Lucie Smailes sometimes has trouble finding a babysitter. Her two young children, Billy and Lily, are not the problem, she explains; it's the wall-to-wall 50s decor. Some of her mates simply can't stomach another evening on her authentic post-war sofa, leaning against poodle-stitched antimacassars, surrounded by green-tinted Tretchikoff babes and crowds of small plastic señoritas doing the Fandango across coloured Formica.
The house is an ordinary two-up-two-down in suburban Bristol, except that its interior appears to have got lost in time somewhere around 1955. The look is post-modern retro, but more at the Woolworths end of the style spectrum (think Only Fools and Horses meets The Simpsons ). The basic colour palette is custard, bubblegum and candy floss. Kitchen furnishings include a yellow dinette table and matching metal-leg chairs; one of those tallboy (or Del Boy) cabinets with a fold-down work surface; and a original retro fridge (in spray-on lipstick pink).
Accessories include a canoe-shaped dish of fake fruit, a carousel of frilly cotton pinnies, coloured pegs, pink flamingos, Festival of Britain wire ware (with knobs on) and illuminated posies of Lucie's favourite plastic roses ('I love roses,' she says). She also loves leopard print, red Perspex and diaphanous vinyl. She wears them when she gets a chance (a wardrobe of ruched swimming costumes, frothy frocks, hats and handbags, is displayed on her bedroom wall). Lucie's idea of a snack? A handful of jelly beans dispensed from a slot machine ('It only takes French francs'), served on red-and-white spotted picnic ware.
In her front room, there's a ship-shaped cocktail cabinet clad in wood-look Fablon and a glitzy mirror-glass cupboard stuffed with plastic-flower paperweights. There's a plastic budgie in a chrome cage, a shiny red-vinyl settee, festoons of paper lanterns and light-up tropical birds, but no television, no stereo - just a mind-bending display of 50s kitsch.
'To my mother's generation, it's all tacky, working-class crap,' says Lucie. And even to us 50s-friendly baby boomers, it evokes mixed feelings, ranging from a vague, uncomfortable sense of familiarity to plain distaste. 'Most of my friends don't like all my 50s stuff,' says Lucie. 'They think I should clear it all out and make the place more homely for the children.' And she has tried to give it up. But therein lies a problem: she can't live without it. 'To me, it's a form of antidepressant - it makes me smile.'
In a sense, her sentiments reflect the mood of the time in which her 'stuff' was born - when cheap, cheerful chain-store goods, big hair, big frocks and imported Americanisms provided an antidote to years of war-time gloom. Imagine the joy of escaping dreary Utility plywood for chrome and vivid Formica, swapping khaki serge for brushed Bri-Nylon, or replacing blackout curtains with the window-wear equivalent of Hawaiian shirts.
The years that followed the Festival of Britain saw the birth of Terylene, tea bags and TV dinners, the first jet-airline service, the Pill, the Pop Parade, molecules, microchips, Miss World and the Chevrolet Corvette. Yet at the beginning of the decade, nearly half of British homes had no bathroom or indoor lavatory. The whimsical mass-market consumer goods of the time suggested cocktail hours and exotic package holidays, but for most people, it was all scrubbing brushes, boiled cabbage and Spam.
'My interpretation of the 50s is a fantasy,' admits Lucie, who wasn't born until 1968. 'In my 50s, everyone had bright melamine kitchens and new-fangled gadgets, and went to rock'n'roll concerts every night, but I know it wasn't really like that. In fact, I'd hate to have been a 50s housewife. Life was still very hard. It wasn't until 1959 to 1960 that things started to pick up.' And nobody, working class or otherwise, would have had quite the concentration of frivolous knick-knacks that have been squeezed into Lucie's house. Her collection must have come from literally hundreds of households (and that's just the Spanish dolls).
Her habit started with a Pat Boone record case, circa 1955, bought at a jumble sale 10 years ago. 'When I first started collecting, I wasn't aware I was buying 50s things - I just liked what I saw and bought it.' Throughout her twenties (as London Contemporary dancer, Citroën 2CV mechanic and tequila slammer girl), Lucie continued to buy, but it only became an obsession when she was studying interior design at art college. 'I did a project on Molecular 50s and Festival of Britain furnishings, and I got completely hooked,' she says.
She succumbs to the occasional extravagance, such as the pink retro fridge at £250 ('It was worth it, especially when you think of the price of a Smeg'), but the challenge is in finding things at a bargain price. Most of Lucie's treasures were bought at jumble sales and car boots.
Favourites include a Hula-girl table fountain which sprinkles water into a small, lurid-green pond of plastic lilies; a cylindrical, red Perspex cocktail cabinet with matching red-rose lampshade; plus Lucie's collection of 'Tinas', or framed glamour-girl prints by Siberian-born Vladimir Tretchikoff, JH Lynch and other masters of low-brow populist art. Tretchikoff's The Green Lady , painted in 1952, was the most reproduced work of the 20th century. It is now achieving status as an icon of post-modern irony, but Lucie doesn't see her like that.
'I don't care about dates, origins or how much anything is worth; my choices are purely aesthetic,' she says. But she has, nonetheless, picked up some 'classic' pieces of collectable kitsch. A spike- legged coffee table featuring a scene from Swan Lake , for example, is a relic of the 'Balletomania' era, when Margot Fonteyn was the teen-heroine equivalent of Posh Spice. The boat-shaped cocktail bar is not particularly rare (factory-made in the early 50s by Barget), but Lucie's is in pristine condition and includes a porthole, anchor and fake-wood laminate deck.
She has a small collection of Homemaker - Ridgway Potteries' tableware, designed by Enid Seeney for Woolworths (in which an abstraction of Robin Day-esque chairs and boomerang tables float around in monochrome space). She has at least two Miss Tissue Heads (plastic dolls' heads from which Kleenex is dispensed from a mane of pink-nylon hair), and dozens of examples of wire-ware products (zigzag wall tidies, magazine racks, plant holders) with the classic Festival of Britain-style 'cocktail cherry' feet.
According to Collecting the 1950s (£15.99, Mitchell Beazley), a Miller's Collectable Price Guide, many of these things now fetch reasonable prices (Tretchikoff print about £30; Barget bar, £150; American dinette table, £750). In fact, Lucie often sells pieces she's grown tired of or can't fit into her house - though she still has a wish list of things she would always find room for. 'I've always wanted a Miss Mixer Martini shaker,' she says. 'She wobbles her boobs around while shaking the drink.' Sounds ghastly? Well, yes, but this battery-operated Barbie lookalike is worth up to £150. London retro specialist Flying Duck Enterprises reports a waiting list.
'I don't know why I collect,' says Lucie. 'People say I'm trying to preserve the past. I don't think that's true. I just like the colours, the shapes, the vitality of these things. Part of me really craves an Ikea life, all creamy beigey sofas and matching lampshades. But I couldn't really live like that.' Her children could. And, under increasing pressure from friends and family, Lucie is thinking of restoring her house to 'normal'. Not that she'll be giving up her habit. Her plan is to buy an original 50s caravan, furnish it in the manner of the period, and park it outside her front door.
Where to get your fill of 50s paraphernalia
In Bristol, Lucie Smailes's local retro shops include Repsycho, 85 Gloucester Road (0117 983 0007), Raw Deluxe, 148 Gloucester Road (0117 942 6998) and 20th-Century Traders,182 Gloucester Road (0117 949 7601)
Flying Duck Enterprises, 320 Creek Road, Greenwich (020 8852 3215) specialises in original, reproduction and modern kitsch. Mail order service available