The Home Crowd

I stumbled upon a scan earlier today from the May 1962 issue of Playboy magazine of the “Playboy Townhouse” for the affluent, on-the-go, bachelor.  It’s a beautiful rendering done by Humen Tan (I really hope that’s not his/her real name) of a design commissioned to designer R. Donald Jaye by playboy to highlight the swingin’ bachelor lifestyle.  This great example of 60’s modern life is captured in this article with furnishings and furniture for which some have remained stylish and modern decades later.

The section of the townhouse highlights the spatial and elemental qualities of the townhouse…the central pool, the open air under a retractable skylight, the teak wood paneling, and lots and lots of concrete.  This rendering also explains the space usage by it’s contents, most of which were specified in the townhouse article.

Note that the servants quarters at the bottom right are not furnished, seeing as how no bachelor outside of Bruce Wayne should be living in the city with a butler anyhow.  Also, a modern design feature that would be scrubbed first after the first estimate is the concrete waffle slab used for the floors.  They might as well have put the garage on the roof as strong, overbuilt and expensive as that would be.  But they’re dreaming out loud, so we’ll side with artistic license on that one.

And what better bachelor bed that the rotating playboy bed, highlighted in an earlier article of the magazine.  Great spot for entertaining ‘guests’, it rotates 360 degrees to face the fireplace or the television with built in conveniences such as telephone, refrigerator and bar.  And who wouldn’t want to watch some TV on that mammoth 21-inch screen.  They didn’t specify what kind of TV it was, but I do vaguely recall George Jetson calling Mr. Spacely over it from time to time.

And the front facade, what better way to highlight your modern bachelor lifestyle than to break up the monotonous traditionalism of your neighborhood than to have a an infill home that resembles a large tic-tac-toe grid above your open carport.  Which at it’s greatest use, would serve as an annoyance as all your neighbors friends and relatives would use it as public parking when dropping by “just for a minute”.  If someone were to have built this townhouse, I’d give it two weeks until the garage door was added, and likely bollards and land mines to keep the strays out of the driveway.

But what a cool concept, and beautifully rendered.  See the full size scan here at Meathaus to read the accompanying article.  It’s presented as an affluent bachelor leading a ‘guest’ on a tour of his home, highlighting the features and forward thinking or modern living, even if the technology is outdated.  Many home today are integrating home automation systems, they’re just using touch-screen remotes instead of the rotary phone styled controls as described.