Everyone talking about the pit and I'm just here thinking "housing?"
The dream is still achievable. My brother and I teamed up with our spouses and bought a home. Between the four of us we were able to buy a house. Just the one.
You'd need that space to go somewhere, so the rest of the floor would either need to be a meter thick, you'd need a big protrusion into the lower floor, or you'd have to have it on the ground level with nothing underneath.
You'd also be pretty locked into the floor plan layout, and there would be no place to put a TV screen that's visible from the whole seating.
Pretty cool looking, but also pretty impractical with modern buildings.
there would be no place to put a TV screen that’s visible from the whole seating
That was kind of the point, it was called a "conversation pit"
Naïve of you to think that this space needs a TV, when any house like this is probably large enough and expensive enough to have a proper home theater room with a proper projector and surround sound system.
You're probably right for a home with this setup today. Back when these were really popular, probably not.
Home theaters are a fairly recent thing and were not the norm, even for people with these types of setups, outside of maybe the uber rich who could afford a projector and the cost of prints. For a sense of costs, a Super 8 reel of a theatrical film would run anywhere from $600-$1000 (accounting for inflation).
Dont forget the tripping hazard!
Just land on the couch problem solved.
i love floor plans that aren't centered around a TV. fuck your TV. try talking to people.
But it can also works as an indoor pool in summer.
Swim and wash the cushions in one go. Efficient.
Pretty cool looking, but also pretty impractical with modern buildings.
It's funny because it's literally the opposite: "modern" buildings (read: of the "modernist" style popular circa 1930s-1970s) are the only kind that do have these things.
It's buildings that are newer than modern that don't have them because people realized they're impractical.
I think they mean lower case m modern (ie. contemporary) not upper case Modern
You don’t need the tv visible from the whole seating area - that seating area is massive. You could put an 80” on a stand either along the side (where the flowers are) or on one of the corners, and still have room for an easy 8 people watching.
In my experience, you can get 6-8 people coordinated for watching a movie at your house. After that, you have a hard time finding something everyone is going to enjoy, you have bio breaks, and in general people like to just talk. Admittedly, we don’t watch sports, but even so I think rounding up 12-16 people (which would probably fill up this pit unless everyone were very close friends) would be a chore.
I have a lovely MCM house. It’s nowhere big enough to have a pit like this, but it does have an atrium. We throw parties pretty regularly, and once we get above 6-7 people, most of the time we’re just throwing on some music and letting everyone mingle. If we do put on a movie, it’s more of a background thing, and I honestly think most people prefer a good playlist and ready-to-go cocktails.
Also, there is a coffee table. How the fuck is anyone supposed to serve something in the pit, carry a tray of hot beverages over a wobbly couch? Just shitty design.Just discovered the tiny stairs in the background. Guess they thought of that at least
Easy, you put 4 TVs on each side. A good signal splitter and some nice speakers overhead and you all enjoy watching tv at a strange angle that hurts your neck. (Also don't try to do surround sound).
there would be no place to put a TV screen that’s visible from the whole seating
Unironically the singular reason these things aren't built anymore.
TVs and tv shows at the time were shit. Entertainment was talking with people.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know:
Either these couches are really tiny, or room in this image is really big. It looks like the room is like six times the size of my college dorm. If the rest of the house is similarly sized, it’s probably also insanely fucking expensive. middle school gymnasium ass room
Yea, I'm estimating that couch pit is about 15' square. So that room has to be close to double that in depth. It's probably a mid century ranch house, all 1 story. You could put a huge hookah in the middle. Or a console pac-man game!
A hooka with opium in it.
If you stare hard enough, you can almost hear the keys dropping into the bowl.
Silicon Valley horndogs are still absolutely doing this shit. They just do it in a room that's plastered floor to ceiling with giant TV screens, rather than in a soft velvet-lined passion pit.
I gotta watch The Ice Storm again.
Oh that movie is SO wild.
I don't think they bothered driving to other places, but I don't know.
the money and cocaine ran out
Sad times.
cocaine doesn't trickle down either
If I recall correctly, I think building codes surrounding tripping/fall hazards and railings may have had something to do with it unfortunately. I may be mistaken though
That would make sense because I can see a lot of tripping and falling leading to injury in a cocaine lounge.
This is the world OSHA has created. I say we return to Darwinism.
Pretty sure you could still get away with this - if the drop is less than 30" no railing is required.
Also any water on the floor can be spilled over into the pit.
I built a conversation pit in Minecraft because I wanted one so bad
Today that place in the middle would be blocked off by drywall and rented out for $1500/month.
Plus hydro.
not gonna lie, I always wanted a home with a sunken living room table/couch like this.
Even today I think its bad ass and interesting... probably a pain in the ass to clean, though.
When I was an installer for a WISP, I was installing to a lot of big fancy farm owner homes; and one of them had this. That house was swanky as fuck. It was practically custom built for partying. Place had 3 kitchens (2 indoors, and 1 outdoor), bars in nearly every room, etc. I wish I lived there... 😞
Three kitchens! Were they Italian?
Indo-Saxon? What are we looking at here.
It's because folks kept falling into them at night and breaking their necks.
Exactly. I literally see no point in this. You can have the same but elevated and a little entrance.
So I have some family that lived in a gated community that used to be a resort for Golden Age Hollywood types. Their clubhouse/community building hadn't been updated much since then, and it had one of these.
100% certain that a) group sex happened here, and b) at least one person broke their ankle in this thing. 90% sure there was at least one time both happened at once.
Probably the person who broke their ankle did it in some wildly adventurous sexual position mid intercourse and kept going until it was complete like a champ.
They took your own generations ability to have silly architectural trends - by the banks and Realestate agencies pricing most out of the market, and by refusing to mass build new towns for cheap.
Don Draper’s NY apartment
Sex pit or big TV. It's a tough call.
IRL they mostly used these for group sex. It would be super weird to have everyone just sitting around talking all at the same time. Cult shit.
I can only imagine what a pain this would be to vacuum.
Just use couches facing each other if you want to dedicate space to talking to each other. But I don't think most people have this much room available anyway.
At the time when this was popular, they also had Fake Fur wallpapers. Surely looks and feels nice, but has to be replaced every couple of years because it's impossible to keep dirt and mold away.
I used to have one. It's no more difficult than vacuuming stairs.
I guess the Roomba could just go in circles in the middle.
Needs more wood paneling, like this one:
https://www.uklocations.co.uk/locations/film-photography-location-nottingham-2376/
Who are they and why is this not achievable today?
Not handicap accessible, lawsuits
Could you do it to your house? Sure
This also takes a special foundation. Can't just add it to any home
landlords and landlords
seriously: tis a joke about changing trends. no think deep.
Because you're posting this to the generation who will forever rent. The landlords probably wouldn't be happy.
Fire hazard!
Dirty
There's a quite famous sunken bed in the Beatles' movie HELP! It was in John's area: https://filmandfurniture.com/2016/09/beatles-help/
What?
Conversation pits were all the rage in the 70's
They took away our tripping hazards
You people have horrible taste in interior design. That looks so bad.
i do like the conversation pits though. despite their potential issues, they look cool as hell.
I really like the idea that if people are talking in there, you can quite literally jump in to the conversation.
This would probably help me stop floating between conversations like a phantom lol.
