70s House | Estelle Bilson
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book posted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Estelle Bilson: So, hello Suzy. My name's Estelle, and I am the creator of 70s House Manchester and the author of 70s House, which is a bold homage to the most daring decade in design.
Suzy Chase: Nostalgia has always been a powerful force in design, but it has become even more prominent in the post-pandemic world, with people spending more and more time at home and seeking comfort and familiar things. Design trends have shifted towards nostalgia as a way to evoke positive emotions and memories. This book is a bold homage to the most daring decade in design. So, Estelle, when you started out exploring all things 70s, did you ever imagine you'd be the UK's leading expert on '70s style and design?
Estelle Bilson: Absolutely not. It's completely accidental, Suzy. When I started collecting sort of vintage in 70s when I was really young, I was about 13. If I sort of talked back to 13-year-old Estelle and told her where it would end up, I think she would be incredibly surprised.
Suzy Chase: In the book I learned about Barbara Hulanicki, and Barbara is the founder of Biba. She said, your 70s Manchester Home is the most important look since Conran, and that is a huge compliment. I would love to hear about this lifestyle brand that influenced you.
Estelle Bilson: I first sort of heard of Barbara Hulanicki and Biba, when I was a child. My mom and dad lived in London in the '70s, late '60s and early '70s, and my mom worked in South Kensington Kensington High Street, where Biba was situated. She had several stores from a small old apothecary store right through... I think it was within a decade, she'd gone from a tiny corner shop to a huge, huge department store, which was called Big Biba. It was a massive art deco department store.
My mom shopped in there in her lunch hour and used to tell me about all the things she'd bought. It was quite unusual at the time because when you had the very acid colors of the '60s and '70s, bright oranges and lots of bright cop pops of color, Barbara was very unique in the fact that she used a lot of very 1920s, 30s for his sludgy colors and was very much responsible for the '70s sort of retrospective look at sort of art deco and sort of Hollywood glamor.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. That brings me to the color orange because I feel like it was the defining divide between the '60s and '70s style.
Estelle Bilson: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was talking to Barbara, she was almost in the 50s and 60s, early 60s, the orange was a no-no, she was like, "It wasn't a color that was used," and you roll onto the very late '60s as you roll into the next decade or the 70s, if you ask anybody what color they associate with the decade, it's orange. Colors like bright purples, bright greens, bright oranges hadn't really been seen, if at all, to the degree, the zestiness in interior design. I think it is one of the sort of one thing that people hold onto is that, the use of especially brown and orange as a color combination, where instantly it evokes very much that '70s atmosphere.
Suzy Chase: That's so funny because there's not any other era in design that really evokes a feeling. I would say.
Estelle Bilson: I think it's one of the things, I mean, it's tricky because when you look back at something, I think was it 10 years back and people think it's something that's incredibly NAF and the phrase, the decade that taste forgot was very much coined by the Face Magazine in the 1980s where in that sort of very sort of either pastorally or very neutral 80s that came out, everyone was horrified looking back for 10 years at how bright and in your face and unapologetic the 70s was.
Suzy Chase: So your whole life has been shaped by furniture from as far back as you can remember. Your dad was a cabinet maker and an antiques dealer. I love this, even your holidays were centered around antique shops and jumble sales. You said you looked like the Clampetts from the Beverly Hillbillies with stuff strapped on the roof of your car. So growing up in your family, you were either board stiff or you got with the program and started collecting. So what did you collect as a young girl?
Estelle Bilson: It started very much with sort of vintage, which would be now clusters vintage, then it was just in the 90s, it was the secondhand closing and then accessories. I started buying compacts and handbags and small plastic bits and kitsch. I was a big fan of kitsch, still am. And just buy little plastic trinkets and church keys that I would see everywhere at car boots sales and auctions.
Try to just buy things that sang to my very soul and just really spoke to me and were very joyous. So that's, I guess, where it started, and obviously as the years have gone past, and you end up with a house, you end up buying more things, bigger things, furniture, but that's where it started.
So it was very much that, you were walking around car boot sales, which I think are very peculiarly British things, Suzy. I think you have yard sales and estate sales. We have people driving to a field and a car and unloading all of their rubbish into a field and people go around and buy it. So it was very much that walking rounds, and you'd be given a bit of pocket money, maybe a pound or something, and find something you want to buy for a pound, and other kids bought toys and I ended up buying vintage compacts, et cetera.
Suzy Chase: That's hilarious. I love it. So fast forward and your love of orange and swirls hasn't diminished. It never ever occurred to you that the way you decorated your home was unusual and it's just something you loved. I think that's one of the great things that this book teaches us.
