Richard: So clearly, I was wrong: our little friend a couple of posts back did not fall prey to the aesthetic whims of a crack commando unit of lesbian decoratoresses. That adorable young man with the cluttered family room is actually a disco-dancin’, Oscar Wilde-readin’, Streisand-ticket-holdin’ friend of Dorothy, and this is obviously his daddy. (I mean that in the most erotically charged sense of the word.) How else to explain that wall color? Surely only one batch of it was made before the secret recipe was tossed in a turkey fryer and destroyed.

However, unlike boy’s special area, daddy’s rumpus room is nearly 50-50. On the plus side: the dog plaque. If you’re a dog lover, you can’t go too wrong in my book. Also: the gray recliner. Yes, recliner. I know. But that gray is Christian Siriano-ferrocshe. Isaac Mizrahi would call it sophisticated; I call it nostalgic. Add a Nagel print, and you’re in my first apartment of the middle-late 80s. Last on the good list: the black wastebasket (what can I say, I’m a sucker for kitsch) and that giant bottle of Lubriderm or its generic equivalent, which surely came in handy while daddy was watching the Teen Choice Awards.

On the downside: tabbed drapes with curtain-rod sheers (match ‘em, people!), more of that nasty faux-brass carried over from junior’s room, and see-through plastic storage containers, which are never, ever, ever acceptable in semi-public spaces. For one, daddy’s bins contain children’s games, which implies something creepy and unsuitable for family websites like this one. And for two, how can anyone cultivate an air of father-like authority with his collection of mini croquet mallets (or shower curtain rings) laying in plain view?

My: I would hereby like to attest that I am, in fact, a fairly wide-hipped lesbian from Ireland. And boys, seriously, we do NOT paint walls Pussy Pink. I mean, would you paint a wall… I dunno, Penis Purple? Foreskin Fuschia? Testicle Tope?

This room screams closet case with an over-compensating wife. It’s like a colour-coded way of saying “Can’t Host”. Only a straight woman, desperately overdoing the whole “femininity” shtick to convince herself that her marriage ticks all the correct gender-role boxes, could have such an utter taste breakdown. She probably thinned the paint with tears. Alice, Monica, Janet, whoever you are – you have our sympathy but really honey, it’s time to wake up and smell the astroglide (no matter how hard you try to mask it with a Glade plugin).

File Under:Living Room Wreckage

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Richard: I’ll be honest: at first glance, this pic made me a little misty, a little nostalgic. The plywood/pressboard paneling; the six-inch shelving brackets (price stickers still attached); the beer steins, proudly displayed; the D&D-friendly crystal ball and other head shop paraphernalia; the turntable stereo (complete with cassettes; I’m guessing a Rush/Foreigner blend); the spindle chair; and most importantly, the giant empty bottle of the world’s nastiest substance, Galliano: this assortment of old-skool oddities could only mean one thing — we have traveled back in time. I assumed that this was a heretofore unknown photo of my hot, cooze-hound cousin, Kenneth, sitting in his unfinished attic, which he’d converted to a man-cave decades before any of us knew what a man-cave was. But then I looked to the left … fridge packs. Fucking fridge packs. There are no vintage fridge packs, y’all. This photo was taken, like, yesterday. Maybe the day before yesterday, but that’s it. This is not my cousin Kenneth. This is not his unfinished attic that always smelled vaguely of weed and brake fluid and cum rags. This is some Kenneth wannabe. So, nice job, faux-Kenneth: you got me. You totally got me. I hope you won’t mind me saying you got an awful lot of wood there, with one notable exception.

My: I … I really don’t understand this. I’m not American, so maybe I’ve missed some kind of cultural cue here but where I come from we only use chip-board for scaffolding and boxes and stuff. Seeing it used as a wall-treatment has all the disorientating effect of a punch in the gut.

It’s like… It’s like the most disturbing-ever remake of I Dream of Jeannie — we’re looking inside a packing crate to see a tiny little man sitting in state among his miniature possessions. That’s my rationalization and I’m sticking to it.

File Under:Violations of Space

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