Silken Flame

During the second half of the Sixties, Barbie was a total homebody: following the release of Skipper’s Schoolroom in 1965, Barbie went through about a dozen homes, but no more public spaces. When she was finally ready to reemerge in 1971, it was into a different world.

Between the years 1963, when Barbie’s Fashion Shop debuted, and 1971’s Unique Boutique, clothes shopping underwent a revolution. In Vintage Fashion: a Complete Sourcebook, Nicky Albrechtsen explains: “Music, art and fashion interlinked to create a new culture, epitomized by the renowned informal boutique shopping experience… Boutiques stayed open ad hoc, a party atmosphere prevailing until the early hours, as consumers shopped listening to the newest music and the celebrities of art, pop and rock mingled with young shoppers all seeking forward-looking fashion that broke with convention.”

An early and impactful boutique reimagining was Mary Quant’s Bazaar store in Chelsea, which faced legal trouble in the 1950s for staying open too late, placing an unfair burden on the competition to do likewise. The boutique of Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin was another Swinging London staple, where the clothes were hung on overhead rails that stretched from wall to wall, surrounded by bare lightbulbs in red and blue. In his book on the pair, Iain R. Webb quotes a contemporary journalist describing Carnaby Street boutiques such as theirs as “like a club–the assistants just smoke and lean against the wall and put records on.”

Reminiscing for The New Yorker on his time living upstairs from trendsetting London boutique Granny Takes a Trip, Salman Rushdie wrote, “Inside Granny’s, it was pitch dark. You went in through a heavy bead curtain and were instantly blinded. The air was heavy with incense and patchouli oil and also with the aromas of what the police called Certain Substances. Psychedelic music, big on feedback, terrorized your eardrums. After a time, you became aware of a low purple glow, in which you could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale. You didn’t like to ask. Granny’s was a pretty scary place.”

Meanwhile in New York, Paraphernalia, serving the Warhol set with designs by Quant, Tuffin and Foale in addition to American designers like Betsey Johnson and Diana Dew, leaned more Exploding Plastic Inevitable: a vast, chrome-and-white interior with slides of the fashions projected on the walls. Johnson described it as “like stepping into a spaceship or into the future.” In all cases, music was blaring.

Mirroring progress in the real world, Barbie’s Unique Boutique, unlike the earlier Fashion Shop, has no stage for the store’s models to occupy, no armchairs and magazines for its customers. The space is narrow, an explosion of color and texture; you can easily imagine the records spinning… and you can practically detect the heady scents, as well.

Of the real-life Sixties boutiques we surveyed, we think the Unique Boutique shares the most DNA with Granny Takes a Trip–or maybe Biba. But Barbie’s London boutique phase was fleeting; her next forays into consumerism, in the Superstar era, would take place at indoor malls and department stores of a decidedly more American persuasion.

In 1970 the best Barbie house arrived. A controversial statement, to say the least: of vintage Barbie Dream House enthusiasts, the chipboard diehards clearly feel differently, and for many plastic aficionados the great, timeless houses came later in the decade. However, we’ll present compelling evidence that the Lively Living House (and the Surprise House, which is the same) represented the acme of Barbie’s domestic adventures.

In terms of furniture this house had the usual for 1970, glimpsed above: the couch and chair with game board, the circular dining table with two high-backed chairs, the solid molded shell of a bed; one novelty was a swing chair hanging from the second-story balcony, occupied by Christie in the image above. The ’72 version, the Surprise House, also added a planter with seeds for growing real plants and some gardening implements in keeping with the country emphasis of the time. The furniture was just fine.

But the surprise house distinguishes itself in two key areas: the walls and floors.

Walls

Let’s take a closer look at that front room/living room, lower left in the box art that introduced this post:

Rich, colorful, detailed, midcentury-psychedelic. And here’s the kitchen next door:

.That mad wallpaper! The avocado appliances! There is no more beautifully-styled interior in Barbie’s plastic dream home era.

And outside? We’ve noted that Barbie and her friends were illustrated on the exteriors of the Sixties mod houses. 1970 marked the end of that trend. Instead, the Lively Livin’ House walls are jam-packed with gorgeous furniture, plants, planters, etc. These panels enclose the living room and kitchen we surveyed above:

The chair and fountain would not be out of place in the original Star Trek series, while the stained glass and fieldstone chimney are all peak 1970 aesthetics.

