Flashback Friday: First Solo Kitchen

Love that space: Park Slope Kitchen, 1999

The Vision: Girly Vintage

The Elements:
Pink 50s kitchenette set, white cabinets with vintage hardware, girly pastel cabbage-petal china, chinese advertising poster, retro California photographs (from a BMW motorcycles photo shoot), and, um, green astroturf flooring.

The Huh? factor:
You might think I would ascribe this honor to the astroturf, but no. I am more worried about the beaded-macrame plant holder, especially since I adorned it with a butterfly. That I often wore in my hair.


The Analysis:
The kitchenette set was one of my early, great vintage finds. While in college, we were driving through New Paltz. On the edge of town, there is an amazing Victorian house filled to the brim with antiques and the like. This dinette set was on the porch, and you could probably here the screeching of my brakes when I stopped to purchase it. For $125 for the table plus four chairs. I used the table for one semester senior year, and then it went into storage when I moved into a 300sf 1 bedroom in Hell's Kitchen. With a boy. A gay boy, but still: the thing is pink vinyl. So I was thrilled that it fit--barely--in the corner of my park slope co-op. Everything else in the kitchen sort of stemmed from the pink-ness and vintagey charm. I will also note that I painted the lower cabinetsto match the lovely upper ones (another early DIY), and installed the pot rack myself. I remember buying a special masonry drill bit to go into the brick wall!

What Remains:
Sadly, none of the actual pieces from this kitchen remain. When Dave and I moved in together, I sacrificed the dinette set, the china, and the art, selling them all at a stoop sale. I have no regrets though: they perfectly represent an era of my life that was all about girlfriends and being single in the city.

Do you have a style in your past that was fleeting, and emblematic of a phase? Do tell!

What Remains: