Design of the Times

One night in the '70s, I found a really big wine crate on the sidewalk outside a liquor store and dragged it home. It was stenciled with little black umbrellas to show which side was up, and when I screwed on big black techy wheels to the bottom and rolled it into the center of my living room, it became an instant coffee table, its sturdy blond planks capacious enough to hold a tray of those French jelly glasses we used for wine. But the real function of that coffee table was to irritate my mother. Every time she came to my apartment she uttered the expected: "Darling, that table drags the whole room down." That would put another couple of years on that crate's life.

That was the way we were. In the '60s—a cocky, full-of-ourselves decade that was in its prime from the mid-'60s to well into the '70s—we rolled out of dorm rooms into our first homes in record numbers, a generation rabid to leave our marks on our space, stripping away stuffy architectural ornament, painting over history with the optimistic primary colors of our own high expectations. In the name of self-expression and cheap rent, we became urban pioneers, pushing the boundaries of conventional housing, moving into chopped-up Victorians and storefronts, bowling alleys, even former gas stations. We papered our walls with our passions; posters shouted FREE BOBBY and VIVA CHAVEZ. Everything we possessed was a political statement, loaded with meaning, an extension of our personalities. "I love my shirt," Donovan repeated 24 times in his 1969 song. Hard to imagine? Just try to picture the emotional surround of every single sofa you've owned since you were 20.

Leading-edge boomers, those born between 1946 and 1954—some 32,217,944 of them—were against many more things than they were for: the establishment, the Vietnam War and, when it came to style, the utterly boring, materialistic values of their parents. But the look of their homes and the fern bars they frequented was far more than decoration; it was an act of defiance: We are not you! The look was something else, too. Like distinctive tribal patterns, our style was a new way to recognize each other: Oh! You're hip, like me. Through more than two decades, where the only constant was ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, these easy-riding, early-adapting boomers used style as an ideology. But it was not to last.

"Just you wait," the renowned social researcher Florence Skelly, of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, predicted in the '70s: "These apples will not fall very far from the tree. You think genuine drop-outs wear leather Frye boots, pure wool L.L. Bean lumberjack's shirts and 100% cotton Levi's like these 'rebels' do?" Indeed, the very twentysomethings who sympathized with their French counterparts as they took to the streets in May 1968 to protest a bourgeois society of frigidaires are the very same folks who were to find themselves fretting over the placement of side-by-side Sub-Zeros 20 years later. Who would have guessed, in those travelin'-light, laid-back years, that by the turn of this century, baby boomers would be sitting on more than $3.5 trillion in home equity?

In the year of Woodstock, 1969, the folks who published Better Homes and Gardens, the largest-circulation home and family magazine and a living hymn to idyllic '50s values, looked out of their windows in Des Moines, Iowa, and saw a world where the almost-grown kids of their readers were behaving in a, well, very un-BH&G way. They decided to publish the first magazine for boomers just out of college and called it Apartment Life. Around the time I lugged that wine crate from the sidewalk, I became the magazine's editor. That was my vantage point when, in 1981, the magazine grew up along with its readers and became Metropolitan Home.

Two impulses converged to make '60s home style. One was the triumph of wit—the loaded gesture, the home as crafts project—and the other was pure modernism. It took chutzpah to make a lamp out of anything: turn a spaghetti colander or a fruit basket upside down, drill a hole in the center, add a bulb, a socket and a wire, and voila, a hanging lamp. Hardware stores were our playgrounds (long before everything was bubble-wrapped). You could fool around illuminating crisp white PVC pipe as a floor lamp, or uplight a terra-cotta chimney flue, for peanuts. That was wit; that was style. Doing it showed you had both.

