Decorating a 1970s Inspired Room

When you think of the 1970s style you probably immediately think of avocado green and harvest gold and shag carpeting. If you have ever rented an apartment you have probably been lucky enough to enjoy remnants of green or gold appliances. This decorating style was still clinging to the pop art elements of the 1960s while embracing the mass production aesthetic of the 1970s. Incorporating this style into your design offers a retro look that is truly exciting and fun.

Before understanding how to incorporate this style into your room design, you may want to appreciate the trends of that period so you can see where they naturally fit a more modern home.

Crazy Color

Most 1970s design found colors based in nature like dark wood, mossy greens, daffodil yellow, pumpkin orange and the ever-famous harvest gold. These colors permeated the landscape throughout the 1970s and some of these rooms still survive today. And actually if you tried to design a room using these colors today, you would look at your finished result and swear that it was simply left over from the 1970’s. So when you are looking to this period for inspiration, you do no simply want to replicate the old style, you want to find new ways to interpret the style to create a new and bold statement. For example, while you would never want to move an avocado green refrigerator into your home, you might enjoy a beautiful silk pillow in that same color on your couch or as a woven place mat on your table. While a plastic orange table might make you go cross-eyed, a dash of orange in a small plastic vase may lend just the right spark to liven up a room. Using a 1970s color palette to accent a neutral room can be fresh and nostalgic all at once.

Build a Foundation of Texture

The 1970s style was all about texture. It actually pushed texture over the top and applied in unexpected places. Rough woolen upholstery, fuzzy shag carpet, rough wall paneling, smooth shiny plastic all juxtaposed against each other made a tactile extravaganza. Simply pulling one of these elements out of a 1970s style room and inserting into a modern room would likely produce a comical result, so instead you really need to select the element and interpret it to compliment your design. For example, instead of installing a shag rug, add a shag pillow to your couch or a green throw to the back of the couch.

Graceful Movement

Since the seventies aesthetic pulled much of its inspiration from nature, the style was dominated by curving lines. Everything from molded plastic chairs to accessories to graphics all were inspired by elements from nature. This element of the 1970s style translates easily into our current design aesthetic. With the push for preserving nature and incorporating environmentally friendly design in our current design trends, bringing in the seventies obsession with nature does not need much translation. Bringing in colors from the seventies to support current organic designs is a wonderfully complimentary match.

In Today’s Language

When you are looking to create rooms that are retro inspired, you can look to public places that have done much of the work for you. For example, Hotel Sax has designed rooms with a nod to the fifties, sixties and seventies. By studying how they pull the element of a period into a modern design, you can begin to translate your own favorite elements from a seventies room to work in your space today.

Elements from the seventies like bold graphics, natural colors and lines can all translate easily into any room today. By using just a splash of a seventies inspired color palette and incorporating the seventies green and gold into a room by way of accessories such as metal wall vases and wall sculptures, you give a retro twist to your room instead of just making it look old.

By balancing pops of retro influence around a room you can make a stunning and individual room that hearkens back to the days of crazy shag carpets, shiny plastic furniture and amazing colors pulled straight from the outdoors. By paying attention to scale and balance,all of these elements can be introduced into a modern room, and the results rather than being horrible or comical are actually stunning.

All text copyright Shanel. Photo from Flickr - "Blue Banquette" courtesy of army.arch.