Decorating Along Automotive Lines
Unfettered by conventional wisdom, horrified spouses or berserk landlords, many thousands of good and true Americans would keep their car in the house. They would pull it right into the living room and use it as a combination sofa/love seat/coffee table/mood lamp/stereo.
A mere Euro-shrimpmobile or Asian econo-box would, of course, not do. The auto-as-decorator-item would have to be a massive hunk of pure Detroit iron, a real battleship of a car in which form and function were like oil and water.
The 1961 Cadillac Eldorado comes to mind. This is a car so astonishingly huge and wildly impractical that it needs to pass through a series of locks to merge onto the freeway. But for sheer chrome-plated, shark-finned, in-your-face impudent beauty, it’s peerless. Heck, you can sleep in an Eldorado. It’s a rolling bachelor apartment.
Actually, just about any American car of the late 1950s and early 1960s would look great in the den. A ’57 Chevy Bel-Air, a ’58 Corvette, a ’60 Buick Electra, a ’62 Lincoln Continental--honest, firmly packed, shatteringly garish, true Yankee rolling stock.
But how to get them in there? You can’t drive a car the size of a B-52 through most sliding glass doors. And even if you could, they tend to block the field of vision to the TV, even if they’re convertibles. Besides, cars of that era leak oil. They’re supposed to. What’s the use of having a vintage American gas hog if you can’t tinker with the bolt on the oil pan now and then?
And just try to persuade your spouse, who loves to spruce up the house with the latest in retro design trinkets, that a ’55 Ford Fairlane would be a better choice than that Erte floor lamp.
OK, so life isn’t fair. So compromise. Try getting the car in the house piece by piece, or at least hint by hint. And the folks at Cicena can provide a good selection of suitable hints.
Cicena is a New York-based manufacturer and marketer of “neon-accent and retro-inspired” telephones, radios, speakers and clocks, that has recently gone automotive with a line of items called Cicena Classics. Two of the products, in particular, are the sorts of things that you put in a room and dare anyone to dislike. These things are virtually non-ignorable, and guaranteed to clash grandly with almost any coordinated decor.
The “Cruiser” alarm clock, for instance. The colors alone will tell you something: It’s available in peach and aqua with matching neon, and black with blue neon. It’s a headlight.
Right. A replica of a late ‘50s vintage car headlight. The dial is encased in a chrome band and a circular tube of neon flashes when the alarm goes off (which sounds pretty obnoxious but probably looks terrific once you’re fully awake). It goes for $49.
It’s the new Cicena boombox, however, that’s a true thing of automotive beauty, and a guaranteed magnet for the eye. In fact, if you put this thing anywhere, in any room, and it isn’t the first thing your gaze falls on when you walk through the door, you’re stone-blind.
It’s an AM-FM, two-speaker portable cassette player known as the “Overdrive” in Cicena parlance, and it bears a heart-stopping resemblance to the dash of a ’58 Corvette. The knobs look like dashboard controls, the radio dial is set into what would be the speedometer and the carrying handle looks like a vintage steering wheel.
But it’s the colors that really carry it off. It comes in two-toned black-and-white and teal-and-white, but the red-and-white combo has Route 66 written all over it. It’s that deep, glossy lipstick red and that screaming white that can be seen clearly for miles across the Arizona desert, trailing a cloud of dust. And it absolutely, definitely can be spotted in a roomful of cherrywood hutches on beige carpet. It costs $129.
“It’s a very American statement,” said Margery Newman, a Cicena spokeswoman in New York. “American culture is based so much on the automobile. Before the product was actually available, we had a few samples around to get testing reactions. There was one of them down at the feast of St. Anthony in Little Italy. It was at a sausage booth. And people were just going wild for it there.”
Well, sure. What could be more American than a sausage booth in Little Italy?
But car mania transcends culture (besides, the Italians invented the Ferrari, remember?). And if you absolutely can’t bear the thought of tire tracks on your deep-pile carpet, and you’re not entirely sure you want to replace your leather sectional with the back seat of a Coupe de Ville, try living for a few days with the “Overdrive” and the “Cruiser.” If that’s not enough for you, sell the Toyota and the living room furniture, go into hock and buy a perfectly restored ’58 ‘Vette. Think of it as a design statement.
And I’ll see you on Route 66.