Like relationships, like conventions, if it wasn't broke, we'd break it—just for the chance to remake it in our own image. Nothing was worse than a fake mahogany dining table, the result of too many board feet of lumber being run through too many furniture factories in North Carolina, then slapped with wood veneer and carving, and labeled with the meaningless marketing term "Mediterranean." If you were unlucky enough to wind up with such a piece, there was only one remedy: paint it white. Quick. The '60s alternative was far cooler: get two sawhorses from the lumberyard, throw a hollow-core door on top. The '60s armchair meant wrapping a couple of painter's clean white dropcloths over an old thrift-shop hulk and calling it upholstery. What decorating magazines like to call "flea-market finds" actually existed then. You showed your cleverness by scoring bright Fiestaware plates, golden-oak ball-and-claw-foot tables, and original bark-cloth curtains with outsize palm fronds like those in the halls of the Beverly Hills Hotel—even cookie jars before Andy Warhol's collection went up for auction at Sotheby's and you needed a mortgage.

Such funky objects were anchored by the trend for contemporary modern design, introduced at retail by an architect, Ben Thompson, through his stores, Design Research. D/R became the hot spot for wildly gestural Finnish fabrics by Marimekko, for straight-lined white sofas and for the new plastic furniture coming out of Italy. "I believe the furnishing of the interior is part of architecture," Thompson said. Think of how righteous you could be touting "Plastics as plastic," no longer masquerading as wood grain, but taking joyful new shapes. Couldn't get much whizzier than a stack of Joe Colombo chairs or an Artemide mushroom lamp. All this was legitimized in 1972 in a seminal show at the Museum of Modern Art called "Italy, the New Domestic Landscape."

Renegade boomers (a.k.a. Bloomingdale's hippies) who were set on trashing the values of their forebears quickly ran out of role models. If there was one guru for the way we lived then, someone who showed us how to transition out of the kid-'60s, it was Terence Conran. Do you remember the first time you saw a huge pile of wine goblets stacked on shelves, seductive as peaches, and just as accessible? That was Conran's idea of fresh, democratic design. Or the first time you imagined a kitchen as a plain pine table surrounded by a frank display of cookware as a celebration of its functional beauty and not prissily hidden away behind overwrought cabinet doors? That idea of Conran's perfectly suited our shifting instincts: this was Downstairs, not Upstairs, style. Conran opened his first groundbreaking shop, Habitat, on the Fulham Road in London in 1964 and by the mid-'70s had a dozen more. Habitat fast became the touchstone for the world's design lovers. Conran was showing us how to be modern and sensuous at the same time. In 1974 he published "The House Book," an authoritative and completely stylish guide so crammed with ideas that it's still useful today. (It wasn't until 1977 that Conran's opened in New York.)

If there was one living space that best suited the ideology of the '70s, it was the loft. With its acres of undifferentiated floor space and its seductive image of counterculture artists, the loft was a perfect metaphor for the way we lived then. Living together, in whatever combinations we chose, was prized far higher than conventional marriage. Lofts meant floors for days, few walls, huge windows. For people who hated labels, who needed rooms? Roles were as blurred as functions. No longer was a lone woman walled off, isolated, in a kitchen far, far away. Now, whoever was up for it could be the cook, and gradually, as professional kitchen appliances with the torque of BMWs took over and power materials like granite and marble replaced Formica, the kitchen became the center of the home, a clean, well-lighted stage, the real living room. In the let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the day, every piece of cooking equipment was out there for God and everybody else to see. And lust over. By the late '70s, the oldest boomers, now over 30, were just beginning to settle down into real houses, where they blew out the walls of kitchen, dining and living to make a kind of suburban loft called the Great Room.

Meanwhile, in 1978, in Santa Monica, Calif., Frank Gehry, long before he dreamed his big dreams in titanium, renovated his own modest house. "I wasn't trying to make a big or precious statement," he said. "I was trying to build a lot of ideas." Those ideas rippled across the country, inspiring a trend of raw construction materials: walls of stripped lath, corrugated metal, chain link. Humble, gutsy, butch. The 1978 book "High-Tech" chronicled a love affair with the stripped-down and the stainless, a fetishizing of the functional. Hanging factory lights and metal industrial shelving clanked home. About that time, designer Ben Lloyd made a dining table with a glass top and a 30-gallon galvanized-metal garbage can as its base, "just because it looked so cool." So cool, too, were the little art-furniture chairs that danced in from left field—OK, from Milan—on their archly pointed toes, furniture so contorted it could hurt you if you sat in it the wrong way. Art furniture leapt whole from the head of maestro Ettore Sottsass, a Milanese architect who, with his merry band, launched Memphis (a riff on both Elvis's hometown and ancient Egypt), a collection of pieces hardly anyone could afford or even get their hands on. Memphis was so fanciful and so arch, people are still arguing about it. One can imagine Sottsass's satisfaction, looking out from under those hooded eyelids, watching as he messed with our heads.

