See a '70s model home: A pretty, practical, family-friendly house

Table Of Content

• Love, Lies, and Leitmotifs
• Pretty, thin, young and single? Check out these sexist stewardess job requirements of the ’50s & ’60s
• The First Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica: A Masterpiece by Gehry Partners
• fantastic & timeless vintage fireplaces from the first half of the 20th century
• House 1977 Eng Subtitles

She finds a powder compact music box which, when opened, plays the now-familiar House leitmotif. At the same time, a piano downstairs calls out to her musically-oriented friend Melody. After briefly studying the sheet music, Melody begins to play the leitmotif as well. Gorgeous, music box still open, watches as her reflection turns into her aunt’s, whose face twists into a terrified scream before the mirror shatters. Auntie’s fractured reflection weeps blood, a sinister cackle resounds, and Gorgeous, shellshocked, is consumed by ghostly flames.

Love, Lies, and Leitmotifs

In 1977, Frank and Berta Gehry bought a pink bungalow that was originally built in 1920. Gehry wanted to explore the materials he was already using — metal, plywood, chain link fencing, and wood framing. In 1978, he chose to wrap the outside of the house with a new exterior while still leaving the old exterior visible. He hardly touched the rear and south facades, and to the other sides of the house, he wedged in tilted glass cubes. And we wanted two separate vanities, that seemed to be the biggest issue with the girls sharing a bathroom before.

Pretty, thin, young and single? Check out these sexist stewardess job requirements of the ’50s & ’60s

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Upstairs in the house, Kung Fu and Prof find Gorgeous wearing a bridal gown, who then reveals her aunt's diary to them. Kung Fu follows Gorgeous as she leaves the room, only to find Sweet's body trapped in a grandfather clock, which starts bleeding profusely. Panic-driven, the remaining girls barricade the upper part of the house while Prof, Fantasy and Kung Fu read the aunt's diary. After a tour of the home, the girls leave the watermelon in a well to keep it cold. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes.

The First Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica: A Masterpiece by Gehry Partners

Within the span of human existence, everything is permissible, and the incomprehensible often comes to haunt us, just as an incomprehensible horde of monsters haunts Gorgeous and her friends. Several sequences suggested by the pre-teen Chigumi Obayashi made their way into her father’s big screen debut (including a watermelon re-emerging from a well in the form of a floating severed head), as well as the central premise of “a house that eats girls”, a threat to rival any rubber shark. Moreover, it was perhaps Chigumi’s input that began moving the project further and further away from Toho’s initial brief, imbuing the emerging story with a certain dream logic.

The resulting soundtrack, like the film itself, attempts to span the generation gap by putting each generation’s outlook into paradoxical dialogue. Though controversial, the house attracted important clients, which gave Gehry the freedom to work on grander projects than the modest homes he had designed up to that point. The second renovation of his Santa Monica home, in 1991–92, was undertaken to accommodate the changing needs of the Gehry family and included the addition of a lap pool, the conversion of the garage into a guesthouse, and increased landscaping for privacy. Some of the exposed wood frames were removed or covered over, and many lamented a loss of edge. However, the house became more open and comfortable for Gehry and his family, and the increased finish, more delicate materials, and greater coherence reflected. When talking about the house’s design, Gehry also references the sense of movement in Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and the unfinished quality of Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock’s paintings, which Gehry says look as though the paint was just applied.

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Although the undercurrent of incredible sadness that surges through House ages us just a bit, Obayashi still sends us out on one final swell of fantasy, forgiving us our naïve need to believe in beauty even as it walks hand in hand with his damning excoriation of humanity. There’s joy amidst fear, and there will be loss in our future, and from the cinematic overlap of these truths emerges Obayashi’s “story of love.” Like a leitmotif, no matter what form it takes, we all eventually hear the same melody. Although Obayashi is quick to textualize his observations about the differences in perception between younger and older Japanese moviegoers—“it’s like a cotton candy! ” one of the girls coos early in the film at footage of an atomic detonation—his intentions in doing so aren’t initially clear. Are the girls simply callous, or is 32 years of distance from unprecedented horror enough to justify their lighthearted attitudes?

The girls try to escape the house, but after Gorgeous is able to leave through a door, the rest of the girls find themselves locked in. The girls try to find the aunt to unlock the door but discover Mac's severed hand in a jar. Melody begins to play the piano to keep the girls' spirits up and they hear Gorgeous singing upstairs. As Prof and Kung Fu go to investigate, Melody's fingers are bitten off by the piano, and it ultimately eats her whole.

A 1970s designer dream house: The American Home of 1974

Frank Gehry couldn’t afford to build his dream house at this point in his career, so the project began with a modest two-story bungalow in Santa Monica that had been found and purchased by his wife at an affordable price. Though he decided to leave the house itself intact, Gehry also wanted to do something with it, something that would put his mark on it before moving in. We have turned our house plans to the City for our Ranch Style Home in Utah! The wife had passed away 40 years before the husband, and although he had the means to update the house he didn’t want to change anything that his sweet wife had picked out. Loved that story, and we plan to honor the house, while making it the best way we can for our family.

Kung Fu's legs manage to escape and damage the painting of Blanche on the wall, which in turn kills Blanche physically. Prof tries to read the diary, but a jar with teeth pulls her into the blood, where she dissolves. Gorgeous appears as her aunt in the reflection in the blood and then cradles Fantasy.

The entrance is barely discernible amidst the exterior’s jutting angles, which Gehry created from wood, glass, aluminum, and chain-link fencing. The old house’s apex peeks out from within this mix of materials, giving the impression that the house is consistently under construction. Gehry wrapped the house in layers of unfinished, frugal materials, including corrugated metal and chain-link, which reflected his relatively limited means at the time. This also allowed him to tap into a fascination with everyday materials that had begun when he was a child spending time in his grandparents’ hardware store. Both corrugated metal and chain-link were considered ugly industrial fixtures in the L.A. Inspired by contemporary sculpture, Gehry embraced the challenge of proving that art could be made out of anything, even chain-link.

At times House almost feels like a children’s film, its opening scenes featuring broad slapstick, a cheesy pop song and endless girlish giggling. Despite Auntie’s hermetic lifestyle and tragic wartime backstory (her fighter-pilot fiancé never returned to marry her), she is far from the Miss Havisham type. The girls find both her and the titular house perfectly charming upon their arrival. But with spooky happenings around the house and the visiting party starting to shrink in numbers, both home and homeowner reveal their sinister true natures.

The leitmotif’s musical simplicity grants it an immediately recognizable quality, which primes the viewer for its approximately 20 appearances in various permutations throughout the film. This creates an orienting locus of stylistic uniformity amidst the film’s immediate visual carnage. It first appears immediately after the title cards; Gorgeous is shrouded in a sheet for a photo shoot in a candle-lit, empty classroom. Pairing the leitmotif with talk of witches and horror offers a microcosm of the film’s emotional span there in its first two minutes. Youth is on display, sweetly scored and dead center in the frame, briefly warped by ghoulish imaginings.