Mad Men Style: The Best of the 1960s from House Beautiful
A look back at the designs of the '60s and why we still love watching them on TV.
While Betty Draper was busy being a house wife in her Ossining, NY, home, House Beautiful was featuring cutting-edge home designs to make any 1960s woman swoon. Here, we take a look back at past designs and remind everyone why we still love to see similar styles every week on TV. For ideas on 1960s-style accessories, see Decorating the Mad Men Way.
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Media Platforms Design Team
Don Draper
Don Draper in season 6 of Mad Men
2Media Platforms Design Team
Mysterious Bedroom
At night, the bedroom becomes mysteriously beautiful, suffused with glowing light from sources concealed in the surrounding deck that may be dimmed or intensified in endless ways, combined almost like musical chords, to fit the occupant's need or mood. The bed wall is luminous enchantment in itself. Featured in the February 1960 issue.
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Media Platforms Design Team
Rich Living Room
Coming into the living room from the entry area during the day is like walking into a richly furnished pavilion, a securely sheltered space under a broad roof resting on substantial stone piers but otherwise open to views of the surrounding landscape. Featured in the February 1960 issue.
4Media Platforms Design Team
Elegant Kitchen
This is a kitchen to delight the eye and fire the imagination, for it is elegant, functional, and easy to maintain. Counters, base cabinets, and exposed wall areas are of plastic laminate. Featured in the February 1962 issue.
5Media Platforms Design Team
Versatile Kitchen
The center island, with lighting and a vent fan built in over the cooking unit, also serves as a work table and desk. Note the space above the cabinets over the sink through which, when the draperies in the passage are drawn aside, one can see the garden beyond. Featured in the February 1962 issue.
6Media Platforms Design Team
Inviting Living Room
This room emphasizes horizontal lines, which makes it seem larger than it really is. The long couch is three separate bed-length sections. And the round walnut-top table is supported by an adjustable central pedestal. Featured in the December 1961 issue.
7Media Platforms Design Team
Wood-Paneled Living Room
An East-Coaster feels more at home in an environment that is rich with tradition, such as the wood-paneled room shown here, whose details evoke a sense of the past. Featured in the October 1962 issue.
8Media Platforms Design Team
Gracious Kitchen
This large kitchen, approximately, 15 x 37 feet, has a refreshing warmth and graciousness that is characteristic of the entire house. The island unit divides the room into work centers, with a sitting room at the far end. Featured in the October 1961 issue.
9Media Platforms Design Team
Kitchen with Garden Room View
Even though there's no window opening directly to the outdoors, this kitchen still has an open, spacious feeling, achieved by a wall of glass that opens into the garden room and bathes the room in soft daylight. Featured in the September 1961 issue.
10Media Platforms Design Team
Long Living Room
This living room is a 23-foot-long space separated from the entry and kitchen by the brick fireplace. Featured in the August 1962 issue.
11Media Platforms Design Team
Living Room for a Busy Life
This living room's elegant refinement is achieved in a deceptively small area with easily maintained materials to make housekeeping simple. The result is an equally good setting for entertaining and a busy life. Featured in the May 1962 issue.
12Media Platforms Design Team
Non-Traditional Living Room
The living room reveals a fresh attitude toward furnishings with very little reliance upon East-Coast traditions. Here the taste is wide-ranging and open to many sources and influences. Note use of non-traditional fabrics on traditional chairs. Featured in November 1962 issue.
13Media Platforms Design Team
Wallpapered Bedroom
Adjustable shutter-blinds, relics of Victorian days, can be turned into effective ventilating doors to a clothes closet, besides giving a room a look of architecture. And a tester bed acquires contemporary freshness, unexpectedly valanced in wallpaper instead of fabric. Featured in the November 1962 issue.
14Media Platforms Design Team
Harmonious Living Room
The living room is a generously proportioned space having the openness and freedom characteristics of the day's feeling and thinking. It provides a harmonious setting for furnishings that are a mix of the old and new. The nature of this mix is particularly emphasized by the tall storage cabinet at the right. Featured in the September 1961 issue.
15Media Platforms Design Team
Small Bedroom
In an apartment bedroom, three kinds of screen join to form a distinguished display of Japanese art and a practical bed niche. This custom-made combination of louvers, shoji-type silk paneling, and an antique foil painted screen can embrace the bed in complete privacy. Featured in the November 1960 issue.
16Media Platforms Design Team
Japanese-Inspired Living Room
The living room is arranged with an asymmetrical placing of elements, preferred by the Japanese. It is carefully furnished with many fine Oriental works of art. At the entrance to the living room is the tokonoma (alcove) with its characteristic tokobashira, a column made of a tree trunk with only the bark removed. Featured in the September 1960 issue.
17Media Platforms Design Team
Living Room with Artwork
Impressionist painting and modern sculpture establish a key for sunny fabric colors and architectural pattern. Basic furnishings, used in company with a treasured painting by George Bellows, adapt easily to different rooms. Featured in the October 1960 issue.
18Media Platforms Design Team
Subtle Colors
Slender proportions, a high ceiling, subdued colors and finesse in detailing create a harmonious architectural background for a collection of 18th-century antiques in this house. Featured in the November 1960 issue.
19Media Platforms Design Team
Living Room with Outdoor Views
In a large living room, the main grouping of furniture is isolated from all through traffic. A low bench provides extra seating without turning focus away from the featured view into the treetops outside. Restrained drapery and furniture fabrics in green and gold harmonize with wood and cane of furniture and with outdoor scene. Featured in the October 1960 issue.
20Media Platforms Design Team
Conforming Furniture
Instead of being limited to one static arrangement, hexagonal snack tables can be used interchangeably in living, dining, or bedroom. All can stand alone, yet they can combine with each other to conform to whatever new rooms you place them in. Featured in the October 1961 issue.
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