“I Am Pretty Sure They Are Now Illegal”: 44 Home Features That Have Been Faded Into History
Trends are everywhere, influencing everything from clothing to homes, hairstyles, and even dances. And while many of them come and go in cycles—just look at the fashionistas nowadays rocking outfits resembling what Britney wore in the early 2000s—some never seem to regain the popularity they once had.
Today, we’re focusing on home trends that failed to stand the test of time. One redditor recently started a discussion about them, asking fellow netizens what some fancy home features are that have faded into history, and many people went down memory lane, recalling what they had in their own homes or saw in other people’s. If you’re curious to see what features are no longer considered fancy—nor legal, in some cases—scroll down to find their answers on the list below.
If you’re curious to see what features are no longer considered fancy—nor legal, in some cases—scroll down to find their answers on the list below, where you will also find Bored Panda’s interview with a social historian and author of 70s House: A bold homage to the most daring decade in design, Estelle Bilson.
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Laundry chutes. In one house it was from the second floor to the basement, in another from the kitchen to the basement.
Phone nooks.
nakedonmygoat: My house has one. I use it for knick-knacks.
My childhood home didn't just have a phone nook, it was almost a phone booth inset into the hallway with its own built in seat. All it lacked was a door. I absolutely loved it and used it for hours on end after school.
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.
Nowadays, vintage furniture and details that many people would consider outdated can be beautifully incorporated into home interiors. However, few homes are built in the exact same style as they were back in the ‘60s, or the ‘80s, for instance.
This list is great proof of that – unless your home was built back in the day, it’s unlikely to have a phone nook or a dumbwaiter, or other features the netizens mentioned, which were once considered fancy but are now obsolete.
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.
The attic fans should still be a thing, especially in really hot, humid areas. Depending on the particular shade of pink or green, as well as the contrasting color(s) of the tiles and porcelain, it might look kinda preppy, but it’s it really an eyesore. Some of it might be a b***h to find replacements for, though.
Milk doors. Small doors usually adjacent to side entrances, where the dairymen would leave products.
Some people on this list expressed regret over certain features going out of style; as did social historian and vintage item enthusiast Estelle Bilson. “I have always been interested in interiors since I was a child,” she told Bored Panda in a recent interview. “I grew up with an antique dealer father and was constantly at auctions and junk shops; I was instantly drawn towards bright colors, plastics and space-age shapes.”
Living rooms with 1-3 steps down.
Decorative tile in bathrooms in god-awful color combinations -pink/black, etc.
My friends bought a home in FL that was built around an indoor swimming pool. The house was a U-shape and every room (except bathrooms) opened onto the pool deck.
Talking about features that have changed significantly or disappeared altogether, Bilson shared that the thing from the past she misses in homes nowadays is vintage lighting: “[It] was just so EXTRA. They really considered it from a practical and an aesthetic perspective – it was not only functional, but beautiful, too. Modern lighting is just so… flat. And LED lightbulbs really feel harsh compared to incandescent bulbs.”
Trash compactors were big in new $$$ homes when I was a kid. We were impressed when people installed them in their existing homes.
Many homes used to have all-around porches for shade to help in the summer.
Pre-A/C and central heating, they had to be clever to stay cool. They’d design houses with great airflow, like the front and back doors lined up so upending them would allow air flow through, and make sure to plant shade trees near them, so they’d be cooler in the summer, but let a lot of sunlight—-aka solar heat—-in autumn when the leaves fell off and the colder weather rolled in. Upstairs they had screened-in sleeping porches to catch some of the cooler outside air on hot nights. If you move into an older house with these features, make use of them. It just might keep your heating and cooling bills low until the weather gets too unbearable.
I've seen photos homes built in the 70s and the living room area is kinda designed like a "conversation pit"...dude that is so cool and I would love to have a home like that
“My other favorites are things like kitchen hatches used to serve food and dumb waiters,” the expert continued, adding that she also loves conversation pits. “They went out of popularity in the late ‘80s but I think they are absolutely stunning,” she told Bored Panda.
“I would say that television and later mobile phones, which killed interaction and conversation, helped in the decline of conversation pits. I know there were a lot of fears about people falling in which led to them being filled in. To me they're the height of luxury and sophistication.”
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!!".
Our family farm house had one of these as well. PROS: A lot less noise because the actual vacuum was in the basement. Better for allergy people because the outlet air is also going to the basement plus there is room down there to install some sort of HEPA filter if you want. CON: More expensive, need to be installed during house build (much easier anyway). The hose you plug into the wall is rather long since you typically had about one suction point per room. This meant the hose was kind of a PITA to roll back up and store.
I think hand cranked dumbwaiters are pretty much gone for good.
TBH, there are other ways to use them—-and I don’t mean riding in them like we did when we were dumb kids (I’m amazed I have lived to tell about all the dumb s**t we did when we were kids back in the day). If there’s no actual laundry chute, you could send your hamper down in it. If someone in the family is sick in bed on the upper floor of the house, you can send their dinner up—-and back down—-without having to balance it to avoid spilling anything while going up and down the stairs. Lots of things can be moved between floors in old dumb waiters without anyone having to negotiate the stairs. Think outside the box, folks!
