17 Things Every Living Room Displayed in the 1960s That Vanished

Step into an American living room in the 1960s and everything on display told a story about who the family was and what they valued. The furniture was carefully arranged for company. The shelves held objects that signaled taste, status, and patriotism. Television was new enough to still feel like a luxury worth showing off. Decorative objects were chosen with intention and often kept for decades. Then cultural shifts, new design trends, and the disposable consumer economy slowly erased nearly all of it. What replaced these displays was minimalism, screens, and mass-produced decor with no personal history attached. This list revisits 17 things that once sat proudly in American living rooms and are now nearly impossible to find in any home being decorated today.

1. The Console Television Set

In the 1960s, television was not just an appliance; it was the centerpiece of the entire living room. Console TVs came housed in large wooden cabinets designed to look like fine furniture, with doors that closed over the screen when not in use. Families arranged their sofas and chairs around it, as previous generations had arranged seating around a fireplace. As TVs shrank and then expanded into flat-panel models mounted flush to walls, the grand console became obsolete. Today, these massive wooden units turn up at estate sales, too large and impractical for modern homes. They are striking artifacts of a time when watching television felt like a formal household occasion worth designing furniture around.

2. The Ceramic Ashtray Collection

Smoking was not just tolerated in 1960s living rooms; it was designed for. Nearly every home displayed at least one prominent ashtray, often several, arranged on coffee tables, end tables, and built-in shelves. Many were decorative ceramic pieces picked up as souvenirs from vacation destinations or given as gifts. Hostesses kept matching sets for guests. As smoking rates declined sharply through the 1980s and 1990s and indoor smoking became socially unacceptable, ashtrays disappeared from living room displays almost overnight. Finding them displayed in a modern living room as functional objects is essentially impossible. They now live in curio cabinets and antique shops rather than on coffee tables.

3. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Set

No 1960s living room bookcase was complete without a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book Encyclopedia displayed in matching leather-bound volumes. These were serious financial investments, often sold door to door through payment plans, and owning a complete set signaled educational ambition and middle-class respectability. Children were sent to look things up rather than being told answers directly. Parents pointed to the shelf with pride when guests visited. The internet made printed encyclopedias functionally obsolete by the early 2000s. The uniform rows of matching spines that once anchored living room bookshelves have been replaced by streaming devices, framed photos, and decorative objects that hold no factual information whatsoever.

4. The Hi-Fi Stereo Console

The hi-fi stereo console was the audio equivalent of the console television: a large, furniture-grade wooden cabinet housing a turntable, AM and FM radio, and speakers, all in one handsome unit. Brands like Magnavox, Fisher, and Zenith built consoles designed to anchor a living room wall the way a sideboard anchored a dining room. Playing records was a deliberate, communal activity that families gathered around. The rise of component stereo systems in the late 1960s and 1970s made the all-in-one console feel outdated, and the shift to cassettes, CDs, and eventually streaming made the turntable itself a specialty item. Today, the hi-fi console is a rare thrift store find. Vinyl enthusiasts have brought record players back, but the grand wooden console as living room furniture belongs entirely to the past.

5. Framed Paint by Number Artwork

Paint-by-number kits exploded in popularity through the 1950s and reached peak living room presence in the 1960s. Completed paintings of landscapes, horses, sailboats, and pastoral scenes were framed and hung with genuine pride alongside professionally made artwork. The hobby was marketed as a democratizing force, putting artistic expression within reach of anyone willing to sit down with a brush and a numbered canvas. Critics mocked paint-by-number as lowbrow, but millions of American families disagreed and displayed their finished works prominently. As tastes shifted toward abstract and pop art influences and home decor became more self-conscious, paint-by-number paintings migrated to basements and thrift stores.

6. The Rotating Curio Cabinet

Curio cabinets with glass panels and built-in lighting were a living room staple throughout the 1960s, used to display collections of small figurines, souvenir spoons, thimbles, porcelain animals, and decorative glassware. The rotating or corner-mounted versions were especially popular, allowing guests to admire every angle of the collection inside. Hummel figurines, Lladro porcelain, and Precious Moments pieces were treated as genuine investments and displayed accordingly. As minimalist design philosophies gained influence and younger generations showed little interest in maintaining collections of breakable figurines, the curio cabinet fell out of fashion.

7. The Rotary Telephone on a Side Table

In the 1960s, the telephone was a living room fixture, placed deliberately on a dedicated side table or telephone stand near a comfortable chair. Rotary phones came in a limited range of colors and were rented from the phone company rather than owned outright. Having a phone in the living room was a social statement as much as a practical one. Conversations were communal events since there was no privacy. Touch-tone phones began replacing rotary models in the late 1960s, and cordless phones eventually freed the telephone from its dedicated table entirely. The living room phone stand, once a considered piece of household furniture, is now a completely extinct category of home furnishing.

8. The Sunburst Wall Clock

The sunburst or starburst wall clock was one of the defining decorative objects of mid-century American interiors and remained prominent through most of the 1960s. These clocks featured a central clock face surrounded by radiating metal spikes, rods, or abstract shapes in brass, gold, or black finishes. They were hung above sofas, fireplaces, and entertainment centers as statement pieces rather than purely functional timekeepers. As decorating trends shifted toward earthier, more organic aesthetics in the late 1960s and 1970s, the starburst clock felt dated. Today, original examples are highly collectible mid-century modern objects.

