Nineteen-Laties

Nineteen-Laties essentially encompasses furniture and art from 1980 to 1999. It includes but is not limited to post-modern and Memphis styles. Beyond the Pierre Paulin and Baughman inspired interiors you would see on the set of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” is a wide net that takes in all the wild and weird from the last two decades of the 20th century. Tessellated stone, oak, brass, Lucite, pastels, amorphic and geometric shapes and overstuffed seating. No more sharp right angles. Nineteen-Laties furniture gets a bit bigger and overwhelming round, or “rount”. It’s the bent oak spindle-back sofa you sat on at Pep-Pep and Gam-Gam’s house when you watched Unsolved Mysteries or Golden Girls. Nineteen-Laties is less pretentious, familiar, and comfortable.

Country Modern (for lack of a better term) is hokey, oak-ee, tacky, a bit garish and also lots of fun. There’s also the glam-modern aspect, think mauve, neon, white and black lacquer finishes. It’s Semmi’s apartment from “Coming to America” and Todd and Margo’s aesthetic from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” It’s essentially the last period that embraced color and flare before the sad earth tones and cheap bonded leather take-over of the early 2000’s.

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