The Vintage Bedroom

[CharlieH.]

One of my many ongoing and never ending projects is my bedroom. For ages I've wanted a bedroom with a heavy 40's feel (as total realism is impossible due to the presence of some modern devices), and I always get stumped at the many intricacies I encounter; namely trinkets, papers, and other artifacts found in the room of a 1940's collegiate tinkerer and hobbyist. I like to have small nothings (gum wrappers, a loose vaccum tube, zeppelin ticket, etc.) scattered about to give that sensation, but I'd like to go further.

Any ideas for giving a bedroom that vintage feel, in spite of nearly blatant modernity?

(The modern touches in question are the televisor and accompanying peripherals, and my many plastic models)

(P.S. I realise there's a similar thread going on, but I'd like to focus on the 1940's college boy's room)

 

[RetroMom]

I have done my eldest son's room in this fashion. Are you lucky enough to have vintage furniture? I wasn't, but still I think the room has a vintagey feel. The color scheme is a red/white/blue.

For the windows: cotton striped drapes.

For the bed: A quilt in shades of red/white/blue and white sheets. A chenille bedspread (I add one in the colder months) in white adds a very authentic touch.

Lighting: Pharmacist's lamp for the night table, standing lamp near a reading chair, banker's lamp for the desk, Unfortunately there is no over head lighting in the room, so I had to resort to small modern lamps for the dresser.

Bric a Brac: various vintage (felt) banners from baseball teams, colleges. Some framed prints of old time baseball players, His collection of trophies and baseballs. Some old editions of books added to his bookcase, ones of sports or stories of interest for boys (i.e. Hardy Boys) work well (my son is only 13). Parker Brothers and Milton-Bradley make some "vintage" editions of their games and we have a few of those on his book shelf as well. Model cars or airplanes, vintage world map on one wall, on the nightstand he uses a double bell alarm clock. He also has a vintage "repo" radio with cd player that he has in his room on a table by the reading chair.

I partially solved my son's love of all this electric, by using a small cabinet with the back taken out to house all his dvds, various game systems and video games. His tv is however on top and not hidden.

I would post pictures - but my son would have a fit, as he would never admit to anyone but his best friends that he has a vintage styled bedroom. Hopefully as he gets older he will come to appreciate it

This is all I can think of off the top of my head, I will poke around his room and see what I forgot to mention .

I hope some of this helps!

 

[CharlieH.]

Thanks RetroMom! You gave some pretty useful hints. I don't have a single piece of vintage furniture, but since most of it was homemade, I figure it's just fine.
Now, what about some vintage style window drapes? I like the idea of horizontal stripes, but I've only seen them in black and white pictures!

 

[MAGNAVERDE]

Hi Charlie.

I have good news & bad news. The bad news is that, offhand, I have no idea where to get horizontal-stripe drapes. The good news is that it's not always necessary to have the real thing to pull off a convincing look, anyway. Oh, sure it helps if you have access to a warehouse of vintage stuff, but often, it's the way you put things together that's more important than whetrher or not every single item is totally accurate in the chronological sense. It makes sense to go for a much accuracy as possible in those details you actually touch or see up close, but generally, our brain will connect the dots, which means you can get by with faking a few things & no one will notice.

One time in school, the professor gave us a fast glimpse of an old black-&- white photo that he projected onto the wall, then asked us to identify the sitter. It was a no-brainer: it was a grim-looking Queen Victoria, late in her reign, when her face had acquired massive jowls.

Then he let us look at it again. It wasn't Her Majesty after all, but Alfred Hitchcock, wearing a black dress & jewelry of the period. Other than that, he looked exactly the way he did in his TV show every week. But as soon as we--upperclassmen in a highly-respected university--saw a few pieces of Victorian jewelry (and for all I know, even that might have been nothing more than bent wire & bottle caps, but it had the same form as the real thing) we mistook a man we had watched every week of our childhoods for a member of the royal family, and a different sex at that.

What's my point? That not all details have to be authentic in order to achieve the look & the feel you want. It's the way you assemble the details you have.

