1940s Interior Home Design

Home design in the 1940s, especially in the kitchen, represented a rapid shift. Older styles and materials were quickly replaced. New ideas took hold, and the kitchen was transformed.

Because of World War II restrictions, it would not be until the late 1940s and into the 1950s that many of these new materials found their way into home design. Chiefly, the rationing of metal adversely affected the production of steel kitchen cabinets.

Home design styles in the 1940s straddled the 20th century. On the one hand, kitchens were still fairly small. Linoleum was still widely used as a floor covering. Colors often hovered in the range of pastels. Iconographic shapes like scallops, sweeps, and curves were common. Unfinished pine was a favored inexpensive wood often used for kitchen cabinets. These were touches that hearkened back to an earlier, more innocent age before the war.

On the other hand, the sleek styles that would characterize the Jet Age period of the late 1950s and 1960s, while still on the horizon, would begin to occasionally show up. Large tempered plate glass found its way into higher-end homes. Some of these curves and scallops began to straighten out. Lines and planes were common.