Peter Goers: Remember when the best room was the one that was never used?

It was the best room in the house, that’s why nobody was ever allowed in there. Peter Goers remembers the suite life.

It’s lovely to lounge around, to be a couch potato and a lounge lizard. It’s one of life’s great occupations. But we no longer do it in the loungeroom which has gone from modern architecture.

The good room, the front room, the sitting room, the living room, the parlour and the lounge room have gone the way of the antimacassar and the doily to the op shop of blessed memory.

Of course, formal lounge rooms existed not to be used, full of uncomfortable furniture and pretty useless pretty things.

In days of yore, a nuptial couple bought a lounge suite and a bedroom suite from Malcolm Reid, Watermans or Le Cornu or, if they were better off, from Miller Anderson or Nottage and Turner, and they kept these suites for their entire married life. How suite they were. Nowadays decor is frequently changed and homes are fully Ikead as attested by the number of unwanted furniture on verges in the eastern suburbs and nature strips in the western suburbs. People now change their furniture more often than their passwords.

Remember lounge suites covered in plastic. Older suites were festooned with crocheted antimacassars and there were doilies everywhere in the lounge room. There was a china cabinet, often with leadlight panels and full of ornaments, a mirror with an embossed ballerina over the fireplace, a nest of occasional tables on which visitors could rest their cups of tea (the good china) and souvenir ware tea spoons which bore pictures of the Blue Lake, the obelisk at Robe, a blow hole and the Fletcher Jones garden, and afternoon tea served from tiered cake plates.

Is this how life looked in the 1950s, before Ikea?

There were heavy curtains, a fringed standard lamp, a brass or bakelite smoker’s companion, ceiling roses, beige embossed wallpaper, glass and novelty ashtrays and a print of the Holy Land and photos of ancient sepia-cloured relatives in oval frames. There was often a highly-valued upright piano for sing-a-longs, a wooden poker worked vase and tapestry covered piano and footstools.

Children were disallowed this room. It was kept in perfect order and rarely used except to entertain rellies you didn’t much like, to meet the funeral director, to open Christmas presents and sometimes for card games.

When the television first came so did the coffee table, terylene curtains and the TV lamp. Lounges began to be more used.

Our lounge room featured a green vinyl lounge suite, a teak china cabinet, burgundy wall to wall carpet (covering jarrah floorboards) and one painting of gums and creek which the immigrant German watercolourist Charles Frydrych sold door to door. Other people had Pro Hart prints and the ubiquitous Green Lady by Vladimir Tretchikoff.

On a Sunday night our little family would repair to the loungeroom after an egg combo and crumpets, or brains or mince on toast, and watch the Sunday night movie while enjoying a family size block of Cadbury chocolate my father had bought from Mickan’s Deli on Findon Road. Bliss!

Those were the days, when housewives vacuumed the front room – in heels.

Then it all changed. The TV moved into the rumpus room or sun room, or family room, and the loungeroom returned to useless best and eventually atrophied from domestic design. Your mother and grandmother’s good room has disappeared along with cake forks.

We once thought a throw rug was for a picnic. Now families reside in huge back rooms which are kitchen, dining room, breakfast bar and lounge combined with huge, comfortable lounge suites and ottomans, a vast TV and a view of a pergola with an outdoor setting and an enormous plumbed barbecue, which dad has forgotten to scrape and clean, and no backyard.

So let’s remember the once sacred lounge room as you lounge around on Easter Sunday, no longer watching religious movies, eating too many Easter eggs, reaching for 17 remote controls, unshaven and scratching your private parts under your soiled tracksuit. And men do this, too. Let’s hope no visitors come because there’s nowhere to put them. Sounds good to me.