I went searching for lamps like the one in the advertisement in the previous post, and found this:

in an online catalogue from Shapiro Auctioneers. The description suggests it’s likely to have been designed by Clement Meadmore, a famous Australian-American sculptor, who was designing furniture in the early 1950s. You may have seen his sculpture at the National Gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pvk/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

He originally studied industrial design (with a strong interest in aeronautical engineering) at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and you can see that industrial-atomic-spaceage look throughout his designs:

These chairs were made in 1950, and sold for about $5000 in 2008.

Retro Renovation (a blog of which I am a huge fan, oh my goodness the eye candy) has a new post up about upholstered bedspreads for the mid-century modern bedroom which you can buy from the site linked in the post. I had this post in my queue but thought I’d bump it up as it was timely.

Here’s an ad for these bedspreads, from Van Winkle, as printed in Australian Home Beautiful for September 1955. The text reads:

“Now.. Bedspreads in the Manhattan Manner”   In Manhattan Penthouses, 5th Avenue Mansions, and Long Island Estates, tailored, quilted Spreads are high fashion. Now Van Winkle brings this trend to Australia. Flawlessly quilted, generously flounced, faultlessly tailored to an original American design, a Van Winkle Spread is bedroom beauty at a budget price. Six fashion-favoured colours: Mexican Rose, Hollywood Green, Miami Sand, Kentucky Blue, Florida Rose, Pacific Blue.

The room in the ad’s got it all! An Eames-ish chair (and balcony furniture), a pouffe, designer lamp, barkcloth curtains, and tiki style sculptures.

(Click to enlarge)

I had a lilac bedspread like this when I was a small child, way back inna seventies, I’m not sure what happened to it.

Many companies released “advertorial” brochures in the years after World War Two, as soon as restrictions were lifted and regular supply of things like paints and fabrics was resumed. Taubmans, an Australian paint company, released this lovely booklet – The Colorful Home by Anne Stewart. [There was a trend in the 40s to use American spellings and phrases, probably due to the influence of Hollywood and of United States servicemen stationed here during the war.]

There’s no date given, but since it’s all about updating your tired old dark wood Art Deco and Victorian furniture with which you have Made Do with during the war, and there’s no modernist furniture in the pictures, I’ll take a guess at 1947-49. I found it in the National Library along with a few other interesting and similar promotional publications. Since colour photocopies cost something ridiculous like $2 a page, and taking a scanner to the library is fraught with difficulty, I used my iPhone to take photos of the pages. I’ve edited it together into a PDF which you can download: The Colorful Home (PDF 38MB).

There are plenty of before-and-after illustrations for all rooms of the house, as well as your exterior and garden. Here are the afters!

A living room: all the dark wood has been painted in "Biscuit", and the furniture modernised by cutting down the legs and removing frames.

Mission brown Victorian furniture and fittings painted in new "Llama Grey"(!) gloss, and the linoleum painted bright royal blue.

The bare concrete floor has been painted "Grotto Green" as has the window frame and door; the furniture is red-trimmed now; and the walls are an ever-popular bright cream.

A nursery scheme designed for a girl, with "Pale Orchid" walls and "Cambridge Blue" enamel paint on all the furnishings. Venetian blinds were advertised as healthful, because you could control "dangerous drafts" so the baby wouldn't catch a chill.

A very pretty little kitchen in a classic 40s colour scheme! Yet more cream paint, with "Oriental Red" trim, and "Burnt Sand" painted lino. The curtains are "snowy white muslin with red coin spots". I want a shiny red sifter like that!

The large kitchen, with walls in "Buttercream", furniture in "Lettuce Green", and floor in "Forest Green". Check out the Cornish ware crockery, and aluminium canister set.

There's that cream paint again! even on the bathtub exterior. The stool is "Marigold", the floor a grey-blue, and the shower curtains and mat have a seagull motif with black trim!

The "oppressive stained furniture becomes delightfully modern" when painted in glossy cream! The walls are "Distant Blue" (a soft turquoise).

Home sweet home - with "Mecca Green" and "Deep Cream".

