Remember These Embarrassing 1980s Home Trends? Every House Had Them

In 1985, you could turn on your living room lamp by clapping your hands. Two years after that, almost a quarter of every mattress sold in the United States was made of vinyl and filled with water.

By the late 1980s, walking into the average kitchen meant being greeted by a white goose with a blue ribbon around its neck. This was the 1980s, a decade that loved a trend, embraced novelty, and committed to looks the rest of us would later spend years undoing. Some were everywhere, a few were genuinely strange, and almost none of us thought any of it was unusual at the time.

At the height of the waterbed craze in 1987, nearly one in four mattresses purchased in the United States was a waterbed.

A vinyl bag full of water sitting in a wood frame, plugged into the wall.

The pitch was straightforward. The bed contoured to your spine, stayed cool through summer, and stayed warm through winter.

Plenty of people will still tell you they slept better on a waterbed than on anything since.

The complications were less straightforward. A king-size waterbed weighed around 1,800 pounds when filled. You needed a heater, or you'd be sleeping on cold water.

You needed a conditioner, or algae would start growing inside. And one small leak meant the bedroom carpet, the floor underneath, and the apartment downstairs were all about to have a very bad day.

Anyone who owned one remembers running a garden hose through the bedroom window and siphoning 235 gallons back out the day they finally moved.

Clap on, clap off. The Clapper. It launched in 1985, and for a few seconds, it really did feel like the future had arrived.

You plugged your lamp into the Clapper, and the Clapper plugged into the wall. Two claps for the lamp, three claps for the TV.

The first time anyone saw it work, it looked like pure magic. In real life, the magic ran into problems.

The dog barked at the mailman, and the kitchen light came on. Somebody sneezed during dinner and the entire room went dark.

But the jingle was undeniable. And almost everyone in America could sing it within a year.

Sometime around 1984, a white goose with a blue ribbon around its neck flew into the average American kitchen.

And it never really left. It started small. A goose-shaped cookie jar, a dish towel. Within three years it was everywhere.

Wallpaper, canister sets, trivets, welcome mats, curtains. By 1988 you couldn't buy a casserole dish at a country store without a goose painted on it.

The goose came with friends. There were ducks. There were geese in bonnets. There were geese pulling little wooden carts. There were heart-shaped wreaths with three geese in formation.

For almost a decade this was the most popular bird in America. For about 10 years, no American wall was finished without a strip of pattern running across the top of it.

You painted the room a soft pastel, then ran a 9-inch strip of patterned paper at the ceiling like a frame.

The kitchen got fruit baskets. The dining room got ivy. The bathroom got seashells. The nursery got teddy bears.

The bedroom got cabbage roses. The most popular pattern in America was a folk art design called Heart and Hand.

Red hearts, blue hands, holding a tulip. It ended up in millions of country kitchens between 1986 and 1992. By the next decade, taking it down was the first job on every renovation list.

It wasn't quite pink. It wasn't quite purple. It was mauve. And from about 1985 to 1991 it was on every surface in America. There was mauve carpet, mauve bath towels, mauve tile, mauve appliances, mauve curtains, mauve bedspreads, mauve toilet seats, mauve toothbrush holders. Often paired with teal. Often paired with both. It was a color so specific to the decade that finding it in a home today instantly dates the place.

Most of it was painted over by 1993, but you can still walk into a doctor's waiting room and find a chair, a wall, or a carpet that never got the message.

Look up at the ceiling in almost any American home built between 1965 and 1990, and you saw the same thing.

A bumpy white surface that someone once decided looked like cottage cheese. Contractors used popcorn texture for three reasons. It went up fast, it was inexpensive, and it covered every imperfection in the drywall behind it.

The premium versions had glitter mixed in, so the ceiling sparkled when the lamp came on at night.

What the texture also did, which nobody was selling, was trap dust, kitchen grease, and a steady decade of cigarette smoke from a time when people still smoked indoors.

Anyone who has tried to remove one understands the cost. White dust ends up in every drawer, every shelf, every air vent in the house.

The ceiling that took 20 minutes to spray takes three weekends to scrape down. If something here is bringing back memories, drop it in the comments, and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Walk into a 1980s den, a finished basement, or a wreck room, and you walked into a wall of wood.

Or what looked like wood. Faux wood paneling came in three-quarter-inch sheets, 4 feet wide, 8 feet tall, in colors with names like honey pine and dark walnut.

It was nailed up over drywall, over concrete blocks, over old plaster. Cheap, fast, warm-looking.

The trick was that most of it wasn't actually wood. It was vinyl printed to look like wood, glued onto particle board.

The grain was a photograph. If you looked closely, you could sometimes see the same knot repeating itself across the room.

