Time to update the ‘80s decor
It’s time to redecorate if you’re still living in the last century.
All things 1980s have inspired a retro revival in terms of fashion, music and design — even the recent passing of former President Reagan has made us think fondly of the age of big hair, Culture Club and English country-style interiors.
Nostalgia’s fine, but if you’re still living in the 1980s, it’s time to redecorate.
“We love the ‘80s because it keeps us in business,” says top Canadian-based interior designer and Home and Garden Television personality Candice Olson.
“There’s this awful ‘80s museum in the sky … and that was the era of the balloon shade,” she says with a laugh. “We all made a lot of mistakes.”
Olson, who is known for her wit and style as she makes over a room on each episode of her TV show, “Divine Design,” restyles a lot of 1980s-era houses and she says design cliches are everywhere.
Like many designers and do-it-yourselfers, she’s found that the building boom of that decade produced a lot of interiors that now look a little dated.
Here are some sure-fire signs your interior is vintage 1980s, and some ways to update.
Interior designer Cathy Craney knows immediately when she’s in a 1980s-era kitchen or bath — she’s torn out a lot of them.
“I look at the light fixtures,” she says. “Light fixtures have come a long way. … If you walked into a kitchen in the ‘80s, you saw a fluorescent tube over the sink and a big box over the middle of the kitchen. Now we have wonderful, recessed lighting and under-counter lighting.”
Addressing bad lighting is a way to make an immediate improvement in a house.
If adding recessed, low-voltage halogen lighting in the ceiling isn’t in a budget, designer Candice Olson will replace a hall fixture or kitchen fixture with a 10-foot track with about eight tiny halogen heads.
“There’s a lot of retrofit kits,” she says. “You can take the old fixture off and retrofit down to the halogen fixture. It can reduce the size to about a three-inch opening.”
Bathroom lighting, too, has come a long way, says Craney.
“You’d see those big, Hollywood-style light bulbs all around the mirror,” Craney says. “They’re so harsh. Now, hopefully, most of those are gone!”
Designer Susan Basham says low-voltage lighting deserves a lot of credit for the turnaround.
Interiors of the 1980s were generally colorful and included a lot of pattern. The 1990s saw white and beige come into their own. And today, things are broadly mixed, but texture has never been more onstage.
Neutrals still are widely popular, but so is color. Floral fabrics have their staunch fans, as do clean-lined contemporary furnishings.
Houses are increasingly hard to characterize as “traditional” or “contemporary,” and while designers will use the term “transitional,” you just don’t hear that in casual conversation.
“It was a classic (in terms of English country style) time but a very heavily ornamented time,” Basham says about the 1980s. “Everything was bright and colorful but perhaps not as serene as today.”
Now, she notes, “You see very classic details but they’re very stylized and pared down.”
Moldings in a house, including baseboards and casing around windows and doors, are a telltale sign of a house’s age.
Olson says many early 1980s houses have thin, two-inch door casings.
The solution for skimpy molding? “Take the existing molding and take a simple panel molding and you’ll add two inches outside the casing,” says Olson. “Beef it up a little.”
And don’t forget flooring.
“Nobody did hardwood floors back then, and that’s huge (now),” Olson says. “Anyone who rips out carpet that’s been there for five, six, seven years realizes it is not a good thing.”
Overall, the 1980s were about excess in many ways, including interior design. While we may have loved it back then, it sometimes doesn’t translate well.
“I think then, everything tended to be a lot more cluttered,” she says. “Now, it’s a much more streamlined, simpler look.”