This room box is a reasonable facsimile of the living room at my parents’ house around Christmas, 1961. I used old photos as a reference to try to gather pieces that were similar to what the room contained at the time. It is, of course, not identical, partly because the actual space in the room was larger, and I am missing the whole archway to the dining room. The furniture in here is closer together than it actually was, but, again, this is fairly close to the original.
The idea came about when I came across a couch and chair set that reminded me of the ones we had. I had the green chair and ottoman custom made, and painted unfinished coffee and end tables to roughly approximate the ones in our living room. I also made the two end table lamps out of beads. The original lamps were ceramic and had two open loops, but these beads with the center rhinestones looked very much like them. They were at the house for many years, even after other furnishings were changed.
In 1961, we had just gotten a piano, and had a black and white TV that was on top of a low bookcase. The large bookcase in the front left was actually a bookcase door that my father had built. Again, this one looks enough like it for me to remember the real one. I took the painting over the couch out of my German-American dollhouse, because it is very similar to one that was in this room, that had been given to my parents by my grandparents as a wedding gift, and was always over the sofa.
Not too many years later, my parents got new furniture and a beautiful patterned rug, but this is how I remember the room most of my childhood.
