Once upon a time, homes had all sorts of features that were considered the peak of convenience and style—think built-in phone nooks, dumbwaiters, and laundry chutes.
These home appliance and design trends were often seen as the latest in modern living, making everyday tasks a bit easier (or at least more interesting).
But over the years, these once-beloved additions have quietly disappeared, replaced by newer trends and technology.
In this gallery, we’re taking a look back at home features that were once all the rage but have since faded into history.
Whether they spark a bit of nostalgia or just make you wonder why they ever existed, these details give us a glimpse into how home life has changed over the decades.
1. Laundry chutes. In one house it was from the second floor to the basement, in another from the kitchen to the basement.
2. Phone nooks.
3. China cabinets in the dining room.
4. Solid oak doors. Oak everything. This house was built in the 90’s but to old standards. It was oak plate rails in the walls. I was going to have them removed when I repainted, but they are glued and screwed to the walls. Removing them would have cost a small fortune, so I left them up… As a result, this house is incredibly solid and very, very quiet. Even my WIC has solid oak doors. Why? Who knows. I’m pretty sure this house could take a direct hit from a nuclear missile and not be worse for wear.
5. Trash compactors were big in new $$$ homes when I was a kid. We were impressed when people installed them in their existing homes.
6. Living rooms with 1-3 steps down.
7. Milk doors. Small doors usually adjacent to side entrances, where the dairymen would leave products.
8. Bright pink or turquoise or green tile bathrooms with matching tub and toilet and sink. Whole house attic fans that could suck all of the heat out of the house in minutes.
9. Central vacuum. I always thought there would be a clog in the pipe inside of a wall somewhere which would render the whole machine useless. I never had one but I had friends who did. Interestingly, though, I’m seeing these videos on instagram now showing people using them and all the comments are like the people just discovered fire. “WOW!! What a great idea!! No more lugging a vacuum around. Brilliant!!”.
10. I think hand cranked dumbwaiters are pretty much gone for good.
11. Finished basements as “recreation rooms,” long before family rooms were built.
12. High-fidelity radios in the walls of each room. Saw that once in one of the richer towns in the SF Bay Area. Thing is that they were all early ’60s models and by the ’80s they were dated and sort of beside the point.
13. Plate racks built into the wall.
14. Glass brick —very desirable in the 1950’s.
15. Bread warming drawers.
16. To show you how poor I grew up: fold away ironing boards. Ooh la la!
17. Maybe not particularly fancy, but the house I grew up in (from the late 1950s) had an incinerator in the basement. You could just throw in burnable items and *POOF* they were rendered into ashes.
18. Floor outlets.
19. I was surprised to see a motor device embedded into a friend’s house kitchen countertop. They said it’s a built-in blender motor that was there when they bought the house. Seemed like a super fancy thing.
20. Knotty pine. Our 1950s house has Knotty Pine kitchen cabinets and flooring throughout. We didn’t know about the knotty pine floors when we bought the house, as the owners had them covered with carpet. The floors were in pristine condition, as they had always been covered since the house was built. We kept all the knotty pine. One other oddity was every closet in the house was cedar-lined.
21. A bar in the home. They are *wildly* impractical unless you are entertaining (aka giving out free alcohol) a few days a week, at which point you’re just throwing away your money.
H/T Bored Panda
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