While cruising around the web for some good images of vintage wallpaper, I ended up on the
Apartment Therapy blog, an interior design blog I happen to be familiar with on several levels already (they frequently mention the company I work for and used an image I'd taken at the semi-annual
Brimfield Antiques Show in Massachusetts for a post they wrote on the fair and
all the amazing junk therein).
The
Apartment Therapy post I was honing in on through my search was about two people who I now am insanely jealous of - David "Duke" and Amy Carter - former Chicago residents of McKinley Park and proprietors of
Pegboard Modern (a mid-century modern furniture showroom). Their old two bedroom apartment featured in the interview from 2007 is quite possibly the mid-century dwelling of my psychotic retro dreams.
David & Amy's living room (all photos taken by David & Amy)
An assortment of interior photos, mostly of their immense tiki collection.
From these few photos (there's more in a
slide show on the Apartment Therapy site), you can tell they created an urban shrine to their retro religion. Not surprisingly, they also wrote a book on their collecting habits,
Tiki Quest: Collecting the Exotic Past, documenting their tiki obsession in full four-color glory.
As I continued to look for more info on this admirable design duo, I
found another feature on their abode, this one from April of 2009 on the
Strange Closets website. By now they have moved to quaint Munster, Indiana with their son and have filled an entire cruciform (that means shaped like an X, basically; four square rooms that intersect in the middle), mid-century modern house with their fab furnishings.
(Photos by Tate Gunnerson from Strange Closets)
Seeing all this stuff makes me excited to finally have a place of my own one day (which is coming soon enough). Having lived with roommates for the majority of my life has made it difficult for me to have full control of the interior designing of my residency, which can be a super huge bummer if you are as emotionally conjoined to your surroundings as I am. It can also be a blessing, because god knows if I'd been living in a house I didn't have to move out of for the last ten years, I would have amassed a wealth of junk courtesy of my antiquing addiction. At least living in expensive, cramped apartments in New York that I have to move out of every two years or so has tamped down my hoarding of vintage knickknacks. For now.
The Carter house also makes me wonder what I must be like for a kid like theirs to grow up in a house like that. My parents never really had any collecting habits, outside of my Dad's brief obsession with
Happy Meal toys when we were kids, when he insisted one day they'd be worth "something". (I hope they've all been sacrificed to the yard sale gods over the years.) I firmly believe that this has something to do with the fact that both of their parents had some particular obsessions of their own: my Dad's mother decorated the house with early American antiquities - horse hair couches, marble claw-foot tables, electrified gas lamps - and my Mom's Dad was a photographer, obsessed with cameras, musical instruments and vintage radios, and set aside his entire basement for tinkering and storage of his techno ephemera.
Once, when I came home during high school with a carload of beautiful vintage "junk" (Dad's words) I'd scored that day at an auction, I was excitedly having show-and-tell with Dad, who was making lunch in the kitchen. When it became clear to me he was feigning interest in my score, I confronted his apathy. "Look, Katie. I grew up in a house
filled with antiques. It smelled like old people, the couches were uncomfortable, I wasn't allowed to
touch anything. I thought it was completely stupid. Why fill your home with old, breakable things when it makes it impossible to
live in?? I wish I could share your enthusiasm for "antiques" but I just can't. They make plenty of good dishes and tables nowadays. And if you break them,
no big deal."
My Dad works with computers. Not much of a surprise, I guess.
At any rate, I look forward to my residential future, and to one day have a place that serves as both a gallery
and an meticulously designed, comfortable living space...but one I can still hula hoop in without fear of ruining anything.