Whole generations of American homes had walls that were technically a picture of a tree.

Walk into a 1980s bathroom, and the first thing you encountered was the toilet wearing an outfit.

A shaggy fabric lid cover in pink or peach or mauve that flopped backwards every time you tried to lift it.

Match it to a contour rug at the base. Match the rug to a tank cover. Match that to the shower curtain.

By the end, the toilet had more accessories than the person sitting on it.

The floor was a similar story. Bathroom carpet, wall-to-wall, was a real and widespread phenomenon.

The thinking was that carpet felt warmer underfoot than tile. The thinking aged badly. Putting carpet in the room with the most water exposure in the house produced exactly the result you'd expect.

Owners remember the smell. The patches around the toilet base. The day they pulled it up and discovered what had been growing underneath.

Anything in a 1980s home that could be made from metal was a candidate for a brass finish.

The list was long. Bathroom faucets, lamp bases, drawer pulls, towel bars, ceiling fan blades, candlesticks, picture frames, door handles, the pull chain on the kitchen light, the lazy Susan in the corner cabinet.

The look was meant to read as expensive, warm, polished, a little glamorous. The trouble with brass was that it never stayed that way.

Fingerprints showed up immediately and lived there permanently. The metal tarnished. And most of the brass in the average home wasn't even solid brass.

It was a thin layer of plating over a cheaper base metal. After three or four years of weekly polishing, the plating wore through and the homeowner discovered they'd been buffing the same patch of zinc for half a decade. By the late 1990s, brass was the first finish every renovation tore out. Every 1980s living room had one piece of furniture that dominated the entire room.

It wasn't the couch. It was the entertainment center. 8 feet wide, 6 feet tall, solid oak, or at least solid oak looking.

Glass doors with little brass knobs, built-in shelves designed to fit exactly the right number of slots.

200 VHS tapes, 80 cassettes, 30 records, an Atari, a Nintendo, a stereo receiver, and a 27-inch tube TV in the center.

The doors had a little click magnet that latched them shut. The magnets attracted every fingerprint in the house.

When it came time to move, the entertainment center was usually the moment somebody started crying.

Four people walking it sideways through the hallway, scratching every door frame along the way.

Through the late 1980s, answering machines went f

When it came time to move, the entertainment center was usually the moment somebody started crying.

Four people walking it sideways through the hallway, scratching every door frame along the way.

Through the late 1980s, answering machines went from luxury item to standard household equipment. By the mid-1990s, roughly three out of every four homes in the country had one.

Two cassette tapes inside, one for the outgoing greeting, one for incoming messages. A small red light blinking the number of messages waiting.

Coming home to find that number reading six was the small daily thrill of an entire decade.

The technology wasn't what made these machines memorable. The greeting was. Some families did it the normal way.

Others saw the cassette tape and saw an opportunity. The kids would gather around the phone and sing the greeting in three-part harmony.

Whatever ended up on that tape became the soundtrack every caller heard for the next 6 months, no matter how funny it had been on the day it was recorded.

Long stretches of glass across suburban America in the 1980s came with one solution. Vertical blinds.

3-in plastic slats hanging from a track at the top, controlled by a wand on the side, marketed as the elegant treatment for patio doors and sliding glass.

The showroom version was sleek. The home version was different. One slat had always rotated in the wrong direction.

Another had popped off the track and was leaning against the wall. A third had been bent by a kid, chewed by a dog, or warped by sunlight, and never sat flat again.

Walking past them produced the signature noise of an '80s living room. A long plastic clatter like dominoes falling slowly down a hallway.

Anyone with vertical blinds at home learned to walk a slightly different path through the room, just to keep the whole wall from rattling at once.

Glass blocks weren't new in the 1980s. They had been around for almost a hundred years.

But the decade discovered them, branded them as Miami Vice, and started installing them everywhere.

In bathrooms, glass blocks formed the wall around the shower. In entryways, they replaced solid walls to let light through.

In bedrooms, they sometimes formed an entire wall between the sleeping area and the master bath.

The pitch was that the blocks were modern and architectural. In practice, everything behind a glass block wall looked blurred, underwater, like a memory you couldn't quite focus on.

Showering behind one was fine. Looking through one at someone in the next room was an experience.

Tell me in the comments, which one of these did your house have? I read everyone.

Somewhere between 1965 and 1985, somebody decided that gathered seating needed to be at a different elevation than the rest of the house.

And for 20 years, millions of American homes were built with sunken living rooms. You walked in the front door, took two carpeted steps down, and you were in the conversation pit.

The carpet was usually shag in rust or harvest gold, or by the 1980s, a sea of mauve.

The architectural idea was that the lower floor created intimacy. The reality was that people tripped on the steps.