Estelle Bilson: A friend of mine always said, "The best things happen to someone who is unapologetically authentic." For anybody that's known me for any length of time has always known I've been into what was called pensioner or a grandma chic. They used to sort of ride it as. But yeah, I mean, I just surrounded myself with things I love. I mean, I grew up in a very, very unconventional house in the fact that when it was sort of going through this late '70s, I was born in the 70s, so 70s, 80s, 90s, where contemporaries families were decorating with, I don't know, with IKEA and stuff. My dad was still sort of squiring away Georgian and Victorian furniture.
So I grew up in a very, almost thematic house myself, with a lot of William Morris, a lot of Liberty, a lot of mahogany furniture. So it never really occurred to me that, A, you buy something new, you always buy secondhand or vintage, or that having stuff in your house that was different to everybody else, it was always there. So it never really struck me, and it's odd when people say it, "You never thought it was odd that you did that." I was like, "No, because I just surrounded with myself with things I love," which happens to be sort of late 60s, early 70s right through 70s itself, orange, bright colors.
So yeah, I never thought it was strange. But then, when you've been brought up with parents that have got strange obsessions, I think you don't quite realize until you grow up being like, "Oh no, not everyone does that."
Suzy Chase: Have you ever gotten down to why the 70s? What is it about the 70s?
Estelle Bilson: I get asked that question an awful lot and I wish I had a really good answer for it, and unfortunately I don't, Suzy. My answer is why not. It's a very personal. I think it's on a very base level. It's like when you fall in love with somebody, they maybe have nice hands or a nice eyes, or they might be nice brown hair that you like or something. But I don't think you ever really know the essence of why you love them. You just do. I think I can never really put my finger on the essence of why I love it.
I really need to come up with a better answer. But it just speaks to me and brings me joy. I can flick through eBay of an evening and it's like, "No, no, no, no. Oh, look at that," and it's usually very graphic, very bold colors, very bold shapes, and it just lights me up. It just turns me on, it switches me on, and it's very much like, "Oh, I love that." I cannot tell you why I love it. It is just very primal and it's like, "I love that."
Suzy Chase: I love that answer. I don't think you need to come up with a different one. I think we all get it. So I also want to talk about longing to replace the items you lost at an early age. Could you please tell the story?
Estelle Bilson: It's actually a very sad story, and it's a story that my... I mean, because I was three, so I remember it. My sister wasn't yet born and it just exists to me, but if I ever tried to talk to my mom about it, she gets very, very upset because to her, she would've been in her mid-30s at the time. We got flooded out, Suzy. It was really quite traumatic. It was quite sad, really. I mean, we lost everything. We lived where my dad had his business and my dad was a cabinet maker, as you mentioned previously. Yeah, it was really, really heavy storm, and it was fast really the local water company sort of held back the storm water and then put it all through the storm system. It just ended up coming out of our house because we were quite situated low in a valley.
I remember the night it happened. We had open rafters in the ceilings. So my dad was trying to put important pieces of furniture, photographs, et cetera, up high. I remember them waking me up and saying, "We have to go now." But my dad had been up all night and waiting and watching the floodwater getting higher and higher and going, "We have to go." So we were homeless when I was three. My mom was eight and a half months pregnant with my sister, and we were homeless, which we slept on friends floors for a week or so. Then we tried to get emergency housing, but it was very stressful for my parents.
I do remember going back to try and salvage some of our possessions and seeing toys and stuff, and my mom was like, "Don't touch, don't touch." Because obviously the floodwater was filthy. I think to sort of say you've been made homeless age three is when people go, "Oh, my God." But yeah, it was quite traumatic really at the time for my family.
Suzy Chase: So that leads me to one of your most treasured possessions, and that's your Marcel Breuer Long Chair. This chair is considered to be one of the most important pieces of furniture to emerge from the interwar modern movement. It's in the permanent collections of several internationally renowned museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I would love to hear about this chair.
Estelle Bilson: Well, this was one of the pieces which did survive. It was one of my dad's favorite pieces and was very much salvaged and put out of harm's way when it flooded. But Marshall Breuer was designing in the Bauhaus Movement sort of in the early part of the 20th century. Various things happened, Second World War, for instance, where things weren't being made. Bauhaus was all related to Germany and everything. So roll on till the mid to late 60s, a company called Isokon in London got the rights to restart remaking the designs. My dad was actually working as a production manager at the time for a company called Lord Roberts Workshop, which was, I believe a charity that helped ex-servicemen that had been injured in both First and Second World War actually. He had the contract to make some, outsource some furniture for Isokon.
