Imagery from Converted into Houses by Charles Fracchia and Jeremiah O. Bragstad

I’m currently undertaking a bit of decorating and furnishing at home, so in recent days I’ve been taking a browse around to see what I can conjure up in terms of inspiration and ideas to give the house an air of individualism. I found myself revisiting the comprehensive curation of a bohemian style that is Charles Fracchias and Jeremiah O. Bragstad’s book “Converted into Houses” and was enjoying the vintage imagery so much I thought I better share this with you all today. The pair basically compiled a book in the late 70’s that celebrated the homes of those wishing to restore, rescue and pour their time, energy and money into an imaginative conversion that in most cases broke conventional living structures at the time.

As you can see in the imagery above and below there seems to be a big emphasis on becoming closer to nature, with an abundance of plants and the inclusion of lots of furniture with organic origins. You don’t see too much synthetic material like plastics, wood takes pride of place making the home feel very honest and un-engineered. I have to admit I’m a bit of sucker for vintage imagery like this as I love spotting items and objects that you don’t come across everyday, my favourite find within this series is the steel car in the centre of the second image which I’m sure provided hours of entertainment for a young one many moons ago.

You may have not noticed as they’ve came out ever so well but these images here are actually scans from the book, I didn’t transfer these to digital format myself however they were so good I couldn’t help but share them. In fact these have given me the impetus to raid our own archive of books and see what I can scan, in the meantime however I’d like to point you towards the collection of Sara Gossett who is quite the avid collector of vintage imagery. I’ve no doubt that you’re going to enjoy scanning her profile for further inspiration, as always I’ll leave the link for this just below.

www.flickr.com/saragossett

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