Toys disappeared down them. The vacuum couldn't get over them. When the sunken living room finally went out of style, it became the first thing every renovation team filled in.

If a 1980s home wanted to feel bigger, the answer was always the same. Cover an entire wall in mirrors.

Sometimes it was one giant sheet of mirrored glass. More often it was the do-it-yourself version.

12-in square mirror tiles with adhesive squares already on the back. You peeled the paper, pressed the tile against the wall, and lined up the next one.

By the end of the afternoon, you had a wall of mirrors slightly crooked with thin grout lines between every tile.

[music] Some had silver veins, some had gold flecks. When the time came to take them down, half the drywall came off with [music] the tiles.

There are houses today still living with mirror tile glue residue under their wallpaper, and the homeowners don't even know it.

In countless American homes, the good living room couch lived its entire life under a fitted clear vinyl cover.

White piping along the seams cut to the cushions. The intention was to keep the upholstery underneath in original condition for as long as possible.

Sitting on it was an experience. Bare legs adhered to the vinyl in summer within seconds. [music] Standing up came with a long peeling sound. Every shift in position came with a fresh squeak.

Here's the funny part of the story. A lot of those couches still exist. Pull up the plastic and the upholstery underneath looks like the day it left the showroom.

40 years of preservation, perfectly intact. Because nobody ever sat on it. The plastic worked. Everything else was the price.

Walk into a slightly upscale 1980s living room. And somewhere in a corner you would find one.

A white plaster column 4-ft tall in the shape of a fluted Greek pillar. On top set a vase of dried flowers or a fake silk plant. Or sometimes a marble bust of a Roman senator nobody could name.

The implication was that the living room was the foyer of a small palazzo. A place where philosophers might gather.

The fact that the column was hollow, weighed 8 lb, and could be ordered from a J.C. Penney catalog for $39.99 was beside the point.

By the mid-1990s, most of them were quietly walked out to the garage. Some of them are still there.

In 1982, a small terracotta ram coated in chia seeds went on sale for the first time. And one of the most unlikely product success stories of the decade was born.

The process was simple. Soak the figurine overnight. Mix the chia seeds into a green paste and smear them into the grooves on the pottery.

Place it on a sunny windowsill. Within a week, sprouts pushed through and the bare clay animal slowly developed a coat of green fuzz that was meant to read as fur.

Some came in evenly. Others grew thick on one side and almost nothing on the other.

After the ram came turtles, frogs, kittens, puppies, and pigs. By the late 1980s, every drugstore had a stack of them in the holiday display.

And the jingle from the commercial, a ch-ch-ch-chia, was wedged permanently into the head of an entire generation.

Few products from the 1980s have a stranger backstory than the Ginsu knife. The product itself was made in Fremont, Ohio by a company that had been producing kitchen cutlery for decades.

The brand name, however, was completely fabricated. Two ad executives in Rhode Island invented the word Ginsu [music] because it sounded vaguely Japanese and Japan was selling.

The commercials are unforgettable. A man in a white karate uniform splits a wooden board with his hand. Then attempts the same trick on a tomato and produces pulp.

Cut to the knife slicing through a tin can, then a leather shoe, then a garden hose, then a tomato paper thin.

But wait, there's more. Between 1978 and the mid-1980s, that one commercial format moved more than $50 million worth of knives.

The blade was perfectly fine. The advertising was the breakthrough. Every late-night cable channel that came after still owes the Ginsu a small royalty.

In September 1985, an animatronic talking bear arrived in toy stores across the country, manufactured by a company called Worlds of Wonder.

To a child opening one on Christmas morning, this was magic. The mechanism worked like this. A cassette tape slotted into a compartment in the bear's back.

Press play and the audio came out of a speaker in his chest, while his eyes blinked and his mouth moved in time with the words.

The first time you saw it, the effect was extraordinary. The bear was reading you a story.

In real life, the magic had limits. The cassette could stretch, the motor timing could drift, and as the batteries ran low, the cheerful narrator's voice slowed down with them.

The bear that had once said, "Hello, my name is Teddy Ruxpin." would, by the time you noticed, sound like something a child should not be sleeping in the same bedroom with.

Even so, Teddy generated $93 million in sales his first year and took the title of best-selling toy in America.

That was the 1980s. Carpet found its way into the bathroom. Mauve found its way onto every wall.

Plastic ended up over the couch. The country goose ended up in every kitchen. And in every American living room, an 8-ft oak entertainment center stood guard over a 27-in tube TV.

None of it makes much sense now. All of it made complete sense then. Maybe that is what made the decade what it was.

The 1980s was the last era that wasn't afraid to commit to a look, even when the look was indefensible.

If anything in this video brought a memory back, leave it in the comments. And if there's a trend I left out, tell me.

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