So he had this chair, this Long Chair, and if any listeners want to have a look, just Google Marcel Breuer Long Chair, because it's quite a stunning piece. I think one of the first... It was very much ergonomically designed, very much that sort of thing. So when you sit in it, they are absolutely ridiculously comfortable. Because we'd had a really tough time. One thing led to another, and it was decided that actually we probably should sell that to get some money, because that's what you do when you need to get hold of some money quick. It's, you sell things, don't you? So my dad sold it.
Suzy Chase: That broke my heart.
It's the saddest thing I've ever heard.
Estelle Bilson: Well, I mean, matter of fact, Suzy, things happen in people's lives and you just have to deal with it. So it was decided that that was to be sold. My dad always blamed my mom and go, "Well, you made me sell it," and my mom was like, "Well, I didn't make you sell it, you decided to sell it." So I always sort of loved sitting in that chair with my dad. It's some of my earliest memories, very, very happy memories of sitting in there between my dad's lap, and we would listen to music and vinyl together and stuff. So when it was sold, I remember thinking, "Oh, I love that chair. One day I'll own that chair." I mean, roll on what, 35 years I think, I was saying to my partner, Steven, "I'd really love one of those chairs."
I was looking and they were fetching ridiculous amounts on eBay and by vintage dealers, and I was like, "Oh, I'm never going to get one." Then I happened to be wandering through eBay, as you do with an evening, and it was one for sale, and then it was for sale eight miles away, and it was in a terrible, terrible condition. I mean, literally just the worst condition like veneer pulling because it's bent wood. So the ply veneer was peeling and it needed to do upholstering, but it was a Marcel Breuer Long Chair. I said to Steve, "It's up for sale and I've got just the amount of money in my PayPal account from the opening bid." At this point he's like, "Oh, do what you want. You're going to do it anyway." I was like, "Yes. Yes, I am."
I remember sitting there, and it was, I think, 11 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday or something, and I put the opening bid in and I sat there and waited and waited till the end of the auction with bated breaths, and I was the only bidder, and I got it for an absolute steal. Like I said, it was completely, it's completely wrecked. But the lovely thing is, I actually did take it down to my father, who is in his late 70s now, and he restored it for me and then I reupholstered it.
So it has a lot of family meaning. The fact that I bought it, I bought the chair back, and he was the first person I called and I bought it. I was like, "Dad, you never guess what I bought." He's like, "What?" I was like, "I bought a Marcel Breuer Long Chair." So I think he was quite proud that I did that. But yeah, he restored it for me and I reupholstered it. So that's the one piece, I think, that in a case of a house fire or something, that I would run in and dash if it was a physical piece to save. But I do love it.
Suzy Chase: In the book you talk about how the first Earth Day on April 22nd, 1970 changed the way we started to think about interior design. So how did Earth Day influence us?
Estelle Bilson: I think the 70s was a very, very strange decade. I mean, you've got such stylistic changes, which I'm sure we'll cover later, but I think it was almost like the birth of modern consumerism. You've got a lot of things. People were still buying a lot of things, but there was definitely this anti-movement of, "What are we doing to the earth? What are we doing to the planet? What are the consequences of making all this plastic, making all of these things? Do we need them?" So half of the people are going buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Then there's a whole after the 60s, hippies that then are coming into parenting and families and they're like, "Hang on, what are we doing to our planet?"
That's where you got a lot of influence for the natural things coming in from the '70s. Whereas the start of the decade where you've got very much that sort of leftover from Space Race or Space Age, you've got then, people like macrame becoming a very, very important sort of crafting in the home, crochet, people are then starting to upcycle what would now be class's upcycling furniture. We had a comedy series by the BBC in the UK called The Good Life, where a man and his wife, he basically turns around and goes, "I don't want to work in the rat race anymore. I don't want to be a part of this," and tries to turn their little suburban garden into a farm so it becomes self-sufficient.
So where a lot of people laughed at this because it was a situation comedy. This was very much a theme going right through the '70s, where, "Can we raise our own food? Can we raise our own vegetables? Can we live an alternative lifestyle?" So that was the first time we really saw that as a movement.
Suzy Chase: So I'd love to chat about a few 70s elements that we can weave into our own home.
Estelle Bilson: Yes.
Suzy Chase: So first graphic stripes on the wall. Why did people start painting stripes on their walls?
Estelle Bilson: Well, it was a cheap way of updating your home in much, much more, and still is actually for those thrifty among us. It's a really cheap way of decorating. Wallpaper is quite expensive. I think the first person really to go with the super graphic star was Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. She was a Swiss trained American graphic designer. Well, she was involved with the Sea Ranch project in the late '60s and they ran out of money. So paint was cheap. As she says.