9. The Matching Furniture Suite

Living rooms in the 1960s were furnished in complete matching suites: sofa, loveseat, armchair, coffee table, and end tables all purchased together from the same manufacturer in the same fabric and finish. Department stores and furniture showrooms sold these suites as unified packages, and homeowners treated mixing pieces from different collections as a design failure rather than a style choice. The look communicated stability and financial planning. Interior design culture through the 1980s and 1990s began celebrating eclectic mixing of styles and eras, and the perfectly matched suite started to read as boring rather than aspirational.

10. The Console Record Player Cabinet

Separate from the full hi-fi console, many 1960s living rooms featured a dedicated record player cabinet: a lower, table-height wooden unit housing a turntable and modest speakers, designed to double as a surface for displaying objects on top. These were more affordable than full stereo consoles and more intentional than a portable record player. Album covers were sometimes displayed leaning against the side as casual decoration. RCA, Zenith, and dozens of smaller manufacturers produced these in styles ranging from colonial to Danish modern to appeal to different living room aesthetics. The cassette tape effectively ended the record player cabinet era through the 1970s.

11. Macrame Wall Hangings

Macrame exploded into American living rooms in the late 1960s as the folk art and craft movement intersected with bohemian interior design trends. Large knotted wall hangings in natural jute and cotton rope became a standard display item, often covering significant portions of a living room wall. They communicated handmade authenticity and counterculture sensibility even in relatively mainstream suburban homes. Craft kits made macrame accessible to anyone willing to learn basic knotting patterns, and the results were displayed with real pride. As interior design moved toward the sleek, polished look of the late 1970s and 1980s, macrame was retired to attics and garage sales.

12. The Brass Magazine Rack

Magazine racks were considered essential living room furniture in the 1960s, and the most common version was a freestanding brass or wrought-iron rack positioned beside the sofa or armchair, holding issues of Life, Look, Reader’s Digest, and National Geographic. Magazines were expensive enough and informative enough to be kept for months and displayed as reading material for guests. The rack itself was a considered purchase and part of the room’s overall furniture plan. As magazine publishing declined and digital media replaced print, the functional need for a magazine rack disappeared. The physical magazines that justified its presence stopped arriving.

13. The Plaster of Paris Sculpture

Affordable plaster of Paris decorative sculptures were a common living room display item throughout the 1960s. These included busts of historical figures, abstract forms, animal figures, and religious imagery, often painted to resemble bronze, marble, or ceramic at a fraction of the cost. They sat on bookshelves, console tables, and fireplace mantels as affordable attempts at cultivated taste. Mail-order catalogs and department stores sold them widely, making them accessible to households that could not afford genuine sculpture. As resin and polymer casting technologies advanced and home decor trended toward mass-produced pieces from chains like Pier 1 and HomeGoods, plaster sculptures lost their market entirely.

14. The Conversation Pit

The conversation pit was one of the most architecturally ambitious living room features of the 1960s, built into upscale and architecturally forward homes as a sunken seating area designed specifically to encourage intimate group discussion. Lined with built-in cushioned seating and sometimes a central fireplace or coffee table, the pit arranged guests in a circular configuration that made conversation feel deliberate and focused. It appeared in design magazines, television shows, and the aspirational imagination of anyone who watched 1960s sophistication unfold on screen. Liability concerns, impracticality for families with children and elderly members, and changing furniture preferences made conversation pits essentially extinct by the 1980s.

15. The Black and White Family Portrait Wall

Before color photography became affordable and ubiquitous, the living room wall in most American homes featured a carefully arranged display of black-and-white family portraits taken by professional photographers. These were formal affairs: children dressed in their best clothes, hair combed, expressions serious. The portraits were printed large, framed in dark wood or gold, and positioned prominently as a statement of family pride and continuity. School portrait packages and Sears portrait studios carried the tradition into the color era, but the formal black-and-white living room wall portrait became associated with an older, more formal generation. Casual color snapshots replaced the formal portrait as the dominant mode of family display.

16. The Television Rabbit Ears Antenna

Rabbit ears antennas sat on top of nearly every living room television in the 1960s, a pair of adjustable metal rods that pulled in broadcast signals with varying degrees of success depending on weather, geography, and the precise angle of the antenna at any given moment. Adjusting the rabbit ears while someone else watched the screen and called out picture quality updates was a universal household experience. Aluminum foil was wrapped around the tips as a folk remedy for poor reception. The introduction of cable television through the 1970s and 1980s made antennas unnecessary for most households, and the flat-screen television’s design made the rooftop-style mount standard for those who still used over-the-air signals. The rabbit ears, as a living room object, disappeared so completely that younger generations often have to be told what they were and why families spent so much time fussing with them.

17. The Avocado Green or Harvest Gold Sofa

No color palette defined 1960s and early 1970s American living rooms more completely than avocado green and harvest gold. Sofas, armchairs, carpets, and drapes in these tones filled middle-class homes from coast to coast, pushed heavily by furniture manufacturers and interior design trends that treated earthy, muted tones as the height of modern sophistication. Matching the sofa to the carpet in the same green or gold family was considered good design. The palette collapsed almost overnight in the late 1970s as design culture swung toward earth tones, then pastels, then neutrals. By the 1980s, avocado green was shorthand for dated taste rather than stylish living.

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• retro decor
• vintage interiors
• boomer nostalgia
• Lost Furniture
• Home History