Website helps renovating homeowners find stuff that fits

In early 2008, Stephan Edwards bought an apartment in Palm Springs, Calif., and over the next four months he restored the bathroom using fixtures dating to circa 1958, the year the building was constructed. When he finished, he sent photos to the one person he knew would truly appreciate his efforts: Pam Kueber at retrorenovation.com.

Helen Stickler spent two years trying to assemble a set of vintage steel cabinets for the kitchen in her 1950s post-and-beam house in Los Angeles, but after countless hours of scouring Craigslist, she was still one cabinet short. In desperation, she contacted Kueber, who sent out a plea on her behalf from retrorenovation.com.

With no idea how to go about decorating the pink bathroom in the midcentury home she and her husband had bought in Lexington, Ky., Judi Forston typed "1959 Ranch" into Google. "I thought I'd find something architectural and scholarly about houses built in that era," Forston said. Instead, she found retrorenovation.com.

Since Kueber started her website in 2007, it has become the epicenter of a small but devoted group of midcentury design enthusiasts, a go-to destination for homeowners who spurn the latest decor trends in favor of retiling their bathrooms in turquoise mosaics from the Eisenhower years or installing Dishmaster kitchen faucets whose bulky forms recall those of a late-model Studebaker.

Many of Kueber's followers live in what she has called "midcentury modest" homes: ranch- or Cape Cod-style houses built during the post-World War II housing boom. And because they grew up in that period, or are appreciative of its aesthetic, they want to restore their homes to something resembling the original splendor.

As Edwards put it: "I'm into the old stuff. I want things to be absolutely authentic."

Being authentic isn't easy. Hardware, appliances and even furniture sizes have changed significantly in the last 60 years. But Retro Renovation, with its abundant and highly specific information on vintage decor, offers a practical resource for doing the impractical. Old advertisements for terrazzo shower floors, how-to tips for cleaning a Saarinen tulip table, where-to-buy guides for dead-stock plumbing fixtures — surfing the blog is like visiting a time-warp Home Depot.

Kueber, a 52-year-old corporate communications consultant, dispenses product news, advice and encouragement in a peppy, we're-in-this-together tone.

"Let's help Helen find her last steel kitchen cabinet!" she wrote in May, summoning the "Retro Decorating Gods" to save Stickler. In another post, she spotlighted the new Retropolitan refrigerator from Big Chill, a company that makes appliances with vintage styling. The Retropolitan's look, Kueber helpfully informed readers, is "Jetsons, rather than Donna Reed."

Kueber started the site after renovating her own midcentury home in Lenox, Mass. "That's when I got into searching, searching, searching for the right stuff," she said. It took five years, but finally, on eBay, she located a set of 1960s steel kitchen cabinets in eye-popping aquamarine that is now the centerpiece of her home.

To educate herself on the period, she read old home builder magazines and brochures from the Steel Cabinet Institute and various long-defunct companies (see "A short history of steel kitchen cabinets," her entry on the subject). "This whole pursuit of a retro renovation takes tenaciousness and patience," she said. "I wanted to do a blog with real resources to get the job done."

While Kueber is the blog's resident expert, she shares the spotlight with readers, creating a sense of community. They send in photos of their knotty-pine kitchens and Danish-inspired living rooms, which she posts along with the names of sources they provide.

"There's something about Pam's site that seems friendlier" than many other design sites, Forston said. And she likes it when Kueber asks for solutions to a reader's design problem, she added, because then "you get to write in and feel like a designer for a day."

Forston found the solution to her own design problem — a hard-to-furnish dining room with three doorways and a fireplace — on Retro Renovation. After seeing magazine illustrations from the 1950s and '60s on the blog, she realized that what she needed was a smaller table, in keeping with the style of the period.

"Maybe we would have made these changes anyway," she said. "But I got the idea from reading Pam's post."

The difficulty of finding both workers and materials is a continuing lament among readers. Homeowners can't just walk into an appliance store and come out with a 1953 Kelvinator Food-O-Rama, and tracking down vintage items creates its own complications.

Stickler thought she had lucked into a deal when she paid $500 for a set of 20 steel cabinets from a house in Palm Springs. But when she got them home, she realized that the set wouldn't fit into her kitchen. After searching Craigslist, she patched together a near-complete workable set from sellers in six cities. She is now able to identify World War II-era cabinet manufacturers, she said, "the way guys can identify old cars."

She ran into another problem, however, after buying a turquoise bathroom sink from two female bikers in Nevada. The sink's odd shape has made finding a vanity exceedingly difficult, and she may have to have one custom made. "It'd be a lot easier to just walk through Lowe's," she admitted.

To facilitate the hunt, Kueber has created a forum for buying and selling that has become a popular feature on the blog. People who inherit or purchase an old home and want to divest themselves of its contents — especially steel kitchen cabinets — often find the forum through Internet searches. And Retro Renovation readers in, say, Los Angeles can call attention to local classified ads that someone in Tampa would otherwise never see.

Given the difficulty of finding vintage materials, especially in good condition, readers are remarkably generous about sharing resources. Kueber, who also makes her readers aware of interesting houses for sale, attributes this in part to a common desire to preserve items that could easily be scrapped.

"I have new old stock in my basement," she said. "I rescue it like puppies."