By the mid 70s, there was a Canadian designer called Ted Butler who released a DIY kit, which I think you can find occasionally on Etsy and eBay, which was around $7, which had the entire kit. If you look on Pinterest and put in super graphic kit, it does come up with the kit and it shows you how to create them. So there's like the swirls, the swoops, the wiggles. With masking tape and paint, you can achieve a really impactful mural on your wall without spending lots of money.
Suzy Chase: In your 70s Manchester House, how many walls do you have like that?
Estelle Bilson: I'm looking at one now in my office that is a very much a swoop. I've had them and I've painted over them and I've put them in again. I've got one in my kitchen and I've got one in my landing as well. They're really, really easy to do and really fun. If you don't like, it's just paint. If you do paint it and then go, "Oh, okay, I don't like that." Just paint over it. It just white paint.
Suzy Chase: So the first conversation pit I ever saw was on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and I fell in love with it. You call this an architectural oddity in the book?
Estelle Bilson: Yeah. I mean, love them, don't get me wrong. I would absolutely live and die for a conversation pit. They just aren't very prominent in the UK. I think you get them much more in European houses and especially in American houses. I think it is one of those things where very much a party, the atmosphere where you sat in these and you chatted, there's no TV, you sat looking at guests. But also I can understand why they fell out a favor. The stories of people's children's grandparents falling in, and also there was talk of people having a bit of upskirt action, while people walk past. So I can see why a lot of people filled them in, but they are achingly, achingly cool. But I think these should be returned. I think everyone should get off the phones and stop watching TV and get into a conversation pit and have a chat.
Suzy Chase: Vinyl, decorative vinyl came into play in our kitchen.
Estelle Bilson: This was something I wanted to update our kitchen and it was terribly, terribly dated and not in a good way. We had the most worthless gray work surfaces and I absolutely detest the color gray and I still can't afford to update it. Actually, if you look at kitchen work surfaces, there isn't a lot of choice. If you look at old 60s, 50s, 70s work surfaces, you had this beautiful bright color full micas, which just aren't prevalent now. So I was like, "Well, how am I going to get around this?" I had printed up a load of flooring, we call it in this country, sticky back plastic. It was just like what it's the sign writers use. So we had it printed and then applied it to our work services. Obviously we use that kitchen every day and it gets a lot of hard use, but it means that you have the versatility of putting any design you want on your work services.
Suzy Chase: One item in the book I'm not familiar with and I'm so curious about is West German pottery.
Estelle Bilson: Yeah, West German pottery. But it was very much born out of the sort of divide of East and West Germany and there was a lot of potteries. There's a few still left actually that's still making, but they didn't really seem to make the fat lava, that's nicknamed fat lava, because if you look at the pottery process, it has that textural quality of almost like hummus. So if you look at pieces from the very '60s and '70s, the color's purple, orange, red, yellow, green, and they have this kind of really lumpy quality.
I mean, a lot of people think they're quite ugly, but I quite like them because of the process, actually, all of them are different. Even if they're on the same batch number, they're, all of them are slightly different, and no two are the same because of the manufacturing process. But they are very much that love it or loathes it, lumpy, very natural looking, but then with huge pops of color. So you've got brown and red, brown and orange, brown and purple. So, yeah, they're very collectible now. They're getting really hard to find, especially in the bright colors.
Suzy Chase: I would love to hear about your Space Age study. What are some of the hallmarks of Space Age design?
Estelle Bilson: There was a lot of plastic used and a lot of metals covered in enamel. It's very much simple graphic shapes. If anyone sort of watches watch 2001 Space Odyssey, it's very much that, very sleek, very paired down, very minimalist. So I'm sitting in my office now at the moment and it's got white walls and it has these bold graphic stripes on it, and we've got a tulip chair that I'm sitting on.
A lot of it, because it is very expensive to get hold of. This office was a sort of a project in itself that I wanted to recreate that look without spending the big budget. So I upcycled an IKEA pedestal table into a desk and used IKEA furniture that was being discarded and applied again, vinyl, contact vinyl to give its pops of color and basically achieve that really bold, striking, simplistic look, but very much on the budget.
Suzy Chase: So tell me about your disco bathroom and why disco and not an avocado bathroom?
Estelle Bilson: I always wanted an avocado bathroom. I managed to source a load of vintage tiles and Steven basically turned around and was like, "Please, can we not have an avocado bathroom? I had one as a child and I hated it." I was like, "Well, I really want to." So I hadn't actually bought the suite and I was still looking for a vintage suite, and it was Christmas Eve, God, about three or four years ago now, and I was just looking through an eBay of a retro 70s vintage bathroom suites. One came up and he was working, he was a Christmas carol concert because he's a sound engineer, and I sent it to him, and he got back late that night, and I was like, "Did you see that bathroom suite?" He was like, "No, I read the title," and I was like, "Well, have a look at it."