In addition to the surfaces we’ve highlighted here, there was a bedroom in rich blues and purples, and three panels of garden walkways including a shuffleboard court. In a sharp pivot, this house didn’t fold up for carrying, but the three outdoor walkway panels did fold up to complete the house exterior with additional windows and decor and make it a bit more compact to store. The panels easily remove from the structures to serve as stylish backdrops for dioramas, and they are indestructible-ish vinyl, so they’re fairly common today.

Floors

When I named floors as a distinguishing trait of the Lively Livin’ House, I wasn’t talking about the appealing tiled floors that complement the walls detailed above. They’re great, but the real innovation of this house, floorwise, is this: as a two-story structure, it is the first Barbie home to have a second floor. Its multistory structure and lack of fold-and-carry capability set the precedent for more famous Seventies houses: the Townhouse and the A-Frame.

The Townhouse had stylized interior walls featuring a heavy helping of gingham, but no printed exteriors. By the time the A-Frame arrived, screened-on wall decor was passé. We intend to end our Many Abodes series here, without digging into these dwellings; but it’s worth noting that the Townhouse is, with the possible exception of the Sleep-n-Keep case rooms, the most urban accommodation the Teen-Age Fashion Model ever inhabited. It took multistory housing to convince her to make the move which we’ve argued was necessary for her career since the start.

Back to our thesis: the combination of richly illustrated interiors (and exteriors!) as Barbie enjoyed in the Sixties, with the structural sophistication she’d come to know in the Seventies and beyond, is what makes the Lively Livin’/Surprise House the best Barbie Dream House, ever.

Rooms for Lively Livin’

A column runs down the right-hand side of the box art that led this post, apparently describing the house’s three rooms: Lively Livin’ Room, Cookin’ Fun Kitchen, and Teen Dream Bedroom. There’s nothing unusual about describing the play set’s contents on the package, and it’s not too extraordinary to give them these cute little names. But as it happens, there is more to this tale.

The 1970 catalog excerpt above lists not just the house itself, but also three individual rooms, sold separately: Bedroom Set, Den Set, and Dining Set. From the terse description, it seems as if these are just subsets of the full play set’s components (although this listing claims there is no bed or bedspread included with the Lively Livin’ House, other sources–including the box shown at top–disagree). But the Christmas catalog entries were often based on prototypes and concepts, as is the case here: besides the bedding confusion, note the red brick chimney on the lower left side of the house, and the densely-slatted fencing that differs from the final product. The real Lively furniture sets, rare-to-vanishing today, put their own spin on these rooms.

In fact, the “livin’room” set (probably the Den Set from the Sears catalog) does include the sofa, chair and table from the Lively Livin’ House, but in a different color palette (shuffleboard is not in evidence). The same was true of the Teen Dream Bedroom and Cookin’ Fun Kitchen furniture pieces. But it’s in the walls and floors (again with the walls and floors!) where the furniture sets really went in their own direction.

They’re not as groovy as the Lively Livin’ House–then again, what is?–but still deeply Seventies. This living room is a little more family-oriented than the one in the Lively house, displaying grown-up touches along with that trippy carpet.

The wall had a simple dimensional feature that pushed the fireplace into the room, as shown above. The other two sets augmented their basic furnishings in the same way, with a dimensional bedroom dresser and kitchen sink. Like the livin’room, these rooms’ walls were new conceptions. Due to the rarity of the sets I have no images to share; however, Marl Davidson photographed them for her book on Barbie structures, and we included a snapshot of those pages when we recommended her book.

Well there you have it! It’s the end, for now at least, of the Many Abodes of Barbie series. Our final house isn’t technically the Lively Livin’ House of 1970, or even the same-y Surprise House of ’72, but rather the ’73 Country Living Home we visited last time. There are still some Seventies furniture sets we wish to discuss with you, but on the whole, Barbie’s focus during this decade was outside the home. Where might we find her as the next decade progresses?

Where to next? This post is about Barbie’s early built environment. Apart from the Many Abodes of Barbie series, the most recent post in this category is about Cafe Today, and the most popular are those on Mattel Modern and Susy Goose furniture and on penthouse apartments. The overall most popular post on this site is about Mattel fashion booklets. Or just head up to the Table of Contents to see more options.