Saturday Morning Miscellany And Some 1970s Style

I suspect that you read all the major shelter magazines

Architectural Digest, Veranda, Elle Decor, etc.

And I'm pretty sure that you too have noticed the creeping trend towards 1970s style

big prints, color block palates, graphic and metallic wallpaper, low slung furniture and more

As one who appreciates a vintage vibe in clothes, accessories and design

I rather like the return of 1970's decorative details

like the metallic wallpaper, shiny tubes and mirrored walls

used in Daphne Guinness's NY apartment

and god knows if anyone can pull off groovy it is la Guinness

Daphne's NY apartment

But 1970s style can go wrong, very wrong.
Are you familiar with author, blogger, humorist James Lileks?
If not you should be

Interior Desecrations - Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s

Lileks, in his clever book sprinkled with images taken from actual 1970s interior design magazines,

shows us the horror which was 1970s decor.

And sorry but I just have to quote

no really I have to

from his book introduction

This is what happens when Dad drinks, Mom floats in a Valium haze, the kids slump down in the den with the bong, and the decorator has such a desperate coke habit he simply must convince half the town to put reflective wallpaper or he's going to lose his kneecaps to his supplier's enforcer. Just say no? They couldn't. They didn't know why they should.

No, I am not saying your mom was hopped up on goofballs. But all it takes is a few trendsetters who fall for this stuff and set the styles for the rest of Middle America. Soon the rest of the nation finds out it has no choice - it's rotten-avocado-colored fabrics and shiny-foil wallpaper or nothing.

from his website

Sweet smokin’ Judas, what were they thinking?
Welcome back to Interior Desecrations, a brutal examination of the unlovely, unattractive, unlivable and unforgivable homes of the 1970s. All eras have some bad taste, of course – but it took the 70s to make bad taste triumphant and universal. It took the 70s to convince everyone to stick foil wallpaper on the wall, paint the bathtub purple, smother the floors in shag so deep it tickled the tops of your ankles, and hang art that managed to clash with everything, including itself. I mean, look at this picture – what is that? A dissected Rubiks’s Cube attempts to threaten a potted plant and his child, I guess.
Love the rug, too. They didn’t even make AMC cars in those color combinations. They didn’t dare.

and more from his book

If you lived here, you'd be laid by now. If it was 1973, anyway. It's the lair of the Tasteful Swinging Batch - the mezzanine lined with unread books, the guitar to indicate your sensitive troubadour side, the TEAC reel-to-reel to show off your collection of progressive jazz, the TV sized just right for watching Kojac while you blow a number of primo Colombian (hey, Kojak man be the Man, but he's solid cool). There's even a recessed ladder in case you're upstairs and your date catches on fire and you have to get down quick.
Her lost the house in the divorce in '79. Oh, she said it was because of his quaalude "problem" but she'd been planning this way before he ever took some Vitamin Q.
What do you mean paranoid? Now you're sounding like her.

and

For the Bond Supervillian on a budget.

It has a ledge, so your minions can topple off when shot. It has a ladder down which you can escape. It has fussy furniture whose old-world charms contrast with your Nehru-jacketed sense of icy-cool nihilism. It's not the sort of lair you'd be proud to show 007. But one of the lessor double-oughts? 002? 003? They'd hardly notice that the paintings are actually lithographs. And for that alone they deserve to die!

Well anyhoo, I find Lileks amusing
and I was sporting a little 1970s fashion vibe myself yesterday at Beladora HQ