He said, "It says brown bathroom suite. I do not want a color, a bathroom suite, the color of..." He said the S-word, but poo. I was like, "Oh, just look at it." He opened it and he went, "Oh, actually, I take that back. That's really cool." So for anyone listening, it's an ombre, a brown ombre bathroom suite. So it goes from chocolate brown right through mid brown to sort of very much like a wheat color. It was 20 pounds including all the taps and everything on eBay, and I threw 20 credit and we won it. So we got the entire suite for 20 pounds. When it arrived, a friend of mine picked it up for me in a van and it turns out it was quite a rare French bathroom, but it's quite fabulous, and we decided to pair it with a porcelain faux marble.
They're like a peachy bronzy mirrored mosaic tile. I mean, it's not for the fainthearted. So that's paired with gold ceilings and then it's got disco balls all over the ceiling, not for the fainthearted. It's just a bit of fun, really, that has that Studio 54 kind of Biba, talking about earlier Biba vibe. One of the things I actually wanted to do and never got round to doing, I wanted to get some sort of 8-track. So every time we switched on the light, it played Barry White or something. I've never managed to do that. One day, I'll have to try and find that. But I was like, "Wouldn't that be fabulous?" Initially, I always had thought in my head I was going to put the disco balls on the ceiling and there's quite, I think it's eight or nine of them.
My neighbor knew about this and she was like, "Have you put the disco balls up yet and I hadn't." Steve was like, "What?" I was like, "Louise, shii, don't say anything." He was like, "What's this for disco balls. You're not putting disco balls all over the bathroom it'll look ridiculous." So the moment his back was turned and he was out at work, I just put disco balls up and just drilled holes, put them all up. I always think it's easier to ask forgiveness and permission in these things when I had a vision and he actually came home and he was like, "Hmm, you've done it then." I was like, "Yeah," and I was like, "I know what you're going to say." He was like, "I can't say it," and I was like, "Come on, say it." He was like, "It looks good," and I was like, "I told you to trust me." So he loves it now. Life's too short for dull interiors.
Suzy Chase: I can't have a 70s book on and not talk about lava lamps. How did the lava lamp become associated with the '70s?
Estelle Bilson: I would say, it was invented in the 60s. So this popularity grew throughout the sort of 60s and the late 60s, early 70s. Sadly, it had a real decline in the late 70s towards the 80s, but I think it's very much to do with that counterculture, hippie movement. Dare I mentioned the word drugs, it has that hypnotic, pulsating, dimly lit. It's a whole vibe, and I think it has got a lot to do with recreational pastimes, shall we say, of the late 60s and 70s.
Suzy Chase: That's it in a nutshell.
Estelle Bilson: Yeah. I think so.
Suzy Chase: That's so funny.
Estelle Bilson: I mean, it's quite interesting. There was a guy that invented it, he was a naturist. He was like a nudist. So he was an RF pilot in the second world board and the nudist, quite an interesting chat, and he invented it out of a cocktail shaker because he saw an egg timer in a pub and it had that water and oil and he was like, "Hmm, okay, how do I do this and how do I turn it into a light?"
Suzy Chase: So how many lava lamps do you have?
Estelle Bilson: I have two. I have two.
Suzy Chase: Just two?
Estelle Bilson: Just two. I would like more. But where'd you put them?
Suzy Chase: You mean, you have nine disco balls in your bathroom, but you just have two lava lamps?
Estelle Bilson: Yeah. Just casually two. I do have one of their space projectors though, which is quite cool. So that's like the oil space projectors you would've seen in nightclubs. They do a version of that so you can project like pulsating oil images on your wall, which is really fun.
Suzy Chase: The very last chapter is entitled At Home with 70s House Manchester. I'm so curious to hear about this chapter and your home.
Estelle Bilson: I started decorating it years ago because that's what I liked and it was very much buying stuff I like. But also, along with that, you end up accumulating accessories, like drinking glasses, plates, and it doesn't really stop. I think when you're a collector and you're a collector because of nostalgia, you end up acquiring a lot of really random stuff.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Estelle Bilson: You can find me on social media and 70s House Manchester and my website is www.70shousemanchester.com.
Suzy Chase: Oh, Estelle, this has been so fun. Thanks for taking us on a trip down memory lane, and thanks for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast.
Estelle Bilson: It was my pleasure, Suzy.
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