The Americans is a really good drama, but I really pay attention to all the interiors and the fashion. It's just fascinating how much people loved peach in the 80s.

Noooooooooooooooooo! (eyes bulge in disbelief, breath catches painfully in chest) Some things should not be recycled or "reinvented" but should proceed directly to the dump, where they can, with the aid of industrious armies of colonizers and fungi and other unsung elements of nature, return to cellular purity. The '80s were bad enough the first time around in terms of fashion and decor. Let us not elevate them to undeserved style status because of television attention or a misguided worship of anything that has attained a generation's worth of age. Everything old should NOT automatically boomerang back to be new again.

the owl cookie jar definitely reminds me of one my aunt made in ceramics class

It's the same as the style of any other decade coming back into vogue -- we will filter out the trends that still seem SO bad this time around.

I like the idea of "high wasted jeans".

So, "high wasted" jeans? Sounds like jeans who like to party. I think the exterior shots of their house are a bit too modern, but the interiors and clothing are hideously 80s. Sweater vests!

Weird post. I have not heard anyone say, "Oooh that kitchen in The Americans! We're redoing ours to look just like it." That show is briging nothing back.

Come on, AT.

I really like this for people who live in 70's or 80's housing. It bothers me so much, seeing before and afters where remodels clash with the era of a house. In ten years there is going to be a whole generation of people talking about the lost architecture and interior details that are so easy to scoff at now. I mean, if you want a french country kitchen, don't buy a split level house.

I love the show. I laughed at the ski jacket one of the kids wore in a previous episode because I had one so similar.

I'm old enough to know now that styles come and go and come back again. Back in the 80s, I would demand "tapered" jeans and laugh riotously at my mom in her bellbottoms in pictures from the 70s before I was born. I would never be caught dead in something so hideous!! By the mid-90s no one would be caught dead in tight jeans and everyone wore "flare leg jeans" - essentially BELL BOTTOMS. And we've already come back! I've mostly retired my flare leg jeans and now "skinny jeans" are in. These are no different than the "tapered" jeans of my childhood.

It's so silly. When ever I see some screaming "oh my god that was so hideous, we'll NEVER return to that!" I just have to laugh. Yes, we will return to that and probably soon. (Same as 15 years from now, AT-ers will be scraping subway tile off their kitchens and bathrooms, complaining of how dated it makes the room. And any subway tile that survives 20 years after that will be "vintage"!)

That show is pretty awesome, but I've never seen anyone wearing anything or living anywhere that I'd like to revive. However, they do a good job to make it all look fairly normal and not costume-y.

Whoa! High wasted jeans!!! Party on!

@Gillianne - your post reminds me of a quote from the great, and wise, designer Valentino Garavani:

"I didn't like the '80s at all; it was a vulgar moment of fashion."

I'd rather have Formica than paneling!!! I grew up with knotty pine walls that had to be washed and waxed once a year. I also at one time lived with painted paneling. Give me good ole plasterboard walls any day!!!

As someone who remembers the '80s well, neither of those kitchens are very accurate...

Those owls were big in the '70s, not the '80s, ditto that wallpaper. By the time the '80s rolled in, people were pretty tired of them.

There was little in the way of butcher block at the time, and definitely not what looks like beech from IKEA. But worst of all, those cupboards are nothing like the cupboards of the '80s -- not the handles, not their color, and not their shape. Not even close. Cupboards of the '80s turn up on AT all the time -- oak or other wood, usually with inset arches.

The almond dishwasher is pretty accurate though, as well as the sink, taps and formica.

(I'm a fan of Dyson toasters, but there is nothing about them that channels the '80s)

Sorry, but these sets don't impress me with their accuracy; quite the contrary.

mschatelaine, as someone who came of age and had my first house in the 80's I couldn't agree more. I love the show, but it's a hodge podge and not accurate at all.

Ugh, who'd want to bring the 70's or 80's back in terms of colors and style? No thanks!

@ Gillianne: these are words of wisdom, they are, they are. That said, methinks the set designers got their decades all mixed up.

