Book Review: Interior Desecrations
Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s
Tanya A. Brown

I remember the seventies. Being an innocent child, I had no notion of good or bad taste. Things simply were as they were, although it did seem that there was awful lot of brown, orange, harvest gold and avocado green floating around. It never dawned on me that the preponderance of baroque glass swag lamps, shag carpets and "wood" wall paneling which had never been anywhere near a forest comprised domestic horror.

I remember my stepmother cooing in delight over harvest gold appliances, knitting (thankfully never finished) afghans of dung brown and bright yellow acrylic yarn, sewing (thankfully never finished) curtains with giant rainbow supergraphics. And there was my uncle's house, with its amazing swag lamp which continually oozed sympathetic drops of oil down a grotto of wire strands protecting a pair of dusty plastic lovers.

It all seemed a bit odd at the time, but not overly so. I simply assumed that interior decoration was one of those adult things I couldn't be expected to understand, like martinis and sex. Not that I didn't have my own childish lapses of taste, including the hot pink foot-shaped rug I gifted my stepmother with one birthday, which looked oh-so-charming against the avocado green linoleum of our trailer house. (No doubt this taught her not to admire anything in Spencer Gifts while in my presence!)

But it wasn't until I read James Lileks' excavation of the decorative mayhem of that decade that I realized things could have been much, much worse.

"This is a labor of hate, " Lileks writes, "It's a hate that burns like your knees burn after you've slid a yard on a harsh synthetic rug. A hate I've nourished and stoked for decades. I came of age in the '70s, and there were few crueler things you could inflict on a person ... First, I want everyone who thinks the '70s were hip! to realize that this decade was the absolute opposite of hip. It was a breathtakingly ugly period. Even the rats parted their hair down the middle."

But the tone of the book is less hate than the grudging affection would have for an eccentric relative. Room by room, Lileks trudges through the houses of the period pairing photos of ghastly rooms with painfully hilarious comments. Of a particularly odious living room, Lileks writes

"Here we have a mix of old green crap, new green crap, and some stunning green transitional crap, all of which serve to give this room the exhausted, mealy flavor of overcooked vegetables ... To tie it all together, an oversized Chuck Close painting of a broccoli's MRI hangs over the fireplace. Why? Because that damn vegetable's relatives might come around looking for vengeance, and that's the first thing you want them to see: their kin, sliced in half, lightly steamed and nailed to the wall."

A bedroom overfestooned with a busy red fabric print elicits the comment,

"It's a difficult effect to achieve: take several sets of fresh cow lungs, stuff them with explosives, light the fuse, and shut the door."

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of the examples were perpetrated by professional interior designers.

The awful photos Lileks provides would have made a wonderful book in and of themselves, but when paired with his over-the-top comments, it truly becomes a sublime reading experience. Nice short chunks of information make this a good bathroom read.

If I have any complaint about this book - and it's a mild one - it's that he didn't address some of the obvious questions about why the design of the period was so bad, even within the context of humor. While he jokingly says that the entire country was nuts (an attractive theory), he doesn't really touch upon why we thought things were fine at the time but they seem so awful now. Was the aesthetic driven by a change in the materials that were available? Are we forever doomed to go through kitschy design cycles in which we eschew disco ball trashcans in favor of platoons of "distressed" wood chickens, then toss the chickens out in favor of whatever comes in style next?

Regardless, his book made me grateful that we live now instead of then. "See you in hell, Harvest Gold!"

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