I did this one year for a big Victorian house that was built in the 1850s but that due to a series of renovations & redecorations over the course of a century was eventually frozen as it was in 1967, when the house was given to the local historical society. For years, the old ladies who ran it had decorated at holiday time with Victorian dolls, teddy bears & candles, all of which looked really lame & totally unconvincing in the mid-5Os living room decor that the same ladies had taken pains to preserve: wall-to-wall frieze carpet, the home's original massive black-walnut trim with its 1930s pickled finish, a taupe-&-turquoise color scheme, and a bunch of modern paintings, with the occasional genuine Tiffany lamp--found packed in a crate in the attic after the owner's death--thrown in to confuse styslitic matters even further.

Nevertheless, stylistic chaos or no, the annual holiday house tours were popular for a while. So popular, in fact, that other old houses--houses whose decor, though newly executed, was more convincingly "Victorian"--began offering tours of their own, with the result that our tours' attendance was dropping every year.

I convinced the esteemed ladies to cut back the fussy (and, in its anachronistic & all-over-the-house distribution, totally unconvincing) Victorian decor back to its natural habitat--the one suite of upstairs rooms that retained its 19th century wallpaper & lace curtains--and in all the other rooms, to match the seasonal decorations to the period of each room's existing decor. Thus the 195Os living & dining rooms had matching white-flocked trees with big white bulbs, matching turquoise ornaments, & swags of emerald green beads, and the 193Os-era kitchen, instead of being its usual immaculate self, was littered with the detritus of cookie-baking, and not in tasteful, the photo-shoot way we see in the glossy magazines: that is, there was flour everywhere, bowls of cracked eggs, half-peeled oranges to lend scent, spilled Ovaltine on the streamlined stove and a sink full of suds & cookie-sheets with baked on residue.

The 192Os breakfast room was in better shape, since you could see it by looking through the door under the stairs in the front hall. In the center of the Department-Store-Louis-Something table was a canary-yellow runner that held an orange-&-black glass footed glass bowl filled with coal covered with home-grown turqouise coal flowers, a brief--and cheap--DIY fad back in the 192Os.

Upstairs, the owner's bedrom was a vision in early-196Os glamour. Besides the pink satin bedspread & the pink grasscloth-on-gold foil wallpaper there was a honey-color French Provincial bedroom suite & swirly driftwood lamps with big shiny white-paper shades & a pink Princess dial phone that still lit up, sitting on top of a 1966 phone book. That stuff was all authentic, but the room still seemed sterile, so we got the big crystal ashtray the size of Montana out of the closet, added a big box of pink tissues in the glittery gold holder that was also in the closet, crammed that stuff onto the nightstand, and added theat signifier of elegance circa 1962, a vase of pink plastic roses with gold-foil leaves. We put a kid to work dousing the room with Dorsay's Intoxication spray perfume as soon as they heard the next group heading up the stairs.

The real-life owner had had no kids in residence, but out one of the guest rooms we made a kids' room & stuffed it with every toy a tyke of 1966 was clamoring for, although whether it was Barbie & Midge or Batman & G.I. Joe I don't remember, since i wasn't in charge in there. All I remember was there were clothes everywhere on the floor & across the floor of the room and its adjacent bath (with its angelfish shower curtain) the bed wasn't made, and the sparkle-vinyl record player on the floor played an Alvin & the Chipmunks 45 record non-stop.

My own contribution was the boy's room, and to match the existing 194Os wood-grained wallpaper, I covered the bed with vintage Beacon blankets stacked 3 deep--no bedspread--and at the window, I hung wooden blinds with dark green tapes. There was a bakelight radio--crackling with news from the European front--& a student lamp with a hobnail glass shade & a pipe tobacco tin filled with stubby yellow pencils on the 193Os desk where the room's occupant had been trying--with not much success--to wrap a bottle of Evening in Paris perfume for his mother or his girlfriend. A bunch of swirled marbles--remnants of his own childhood a decade before--filled a beat-up metal candybox, and a stack of Popular Mechanics had slid to the floor, revealing a well-thumbed copy of Esquire magazine hidden underneath. There were faded felt souvenir pennants of vacations past--Brooklyn Dodgers, Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park-tacked to the wall, as well as a map covered with arrows & curves copied from the newspapers' reports on the war. Below, a fringed rayon pillow from the optimistically-themed 1939 World's Fair sat on the overstuffed floral chintz chair which he had tried to disguise with a blanket swiped off the 2Oth Century Limited. The Andrews Sisters "Christmas Island" spun on the 78 RPM record player & the air was heavy and damp with the scent of sheep from the wet wool jacket draped over the the back of a chair next to the radiator. A jacquard ski sweater--also wet--was hanging from the shower rod in the bathroom and in one corner was an open suitcase, half-packed in anticpation of a holiday trip. The mirror above the dresser had tiny black-&-white photos of pals stuck between the glass & the frame & Christmas cards from girls in class were taped to its edges. The closet floor was full of shoes & dirty clothes--thick cords, argyles sweaters, you get the idea. It looked like real boy's room, not a museum display of irrelevant Victoriana.