"The Americans is a new television drama that is bringing an not-currently-in-favor era back into style with mustard yellow and high wasted jeans. The early 1980’s style of the kitchen in The Americans is bringing back wood paneling and Harvest Gold appliances, but there is a modern way to get the early 80’s look without the formica. "

WHAT? Do these two sentences make sense to anyone? Who is writing the Apartment Therapy posts these days??!

@mschatelaine: well, the series is set in the early 80s and not everybody remodeled all the time or was always following the newest trends. Kind of reminds me of the Bettys and Dons mad men kitchen which looked 50s and not 60s, but the thing is, they already lived there for some time and so it maked sense that their suburbia house would have a 50s and not 60s kitchen. Same with the Americans, it makes sense that they have 70s things leftover from when they first moved in/started to buy stuff in the US (which would have been in the 70s) and that not everything in their lives would be right on trend. There are plenty of 1980s, 1990s, 2000s things in my parents house and they got just rid of their 1970s pots and pans which I have now and if my life would be a series made in 2030 people would say how period inaccurate my pans are, "those are 1970, not 2010s, how could the set decorator mix up those decades!"

@fulinlin: well said. i was about to make the same comment.

GAAA! haha "high-WAISTED" methinks

the harvest color scheme seems out of the 70s

@fulinlin and 77bpm --

You seem to overlook that while it can be acceptable to go backwards in time when designing a set, it is not acceptable to leap ahead of the time period in question, which is exactly what this set does.

Those kitchen cupboards are from the '00s, as are the handles. Cabinet hardware in the '80s was nothing like that, much less the cabinets. Believe me, in the '80s, there was no such thing as white kitchen cupboards, least of all ones with such a profile. Just didn't exist.

The beech butcherblock didn't come around until the early '90s -- I remember this particularly clearly as we used it in our own kitchen reno in '92, and it had just come on the market.

Now, let's have a look at some of the other glaring inconsistencies...

The wallpaper... That kind of op-art(ish) wallpaper was popular in the late '60s/early '70s with the trendy design types. (That's not quite the wallpaper which turned up in the average middle-class suburban home) Trendy high-design types were much rarer than today, and tended to embrace design trends, which seemed to cycle more wildly back in the day then they do now. This is a bold wallpaper that you would tire of in a few years; from the design alone, you wouldn't hang on to it for 10 or more. In any case, you wouldn't hang onto wallpaper used as a backsplash behind a sink that long -- that's heavy-duty use and would have been tattered and stained. And again -- you wouldn't find early '70s wallpaper behind cabinets from the '00s unless you are leafing through an issue of Domino.

A set designer, especially when working on a project set in a defined historical period, has to be a material culture expert -- thoroughly understand the material culture of the period in question so as to maintain set consistency. An inherent part of that is understanding who used what, when, how and why. It's not just about making an appealing design, but a consistent and accurate one. The set has to have a core consistency.

This set clearly fails the test of core integrity -- it gets the facts wrong, way wrong.

mschatelaine: Don't know where you grew up but we had white cupboards like those in our home in the 60's. And in beach houses, like where I grew up, tons of people had butcher block counters. I think of them as classic and a staple of old Hampton's houses. You may be a set designer but lighten up

You had kitchen cabinets in your house in the '60s with inset European hinges? (you'll note that the hinges don't show on the cupboard doors in the picture above)

Inset European hinges didn't make it into mid-range kitchen cabinetry until the early 1990s, when IKEA popularized them in North America.

And I'm not a set designer -- I just don't appreciate faux historicism and inaccuracy.

@mschatelaine: nobody is arguing that they got every small detail right (like the hinges of the cupboards) since most of us wouldn't notice something like the hinges anyway. But that they would have a seventies owl or a seventies backlash? Sounds about right for me.

@mschatelaine: nobody is arguing that they got every small detail right (like the hinges of the cupboards) since most of us wouldn't notice something like the hinges anyway. But that they would have a seventies owl or a seventies backlash? Sounds about right for me.