The same way features popular in homes back in the day disappeared over time, design trends popular nowadays will likely become obsolete, too. At least some of them.
Speculating which ones will be the first to fade into history, Bilson admitted that she hopes it will be flipping houses. “One trend I hope that'll fade is one where people flip houses and remove all vintage architectural detail. It hurts my soul when I see homes gutted with no appreciation for their past,” she shared.
To show you how poor I grew up: fold away ironing boards. Ooh la la!
Finished basements as “recreation rooms,” long before family rooms were built.
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.
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.
Floor outlets.
I actually had some installed in a condo I owned as the rooms were fairly large and to run a wired lamp across the floor would have been a real trip hazard.
I was thinking just the other day how much I miss a water bed and was wondering if you could still get one. We used to have a couple of water bed stores, but they are long gone.
Pro tip, if you have a decent amount of piercings water beds are NOT your friend
Bread warming drawers.
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.
This now sounds like a nightmare and a disaster waiting to happen, and I am pretty sure they are now illegal, or at the very least, inadvisable.
We had that intercom in our 1973 built house. We used it as a baby monitor, would put the baby’s room on listen and pipe it to the family room which was downstairs. That required a bunch of switch flipping at the central station to figure out. They weren’t exactly flexible or user friendly. Had to do everything at the central station.
That was the only practical use we got out it in over 40 years.
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.
Imagine if you pulled up the metal plate there and be able to witness 70 years of different meals and things 😳
Kitchen counters that wrapped around a corner with a little 4-layer shelf thing at the curve.
Matchy-matchy draperies, wallpaper, carpeting in every room.
Our house had a brick indoor planter box by the stairs. Never had a plant in it the entire time we lived there. We mostly put junk in it that we couldn't find a place for anywhere else.
My dad’s house where he grew up had a ballroom. It was long out of use by the time they bought it.
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.
Most of the houses built in the 1950s in "Lamorinda" area of the SF East Bay have brink fireplaces in the kitchen with a separate fireplace for a rotisserie.
Double-hung windows are another thing that isn't common these days. My house has them, and guess what they are made out of. And then! And then! My storm windows are also double-hung. They are an absolute PAIN to clean, but then I can heat the house in January with a match.
Mirror-tile walls.
I hated them back in the day,. I thought they were tacky and looked like the walls of a bordello. I would not have them in my house now, even if they become the height of chic. I will take my regular non-reflective walls any day, and choose to put up A mirror in one spot on one wall, not the entire circumference of the damned room, thank you very much.
Not sure if it was a "fancy" feature, but you rarely see new homes with detached garages.
At one time people liked wood panelled walls. I think they're horrible, dark and depressing.
An oven embedded in the kitchen wall. I can only imagine what a pain in the butt it would be to have to replace!
It's just that in the past, appliances really lasted a lifetime and it was possible to repair them without spending more than the purchase price (as happens today), so the practicality of replacing or dismantling them was put on the back burner.
Round beds.
Sixties to seventies. Considered really cool and sexy, but a b-i-t-c-h to make and to even find sheets for. Ditto for the water bed, which followed it. Water beds were actually rather comfortable, plus they were normal bed-shaped and you could get sheets for them, but they were highly impractical, especially if you had pets with claws. Not to mention children. As people found out the hard way.
I wouldn't call it fancy but some older homes had open bricks in the attic, I mean just holes where there wasn't a brick, in a cute pattern so there was air flow.
Atriums, unfortunately. Besides bringing the chores and smells of the outdoors indoors, people were lazy and didn't want to maintain them. Plus, they were a security hazard, an easy way-in for thieves.
In Southeast Europe (a.k.a. the Balkans), the epitome of fancy back in the day was to have a display cabinet... but not with china/crystal, but rather full of expensive Western booze. Quite the status symbol in the 80's and 90's. And sometimes the bottles were kept as trophies, even after they were empty of their content :P
This was pretty interesting. The vast majority of these are things I've never seen irl, and quite a few I've never even heard of (like fold-out ironing boards).
Front and back patios. Decks started taking over in the 80s and patios went away. I miss them.
One of my friends wallpapered her house, including the light switches, with floral wallpaper and it looked so comfortable and cosy.
"Which outdated home feature do you think could make a comeback?" Make houses affordable to buy again and keep to pass on to your children. A homestead.
In Southeast Europe (a.k.a. the Balkans), the epitome of fancy back in the day was to have a display cabinet... but not with china/crystal, but rather full of expensive Western booze. Quite the status symbol in the 80's and 90's. And sometimes the bottles were kept as trophies, even after they were empty of their content :P
This was pretty interesting. The vast majority of these are things I've never seen irl, and quite a few I've never even heard of (like fold-out ironing boards).
Front and back patios. Decks started taking over in the 80s and patios went away. I miss them.
One of my friends wallpapered her house, including the light switches, with floral wallpaper and it looked so comfortable and cosy.
"Which outdated home feature do you think could make a comeback?" Make houses affordable to buy again and keep to pass on to your children. A homestead.