No, the place wasn't like anything that any of the regulars from previous years' house tours had come expect. There were no doll tea parties set up in every corner, but what was great was that instead of mooning over some hokey, cliched pastiche of Victorian days, people wandered through these rooms and were struck by a rush of memories, their own memories. In the bedrooms, they saw what looked like the rooms of their own childhood, full of hand-me-down toys, but under the tree, they saw all the toys they always wanted but never got, all in their pristine M.I.B. glory, courtesy of a local collector: the Kenner Easy-Bake oven, the Swinger camera, the Rock-'em-Sock-'em Robots, with their hundreds of small parts sized just right for choking on. More than that, in the small-group ensembles scattered here & there throughout & around the house--Dad cussing up a storm as he shoveled the front walk asn you entered the house through the side door and found the vestibule floor filled with wet galoshes & damp snowsuits; Junior upstairs in his room attempting to tie a knot in his new tie for the holiday dance, Mom gossiping on the phone with a neighbor while keeping an eye on the cookies in the oven & acting as referee when the twins get into an argument while playing the Get Smart board game on the living room floor, the muffled voices of big sis & her pals giggling behind the closed doors of the study--visitors saw the place as a living, breathing home once again, not as the same lifeless museum that they had trudged through every season for the last ten years. The effect wasn't even that hard to achieve. After all, twenty five years ago, Fiestaware wasn't back in production, swing dancing was still in hibernation, and you could still pick up awesome vintage wear for a few bucks at your neighborhood Goodwill, even though nobody wanted that old stuff. Well, that is, nobody but weirdos like me. Anyway, when the call came, I was ready. And the whole thing was a big success. Best of all, it was different.

Basically, though, the same concept will work for you, minus the holiday angle, which wasn't my choice in the first place. It's just that that's when people decide they want to go & snoop around for 'ideas' in other people's houses, they seem to want to do it in December. We just put a new spin on the whole thing. Anyway, the main thing to remember when you do this is to not over-coordinate everything, which is the fastest way to yank a room out of any sense of verisimilitude & into the Disneyfied, decorating-obesessed present. Sixty years ago, few young guys bothered with such niceties, so if you want to capture the look, you shouldn't bother either. Or, at least, it shouldn't look like you did.

That's the key to the magic of Fred Astaire's dancing. He made what must have been a killer of a workout look like he hadn't put any effort into it at all. Like it just happened--all by itself--on the spur of the moment. But if it's harder to pull off a scheme like this than it is to do up your room with generic bed-in-a-bag predictabliity, it also gets you a lot more credit in the long run when it all works. Anyway, keep us posted with your progress.

Regards,
MAGNAVERDE.

 

[CharlieH.]

Magnaverde, that was an amazing project! Thanks for all the hints. And you're absolutely right about this, the room shouldn't be decorated, but simply used. I especially like the idea about the map. Now if I only had a vintage pipe tobacco tin....

 

[mysterygal]

Vanity's

Me and the hubby's new house is going to have a lot of vintage flair about it, but my main thing I want for the bedroom is my own vanity...I love these things!
Where in the world do you find them? (I have yet to find any luck in locating one!)

 

[Elaina]

Calico corners (they have a website) does drapery in all kinds, from shades to actual drapes. They carry horizontal prints, but not sure what your cost is for they can be on the pricey side, but the do offer wonderful service.