JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2612

There’s just something very simple and calming in the arrangement of the colors in these photos–and of course something very different from what one comes to expect in interior design. This is so much so that I think it would be possible to take an entire two-day vacation in a house that is decorated in just this fashion. Your brain would be relieved of the expected and introduced to the soft exceptional with a color palette equivalent of an all-white-food carbo breakfast that one could slide under a bathroom door. I think you would take a seat with a good book, and then fall immediately to sleep–not from boredom, but from the unexpected luxury of color-unusualness and perhaps a little whiff of the grandparent’s house, the colors surrounding you having the optical qualities of the heat from a good fire. If we were seeing movies of folks gathered around the radio and listening to the end-of-the-war stories in 1945 in a set like the images below, we wouldn’t picture the black-and-whiteness to purge itself into this allotment of soft color. 

The images come from an innocent-sounding pamphlet published by Pittsburgh Paints: Pittsburgh Color Dynamics for Offices, Hotels and Restaurants and published in Pug in 1945.  The cover gives it all away, and then once inside you are immediately invited to the design equivalent of a happy version of Nemo in Slumberland. For example, a living room, begging for someone to sit in and enjoy a cup of coffee while wondering when Joe DiMaggio would be back in pinstripes, and where the smokes were, and what happened to all of the missing artwork: 

Of course if you spilled coffee on the rug (the color of Ronald Reagan’s shoes) no one would ever notice.

You could retire for the night after waking up from your color overdose/withdrawal here, a bedroom whdreams are dreamt and things are thunk, and sleep is the biggest thing made: 

[The image cropping is at is appears in the original.]

 This all just seems so terribly suave, so above distinction and yet below it.  The “rediscovered” blue (“cascade blue”) that I forced into the title is found here, in one of the pages of color swatches: