The simple, playful shapes of Mid-Century design put the focus back on the materials they are made from and the overall balance of the design.
Spot these simple shapes from small to large in a great (or even an every day) mid mod design. They show up everywhere. From the basic triangle of the gable or flat roof to the gentle curve of a kidney shaped swimming pool.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Cornerstones of Mid Mod Design Series
This is one of a five-part series on the Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones. If you’ve ever wanted to know HOW to add a little more Mid Mod charm to your home … start here. Make sure you listen to all four so that you can:
- Keep your house balanced while you play with ASYMMETRY
- Choose the right SIMPLE SHAPES to keep those clean modern lines
- Highlight a MIX OF MATERIALS to make your home shine
- Add or enhance the FLOW BETWEEN SPACES (in and around your home)
- Pull it all together with a listener Q&A
Grab my easy Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones guide to make it easy!
What’s great about simple shapes?
Simple shapes are easier to clean, easier to craft and still allow you so much room for style! A playful un-fussy design lets you lean into the minimalism of pure modernism with squares and rectangles or the jaunty optimism of retro chic with boomerang shapes, starburst designs and off-center trapezoids! Choose your own adventure!
Play with simple shapes in your update.
Think of this as the Coco Chanel method of design – “before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” A little of the playfull – the starburst, the boomerang and the trapezoid – go a long way. So let your design choices be easy by choosing the most minimalist light and plumbing fixtures, the most smoothly curving door and cabinet handles and the most simple slab style doors. Then jazz up your design (just as much as you want) with a few over-the-top atomic details!
Watch a quick lesson on simple shapes:
Or listen to the full podcast episode on
Watch all the Cornerstone videos on Instagram
Resources to help you design the cornerstones into your remodel
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Learn how to get ready to remodel by watching my FREE Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”, ON DEMAND.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
When you walk into a mid-century home that was remodeled in the wrong era, you know, basically anytime between 1970 and last year, or by the wrong folks, you can feel it instantly. One of the quickest giveaways is overly ornate details in the baseboard or crown molding. Actually crown molding at all, unless it’s the rare simple curved, cove ceiling edge, indicates an out of period remodel. Fussy, leaded glass windows fluted trim framing every kitchen cabinet door. All of these say I was meant for a house of a different era.
In the mid mod years, we love most of the parts of the house from the cabinet doors and how stores to the light fixtures and hardware are made of very simple shapes. Today I’m going to tell you how to spot them and how to choose them again for a home update that matches your home’s original DNA.
Hey there, welcome back to my mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1502. So you know how last week I said it was the perfect week to set your remodel plans in motion for 2024? It was either by signing yourself up or ready to remodel so you could use our comprehensive and yet simple program to DIY your way to a great home improvement design.
Or by just getting the ball rolling by calling Mid Mod Midwest (me) to update your home for you. It was last week. But this week is in way even better, because this is your last chance in 2023. To get all set up for a master plan. We will be closing down our offices from the 23rd to the first so you need to get in touch ASAP, so we can send you an appointment scheduler with dates before the holidays.
We’re looking at projects that will be coming back to our clients in March right now. So I want you to get your plans rolling right away. Here you go, friend. There’s a link in the show notes page. As always, you’ll find those show notes and the references we make today at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1502.
And you’ll also find a link to the cornerstones of mid-century design workbook. And it will help you peek ahead to future Cornerstone topics coming out later this month. But the substance of today’s episode was taken from a live design chat series I ran on Insta two summers ago. So if I made any references to the hot weather or the topic of tomorrow, know that you’ll hear about it next week.
And know that I know it’s December right now enjoy your time travel and your trip through a new mid mod design principle. Here you go.
It’s day two of the cornerstones with mid mod remodels. And today we’re going to talk about how to use simple shapes to make the most of your mid-century home update. So if you’re worried that you want to remodel your house, make some maybe sizable changes. And you’re worried that you’re gonna end up removing the mid-century character from your house, we’re going to talk about how to use simple shapes to avoid that.
And if you are living in a house that was built during the mid-century era, but has lost a lot of its original mid-century character. This is going to help you fix that problem too. We’ll be talking about the cornerstones of madman design all week. And today, simple shapes. If you’re watching the replay of this, you might want to go ahead and download the workbook that goes along with this topic.
And it’s going to tell you all about the things you want to know about those four cornerstones of madman design, asymmetry, simple shapes, a practical mix of materials and flow between spaces. And if you’re watching live, grab a drink, settle in, ask some questions, I’ll try to answer all the questions that I get while we’re talking here. I’m gonna have a drink because I’ve just switched from a client call to this live and hopefully I will keep myself in order.
So ask your questions in the comments. And I will get to you. It’s great to see you all here. And now I just want to talk about the basic concepts of simple mid-century shapes. Some of the best examples are the ones I posted in the Instagram post I put up today asking people to vote for which of several iconic mid-century shapes are their personal favorite – Googie style, the LAX airport terminal with Breezeblocks in front of it. Breezeblocks of a perfect example of simple mid mod shapes that are repeated. They are really just a combination of squares, triangles, angles, trapezoids that make beautiful surprising aggregate patterns.
The next one I showed was Starburst wall art from my own collection. You can see I collect little brass. There’s more all around me. I collect little vintage brass objects, and that kind of starburst, boomerang shape, jazzy design was really iconic of that sort of optimism, the Atomic Age of mid-century design.
Then, I showed some simple trapezoid mid-century mailboxes by Mod Box Mailbox, whom I love. I have a different design on my own house. And that kind of it’s leaning. It’s interesting. It’s not just a regular rectangle. It’s not sort of ornate style. Instead, it’s one interesting angular line. That’s really a kind of given the mid-century design.
And the fourth one I showed where the curved plywood and curved molded plastic chairs designed by the Eameses and these beautiful shapes that were suddenly possible with a new technology in the mid-century era. People were really having so much fun playing around with them. And houses were made up of simple triangles, flat roofs, gabled roofs.
The client I was just talking to a few minutes ago, we were talking about how to get more natural light in the kitchen with a skylight. And while it is slightly more complicated project than doing nothing to cut a hole in the roof and put in a skylight, it’s so easy to install a skylight in the roof of a mid-century ranch house, because those simple shapes lead to simple structure, which means that we know what the rafters are doing. We know what the ceiling joists are doing, it’s relatively easy to span between them.
And it’s going to be really nice as compared to a multi-story house, you can put a skylight and to get more daylight into the kitchen in houses worth more complicated structure, like a Victorian house with a toroid on it really gorgeous, so much fun, very complicated structurally. But a simple ranch house or a simple flat roof house has a very simple type of structure, which makes it very easy for you, the homeowner now to modify it to fit your life.
Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit about why shapes became more simple during the mid-century era. And there’s a couple of reasons. The first one that strikes me is because suddenly they didn’t have to be as complicated. When you think about the way that a door was constructed. Before the mid-century era, it was being made out of pieces of wood, the houses were unconditioned. So in many climates, there was a necessary swelling and shrinking of all wood in the house during the year when it was cold, wood would be drier and it would shrink when it was warm in the summer, it might be more humid wood would swell.
And you needed to have a door made up of multiple pieces, multiple panels, we often think of like six-panel door, or sometimes doors will have vertical panels and horizontal panels in them in periods before the mid-century. And that was to allow for a little bit of swelling and shrinking without swelling, the doors closed. In the mid-century era, they started using hollow corridors which today if we think of modern construction, a hollow corridor feels cheap. But this is a hollow corridor, it is very sturdy is very well built and it doesn’t shrink and swell in temperature changes because it’s made of component materials that are more flexible.
And the simple shapes of a mid-century door allow you to show off the materiality, this gorgeous woodgrain, which is original. And that really made everyone’s life easier. So they didn’t have to fit furniture together as complexity didn’t have to finish houses together as complexity, they suddenly had the ability to make shapes more simple.
On the flip side of that, in the mid-century period, they suddenly have the ability to make simple shapes more interesting. Some of those curves, the kidney-shaped pool than in concrete, or the curves in the in the plywood, bent plywood or the molded plastic and those Eames chairs were suddenly possible with the mass production technology of mid-century construction. And so suddenly, they had the ability to make more interesting simple shapes. Frankly, even. I’m so sorry that the trimmer on my door is painted. I painted it, yes, but it was painted before I got here. And it was kind of unstoppable. Maybe it’s my fault. Anyway, don’t paint your trim, friends.
But you can see it has this simple ranch curve. This profile is literally called Ranch trim. And it has a bunch of things going for it, it was something that we’re able to mill with new mid-century mass production milling technology. And that simple curve that it makes is not only very pleasing to the eye but subtle. It’s also not dust-catching. It’s easier to keep it clean. It’s easier to install it than the more complicated trim profiles of easier houses of earlier houses earlier, not easier.
So okay, they made their shapes more simple because they didn’t have to make them complicated. They made them more simple because they could. They made them more simple because they wanted to. It was the Space Age, this element of optimism and Futurism. You think about the Jetsons that’s, in that post that I put up today, the Googie style LAX airport terminal was sort of the pinnacle of “We are going into the space age houses should be different buildings should be different. Let’s be cool about it” design of simple shapes. So those trapezoid those atomic Starbursts for all kinds of representation of how people thought their life was gonna be really fun now. We were looking forward to a new era.
And that’s very appealing in this more complicated modern time when we don’t always feel that positive about life. The other thing about simple shapes, which is definitely I’m going to come back to tomorrow is that their goal wasn’t necessarily to be the fanciest things that people prized during the mid-century era weren’t necessarily luxury. They were durability they were ease of use, they were ease of maintenance.
I was talking about my tendency to get brass objects of decor on Facebook marketplace. This is my latest find actually brought this chair in the room for the video today. This is a vintage finger hut lounge chair With final covers, and this is gonna get into the materiality tomorrow. But it also has to do with the shapes.
Because here’s how they were advertising this object, which I’m so excited I have the original sales card of the Fingerhut lounge chair is designed to provide the maximum of comfort and beauty yet requires a minimum amount of care. Wipe spills off with a damp cloth as soon as they occur. Occasionally tighten and polish the hardwood legs, you’ll find your new figurehead lounge chair is one of the most carefree pieces of furniture in your household. And this was kind of the whole vibe.
People wanted to get into houses, they wanted to be homeowners and they wanted to live smoothly in their houses. Now, if you have been a longtime follower if you listened to the mid mod remodel podcast, we talked about kitchens, there’s a weird sort of dichotomy in mid-century era advertising, where everything was supposed to be labor, saving and easy, particularly for the women who were intended to be the housekeepers of these mid-century homes. But there wasn’t really like a big movement towards what else those women should be doing with their time. So it was kind of a strange back and forth of it should be so easy. So you have more free time to, I don’t know, go to bridge club or something.
But this is a total digression. People often put up that hashtag vintage style, not vintage values. But the thing about the values of the mid-century era is that was when the civil rights movement was happening. Feminism was working its way towards where we are now. There were people in the atomic era houses in the mid-century ranch houses who were fighting for the exact changes that we now live with today. So anyway, that’s a total digression. The reasons why shapes were simple.
Now, let’s get into the practicality of remodeling. If you’re following along, and the Cornerstones workbook today’s questions are, what simple shapes does your house have intact right now? And if your house has been flipped, the answer might be not a whole lot. But if your house is mostly original, like mine, for example, was owned by only two families before me, a lot of the details of the house are still intact. And I can go around and name a whole bunch of things that are original to the house that share that original mid-century simple shape. doors for one, I bought this house for the doors, I love them so much.
