Sears catalog. Find one for your target year, and a few going back ten or fifteen years before that, and mix things up, and there's what would give a realistic impression.

 

[Shangas]

I agree with Lizzie. A lot of things were used for a long time before they really changed. That's why so many pieces of furniture from this period survived.

You have to see it in context, I think. These days, if we want a new desk or a new couch-&-chairs set, we go out and buy it. If we want a new coffee-table, we go out and buy it.

Maybe in the 20s, people did. But come the 30s and 40s, people didn't have the money or the time to buy new stuff every six months. So they stuck with what they had. Because furniture was so expensive, a lot of it was just "inherited", either literally or figuratively.

In an office-building, when someone left (resigned, retired, fired, etc), their furniture, unless it belonged to them, was left in the office for someone else to use. This would go on, year in, year out, until the desk/chairs/bookcases NEEDED replacing, or the management were able to pay for new stuff to make the company look better.