Looking through some old photos the other day, I couldn’t help but notice how, despite the conservativeness of the generation, just how garish the grandparents' home décor of the 80’s truly was.
Even now, when passing a charity shop, I always smile when I see a mainstay of my grandmother’s ornament cabinet: The bearded Chinese fisherman. Quite why the aged folk of suburban blighty felt attuned to such an ornament, I'll never know, but it was an unlikely décor hit.
The ornament cabinet itself seems to have gone for a burton: It's as if that age group wanted to show off, in museum style, the commercialised products they had managed to frequent over the years and store them in a glass cage for posterity. Then, as now, such an ostentatious display of average income wealth was the domain of the female of the species, with my grandfather only given enough space to display his cat's cradle, which he would gladly share around when we came over for a liver sausage sandwich as we gleefully smashed the balls against each other.
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The carpets were also a thing of majestic, if garish, beauty: Swirling masses of browns and oranges that brought on a hangover after so much of a sip of alcohol as grandad dozed in his recliner chair and got good purchase out of the pile cushion that all men of his ilk seemed to have. That was, of course, in days before I realised what piles were and we used to pretend to eat it, imagining it was the world’s biggest Polo, or wear it as a Russian Cossack hat.
The walls were crammed with pictures of badly printed, often sad looking, girls or women: Some working the land, and others with a tear running down their faces. Other geriatrics, taking a differing tact, would adorn the walls with the type of pictures you saw, and still see, in Chinese restaurants, with light up waterfalls highlighting some far-flung countryside vista in the back end of Asia.
The sofas were an extension of the carpet, seemingly designed by Stevie Wonder and Helen Keller and all homes had those odd brown cups to place under the sofa legs or wheels to “protect the carpet”, although from what, I don’t know. But, of course, I do the décor of the 80’s grandparent a disservice by describing it as “garish”.
Now such furnishings for nesters are best described as “kitsch”, as, seemingly behind a wall of tongue in cheek humour, we embrace the eccentricity of such a great time in human existence as we try our best to recreate the happiness that period furnished us with…
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