Let’s think about some particular places where original shapes might show up. And whether you have them or not. Where you want to preserve them, put them back, make choices around simple shapes that will help your house feel in line with its meant entry era, the most obvious place is the kitchen. So in your kitchen. If I want you guys to participate, comment, do you have your original mid-century kitchen intact? Anybody say yes in the comment and I’ll shout you out. And if you do, by the way, do you like it? Do you plan to keep it? There are reasons why you might and why you might not and I’m totally on board with either of them.
But if you have your original mid-century cabinets, it’s a total win because they’re great sturdy, made out of materials we don’t have access today. Built to a level of craft we probably can’t get today. Even if they’re a little bit dinged up even if they don’t have the modern sort of bump it with your hip and it closes on its own fasteners, they might be worth keeping intact. On the other hand, sometimes the layout of a mid-century kitchen is just really problematic. It was designed for one person usually the mom of the household to prepare food in alone and it often feels a little bit separate.
Okay, we’re getting some yeses the outline of the kitchen. Yes except appliances love it. Thanks for Thanks for participating everybody. Keep your answers coming. So a mid-century kitchen might be made out of wood might be made out of metal. Yes, except the appliances great love it. But whatever it’s made of the cabinet doors are simple flat slabs, slab-style cabinets, and again, simple shapes. It’s cleanable it’s not dust catching and it shows off the material whether it’s enameled metal or whether it’s original, glorious wood grain plywood,
it shows off what it is. If you have to replace your kitchen or if your kitchen has already been fully replaced. I strongly encourage you to stick with that slab style of cabinet front and here’s why. If you go okay I’m getting another answer somewhat The cabinets are original with poor carpentry countertops redone we’ll be changing the layout and keeping them in centerfield. Exactly. Okay.
So if you’re in this position, now you need to make choices that are going to help the house feel related to its history. Many mid-century kitchens were torn out and replaced, sometimes replaced with the exact same layout. So they have the mid-century layout. But non-mid-century cabinets, which is the worst of both worlds, in my opinion. If they were done in the 70s in the 80s and the 90s. Even in the early 2000s. They probably have a more ornate a more detailed style of cabinet doors, which to the people in that era would have felt very stylish, because the most stylish type of house in the 80s and 90s was a Victorian house.
So they’re going back to a more ornate, more detailed cabinet front style. But as we were just talking about the details of a mid-century house don’t include that kind of ornate necessity. They don’t need to be fit for multiple pieces of wood. And so it just it feels a little bit out of line. It’s always going to feel a little fussy for the house and it might feel very tight, stylish and trendy in the moment. Right now what you’re often seeing stylish and trendy on HGTV are Shaker Cabinet Doors. We might be aging out of that movement, but we’re not out of the moment yet. People are putting Shaker Doors into mid-century houses constantly. And it is trendy right now.
So right now when you put a Shaker Door cap Shaker door cabinet system into your kitchen, it feels fresh, new and trendy. But every trendy choice especially trendy choices that don’t relate back to the original era of the house will then go out of trend and will immediately date your kitchen, which is so frustrating. So when you’re thinking about a kitchen you want to think about it doesn’t have to look perfectly vintage, but it wants to feel like it’s a cousin of the style of the original house.
So slab front doors. Simple, not beaten metal, but like simple metal cabinet handles, think about those atomic shapes, curves, easy to grab things you want to think about the metals will do materiality tomorrow, but make choices in your kitchen replacement that feel like they’re related to what the kitchen of the house might originally have been.
Basically the same story in bathrooms. Bathrooms also have cabinets, you want to make sure you’re using slab right cabinet doors in their bathrooms have fixtures. Again, if you go to a big box store and you look at a bunch of bathroom fixtures, many of them will have a lot of sort of complicated fluted, sort of bubbly outline details on them. Those are harkening back to a previous era. So I’m going to use Victorian as a catch-all but a pre mid-century era when they had to be constructed multiple pieces. Pieces constructed in the mid-century era were machined from a single piece of metal. They were bent they were joined. So you can choose more simple shapes for your faucets for your showerheads for your cabinet handles in the bathroom, and you’ll always be doing better.
