15 household items every ’70s kid will remember
Walk into any home between 1970 and 1979, and you would have known exactly what decade you were in. The colors alone gave it away. Here are 15 objects that felt completely ordinary then and look like relics now.
Avocado green appliances
The refrigerator, the oven, the dishwasher: all in that earthy green, paired with harvest gold and burnt orange to complete a palette that announced the decade from every corner of the kitchen.
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The rotary phone
Rotary phones hung on the kitchen wall with a coiled cord long enough to stretch across two rooms. Mess up the last digit, and you start the whole dial over.
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The console television
The family TV was furniture: a massive wooden cabinet with a built-in cathode-ray tube designed to anchor the living room. Changing the channel meant getting up and turning a dial.
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Wood paneling
Dark faux-wood paneling covered the walls of basements and dens nationwide, giving every room the feel of a hunting lodge and creating a look that was unmistakably of its moment.
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The Crock-Pot
The slow cooker arrived in American kitchens after Rival Manufacturing debuted it in 1971, marketed directly to working women with the slogan “cooks all day while the cook’s away.”
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Beaded curtains
Hung in doorways, beaded curtains added color, movement, and a soft clatter to any room. Their heyday was the 1970s, when the plastic variety came in every color imaginable and required nothing beyond a hook above the frame.
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The bean bag chair
Designed by three Italian architects in 1968 and adopted wholesale by the counterculture, the bean bag chair became a staple in every rec room and teenager’s bedroom. It was the unofficial furniture of the decade.
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The flip-number clock radio
The mechanical digits clicked over every minute with a satisfying sound, and the alarm it produced could wake the heaviest sleeper. Clock radios peaked in the 1970s, and the flip-number version was their most iconic form.
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The answering machine
A bulky cassette-based device that let you miss a call and still find out who it was. Two tapes handled the job: one for the outgoing message and one to record the incoming, which felt like science fiction to a generation raised on party lines.
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Encyclopedias
A full set on the shelf was a point of quiet pride, sold door-to-door and not cheap. They answered school questions and settled dinner table arguments until the Internet made them obsolete overnight.
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The electric can opener
Mounted on the counter in avocado green or harvest gold, the electric can opener made enough noise to alert the whole family that a meal was on its way. It was considered a genuine labor-saving marvel at the time.
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The waterbed
Patented in 1971 by designer Charles Hall, the waterbed promised floating bliss and delivered a surface that sloshed when you moved. Getting in and out required commitment. Owning one said something about you, though exactly what was never entirely clear.
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Popcorn ceilings
Textured, bumpy, and standard in new homes across North America throughout the decade, popcorn ceilings were believed to improve acoustics and hide imperfections. They have been scraped off by subsequent owners ever since.
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The harvest gold bathroom
Avocado green was for the kitchen. The bathroom went harvest gold: the toilet, the sink, the tub, and the tile all coordinated in the same warm, orange-tinted yellow right down to the soap dish.
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The record player
Many households kept their vinyl in a console stereo unit, a wooden cabinet with a built-in turntable that served as both sound system and living room furniture.
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Wrap up
These objects were not exotic at the time. Seen together now, they form a portrait of a decade that wore its personality right on its walls, in harvest gold and avocado green.
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