For Kitchen and Bath month, we're starting up a new round of Guess the Decade. This bright, cheeful eat-in kitchen is your latest design detective assignment.Take a good look at the room and then jump below to make your best guess:
Comments and conjecture are welcome in the comments, as always, but if you know the source of the photo - PLEASE don't tell. We promise to reveal it tomorrow, so please check back then for the answer.
Good luck!
More Guess The Decade:
Comments (32)
I need a bigger picture. But I guessed '40s anyway.
I'm going with the '90s as well. The hanging lanterns and general cutesy clutter remind me of the kitchen from the apartment set of the TV show "Friends". It could easily be any of the listed decades, but the 90s just seems right to me.
Those baskets definitely scream 90's. But I might guess 60's.
oh, tricky!
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing this kitchen in a magazine in the 1990s.
The gigantic clock makes me think 90s.
This is probably intended to look like a 1940's kitchen, but the refrigerator and plug-in clock are from the 1950's...
...however the bar/peninsula, stainless steel countertop, italian birch counterstools and painted floorcloth are the dead giveaways: 1990's
The bar with barstools makes it very modern to me. Isn't the open kitchen a recent phenomenon?
Are those zinc countertops or stainless steel? Hard to tell but all the collectable stuff makes me think 90s rather than vintage. I feel like my grandma would've thought a classy kitchen in the 40s and 50s would be more formal.
I remember seeing this kitchen in Country Living or Country Home not so long ago...my vote is the 2000's.
And my fuzzy memory says I clipped this just a few years ago from Met Home...
The tablecloth made me think 70s, but the text 'if you know the source of the photo' makes me think it's more recent - otherwise people would be unfamilar with it. Did you give yourself away AT? :)
I'm guessing '40's. "I spy" art deco pottery on the top of the cabinets that might be Abingdon Pottery, manufactured in Abingdon, Illinois, 1933-1950's. I wish the picture was clearer, too.
There's an odd combination of old & formal (the china in the cabinets) and old & cutesy (the fridge) and more recent (the lanterns, baskets). There's a strong cost-plus/pier one vibe to those asian/basket element, which is what says 90's to me. This stuff is too cliche now to featured prominently in a fancy mag.
I'm going with 40's
I went with the eighties...but this one was tough...no matter what the answer actually turns out to be...I know I'm not very fond of it...it seems like it would feel too cluttered
I definately think the 40's...I'm so curious now!
The trick here is that it's smack in the middle of a transitional period between the 80's and 90's. I'm going with 90's, but just barely. This looks exactly like something you guys scanned from an issue of Metropolitan Home or House & Garden (During it's Anna Wintour incarnation as "HG"), circa 1989-1992.
Is this some Broadway choreographer's weekend house in upstate New York?
I go with 90's because to me it feels like it has more of an edge of that 1990's attempt at gaiety and heedlessness--sort of "Monica's apartment from 'Friends'" or "Benny & Joon."
That frenchy commode back by the staircase with the flower arrangement pulls everything back towards the late 80's, so there I am thinking 1991-1992-ish.
Too bad there's no wooden bowl filled with Granny Smith apples or Michael Graves Alessi teakettle to more decisively date this kitchen by.
I'm with Bruised in that it looks like the home of someone associated with Broadway... In the late '70s and early '80s the homes of people like Zoe Caldwell with their impressive Majolica collections used to show up in the pages of House Beautiful, and this bears such a resemblance to such features, which have fallen out of favour.
If it weren't for the damned stainless steel counters and the bar stools, I might say '80s...
The McCoy Pottery on top of the cabinets is very Martha 1990s, the silly stacked picnic baskets are '80s, and the vintage fridge '70s (in the '90s and '00s using vintage fridges became a "bad thing" because of energy and environmental concerns). The colour of the floor and walls and cabinets is very '70s.
This is a tough one!
I guessed the 90's but it can also be now.
If it's a recent (last 20 years) picture, I want the source for that floor. I think it's great.
Although probably more recent the room has a 50's feel to me.
I guessed 80s. It may have been in a magazine in the 90s, but I'll bet it was designed in the 80s.
is that a copper countertop?
I agree with everyone who said it has a 'Friends' vibe and guessed 90s.
And, hey, to the people who are saying where they saw it, doesn't that kind of take the fun out of it for everyone?
Based on the fridge, stove, and linoleum floor, I'm saying 50s.
NOBODY in the 40s or 50s (or even 60s or 70s) would have had those glass cabinets with the chinese mullions in them. NO ONE! It doesn't even look like there's food in those cabinets or kitchen stuff, just fancy plate collection. It's just too studiously retro appearing.
PS and definitely not that light fixture AND the clock wouldn't have had a visible cord - there would have been a clock outlet there (like I have in my 50s/80s hybrid kitchen).
I have 22 years of magazine clips organized in binders (yes, I know I'm insane). This particular image is in my 'kitchen' binder! There are a lot of fun details that you can't discern from the photo here... I won't give any more away.
i feel like even though this WANTS to be 40s, i dont think anyone in the 40s would have something as impractical as a flower vase head on their counter top. the counter stools are pretty 80s to me, so i went with the 80s.
I am guessing 19-cheesy-3
the lanterns are very 1990's and the 1990's were, if you were not a wallpaper magazine devotee, about all the previous decades. notice the 20's chairs, 40's tablecloth, 50's counters and appliances.
It's trying hard to be the year 1956 in a house built in 1921...but this is now.
The photography gives it away, but more than that the stainless steel and that mottled grey (granite?) counters are now. Plus, flea market chic is more of a newer trend. Nobody "collected" that many picnic baskets or tea kettles or vases of a single size back in the day. You had one. And party lanterns? In the kitchen? That would have been like putting up a Christmas tree in the bathtub. The kitchen was a workroom, where people invested a good 4-5 hours a day working, not a showroom for dishes. Several of the standard kitchen accoutrements of the era are missing.
Those cabinets would have been exceedingly eccentric if original. Again, that kind of ornamentation wasn't put in a workroom.
That is a photo taken in the past 4 years at the latest, is my guess.