This happens around the front door when you’re replacing your front door. Or if you’re re-replacing your front door because many mid-century front doors were replaced because they needed to be replaced because someone was trying to do something stylish and they will you’ll see like a replacement front door in a mid-century house. Cute little asymmetrical mid-century ranch with a leaded glass oval window door in it and you’re like Hello 1985 Hello, nice to meet you. So when you’re going to replace that door again to try to bring back the door to the mid-century era, a simple slab door with perhaps jaunty trapezoidal windows in it or perhaps just you know, a stack of little rectangles, simple shapes are always going to be your friend.
Let’s see. The last place I want to talk about the benefit of keeping simple shapes you have replacing them in kind or bringing back simple shapes to your house is outside the house on a deck. decks and patios, particularly decks get replaced more often than the rest of the house. Because they’re wood they’re exposed to the elements, they do rot. Nowadays, some people are replacing their wood decks with plastic replacement decks, I actually think that can be a fine choice that tracks the brands are escaping me, it’s not a bad choice for a luminous finish. But if you’re choosing a low or no maintenance deck replacement, you want to make sure you are nailing your design because it’s not going to run out in 15 years.
Let’s see oh, I’ve got a fun COMMENT. I’ve got an original cute door in our bathroom closing the main space and toilets when wider open. I don’t quite understand that. But if you’ve got anything original about your bathroom, you love your winning. Yeah. Let’s see there’s a mid mod architectural masterpiece near me with a super cheap white Home Depot front door. It kills me if I walk around my neighborhood sometimes. And I see the front doors that people have replaced in the 80s and 90s that just don’t see the house and I want to go let’s take a postcard in the mailbox and say, if you wanted to replace your door, here’s a selection that would be best for you. It’s a little bit of an architectural busybody. So I don’t, I just didn’t get and I tell you guys, I know you’re on board with it.
But anyway, if you’re thinking about replacing your deck, especially if you’re going to go with non-wood, if you’re going to use a wood replacement product, you want to really nail the mid-century style of the house. And to do that you want to think about horizontal lines like we were talking about yesterday, the asymmetry, and you want to think about what are what’s the railing made of. Is it the simplest of shapes and what are the style elements you need to have for safety you need to sort of be protecting your deck to make sure no one’s going to fall out through the railing area.
But if you go to again, if you go to a big box store if you go to Home Depot, the styles those vertical rails that protect people from falling through or dogs from running off the I often have sort of little fluted details and you want none of that you want the most minimal simple square shapes I’m getting thank you for this biggest pet peeve is shaker cabinets and a mid-century home. Why do we let HGTV talk us into this, and by us, I mean, homeowners who don’t know any better, they’re gonna go off-trend just as fast as they came on trend. And it’s so sad.
So make sure that when you’re thinking about the shape of the railings on your new mid-century deck that you’re do deck on your mid-century era house that you’re harkening back to the mid-century style. Minimalism is never a wrong choice. So if you want to use glass or even metal cable will feel a little bit discontinuous with the original period. But if it’s visually light, that’s a win.
For more on the cornerstones of the mid mod design, and how to make the right choices in each of these elements, grab the free workbook Cornerstones of mid-century design. Or just go back over the things I’ve mentioned here on the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/ 1502.
Whatever you’re going to do with your mid-century update. Whenever you’re going to make changes to a house from the mid-century era. You want to make sure that even though these changes aren’t the exact thing that would have been done when the house was originally built, they still feel related adjacent to those choices. That’s your best proof against going off-trend when trendy choices change to further future-proof your home.
Next episode, we’re going to be talking about the material choices you can make to really when you’re mid mod remodel. And the great news about mid-century material choices is that they were super practical. Again, they were all about the ease of care ease of living durability. There’s a reason why so many of the materials, about to be mentioned then are still around 70-plus years later, they were built to last and we should have the same goal for ourselves going forward. More on that next week.