As the '70s trended more toward tech and modernist minimalism, the real danger of all such movements arose: that in opposing old doctrines we'd created new ones that were just as confining. Where was the soul in all this superslick style? In "Home," social historian Witold Rybczynski worried that "the modern interior is a rupture in the evolution of domestic comfort." "Austerity," he fretted, "has replaced delight." Surely this was not the way we really wanted to live. In 1977, Christopher Alexander published an extraordinary book about emotional design, "A Pattern Language": "Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick," he wrote. "It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life—the things you care for, the things that tell your story." Alexander had hit a nerve. Perhaps we were not meant for a butcher-block and steel-pipe future after all; so much hard-edged doctrine, not enough drama. It was time for another change. It was time for the '80s.

Amid the headiness of Father Knows Best Reaganomics, suddenly taxes were low and supply was on our side. Boomers, into their 40s by now and beginning to make real money, presided over a deregulation of style. All those upholstered values (and the sofas that went with them) that we'd thrown out in the '60s returned with a visceral thud. Suddenly, furniture couldn't be too rich or too fat. All those decades spent obliterating history doomed us to repeat it. Boomers, for the first time, came face to face with period decor: lampshades, serious silks, important art and heavy- hitter antiques. In "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe takes us into a living room of high '80s style: "It was enormous, but it appeared to be ... stuffed ... with sofas, cushions, fat chairs, and hassocks, all of them braided, tasseled, banded, bordered and ... stuffed ... There was not so much as a hint of the twentieth century in the decor."

About that time influential architects like Robert Venturi and Michael Graves (both had been fellows at the American Academy in Rome and fell hard for Italy) grew so unsettled with the tyranny of purist modernism, they began introducing classical elements into the buildings and rooms and objects they designed. Venturi's idea of "messy vitality" gained momentum, and Graves's luscious Renaissance color sense spearheaded the selective readmission of what we'd rejected. Columns appeared in living rooms, holding up nothing but our own sense of history. References to ancient roots were coyly "quoted" with architectural elements taken out of context. Pediments and other chunks of ornate molding that looked as if they'd fall-en off buildings were mounted on the wall as sculpture. Postmodernism was born of such an impulse, and trickled immediately and disastrously into popular culture. Only the sorry remains are visible today, on the pink-and-blue pillared facades of unfortunate banks and takeout places in strip malls.

Did boomers feel hypocritical about this ideological about-face, this sudden influx of money and stuff? Sure. Here's how David Brooks addresses his reader in "Bobos in Paradise": "You will devote your conversation time to mocking your own success in a manner that simultaneously displays your accomplishments and your ironic distance from them. You will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that you yourself have not become one." By the '90s, if we had not quite become them, it was becoming more difficult to tell the difference. But somehow it mattered less. The '90s marked the end of a defining style for boomers. They not so much aged as marinated; confidence grew with experience. The best furnishings no longer languished behind the closed doors of elite design centers, access forbidden to mere mortals without a designer or an architect, as if we didn't have eyeballs good enough. As retail shops like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware and Baker and Moss opened their doors, we'd won a great battle: good design became available everywhere. Just as you can wear pretty much what you feel like these days, homes can have multiple personalities. Almost anything goes now. By the mid-2000s, boomers had melted into the culture—moved on, got unmarried and remarried, watched their children have children, left old places, built new ones, second ones, third ones. Some of the old baggage did travel along with us. But you can no longer tell who we are just by peeking into our living rooms.