Found at Bargain Hunter (Anglicare) in Queanbeyan. A white cotton tablecloth with cross stitch embroidery, and six matching napkins. Very pretty! Probably from the 1950s?  I think it was either my grandfather or grandmother who told me that these tablecloth sets were actually made in China, and the ladies who did the embroidery would stitch with the cloth in water as it made it easier to see the threads of the background cloth, and the floss wouldn’t snarl. Update: My mum says her similar tablecloth was actually a wedding present in 1974, so this is probably not as old as I thought it was. The design and colours are nicely “era-neutral” though, don’t you think?

Salvos Fyshwick had all handbags for $2, and what did I spy amongst the 90s vinyl? This! A vintage brown lizardskin handbag. Est. 1950s. The lining is leather with two elasticated pockets. After I get some reptile leather conditioner and tidy it up, the only flaw is a little crack in the underside of the handle. Bargain!

Salvos in Tuggeranong had a bunch of pretty glassware and ceramics. I got this oval pink ceramic plate, it looks 1950s but could be newer. There’s no “Dishwasher and Microwave safe” label on the underside, in fact there are no markings at all. Mystery!

I also got these very cute space-age themed drinking glasses.

And these 1970s blue glass bits. They’re not really wide enough to be parfait or dessert dishes, so they’re probably brandy or liqueur glasses. They came in a shiny black PVC box with a YSL Parfum label inside (obviously a gift pack of some kind).

I also bought some very deco-looking EPNS bits, but I’ll post photos of those after I remember to buy some Silvo.

The Australian Home Journal was a magazine mostly about fashion for the average woman. Each cover featured 3-5 outfits and inside were full-size paper tissue patterns and instructions on how to make them up. There were also more outfits illustrated inside, amd you could buy them by mail order from the AHJ pattern service. The rest of the magazine featured knitting and crochet patterns, fashion-related DIY and handy hints, short fiction, advice columns, recipes, and plenty of ads for powders and potions to keep you regular, make you slim, and keep your baby quiet. Celebrity news is limited to two pages on the latest film (and later TV) releases and a description of a star like Esther Williams or Hedy Lamarr’s latest outfit. The writing is often quite humorously snippy, a little al0ng the lines of today’s Jezebel.

There are lots of great period fashion hints to be had, including on how to accessorise.

The Australian National Library has a good collection of AHJs, from 1904 through to 1982, however is missing all the 1970s issues. Archive.org has some digitised issues from 1949-1952: Australian Home Journal.

Does your house have a pink pre-1960s bathroom? Don’t sucumb to the lure of flat-pack-tastic bathrooms spruiked on weekend renovation TV shows and rip it out. Restore it! This site, Save the Pink Bathrooms, explains why.

I used to live in a little 1927 cottage in Barton that hadn’t been renovated. It still had the old Canberra wood-fired stove in the kitchen, and a bathroom that was pink-tastic. The people who bought the house from our landlord extended the house and I’m not sure that piece of the past is there anymore. (And I’m not sure I really appreciated the design of that cottage while I lived there, actually. Hindsight! No bench space in the kitchen was frustrating, however.)

If you look on real estate listings sites you can usually get pictures of the insides of these places when they come up for sale or rent.  The weirdest renovations, to me, are not those that modernise the interior, but those that do a Federation style. Does not compute!

Here is a matching set I got recently. Lovely glossy black glass (AKA “French jet”) and a kind of stylised crown shape for the clip on earrings, and a big leaf-shaped brooch. They always get plenty of compliments. 1950s, judging from the design and also the clips – it’s unsigned. Navette-shaped stones were quite popular in costume jewellery.

My current favourite handbag. It’s probably early mid1950s – early 1960s, and made of vinyl with lizard embossing, and brass fittings. Maker is Stylecraft Miami. It holds a lot more than most vintage bags and one of the inner pockets is just the right size for an iPhone. The bag is all black on the other side, so you can sort of have two looks depending on which way you hold it. Found on eBay Australia. I grabbed it because the two-tone bags are a little unusual; one of the only ones I’ve seen in a fashion plate is this black and white one from The Australian Home Journal (2 January, 1956). The black and white bag also seems unusually large for the era!