PEE-WEE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
"It is impossible to overstate his influence" - Michael Beirut, design daddy
Trigger warning: there are a lot of parentheticals today (oops).
ALSO: at the end of this Issue, we have a special FOR SCALE ✨EXCLUSIVE SALE✨ of some ALEXANDER KAYE FURNITURE. Very Playhouse stuff!
Dear Snoops,
The word of the day is “DEVASTATED” as we honor the legacy of manic entertainer PEE-WEE HERMAN (aka Paul Reubens) and, in particular, his PLAYHOUSE – set to his 1980s children’s T.V. program Pee-wee’s Playhouse and provider of important décor lessons that reach far beyond its own specific aesthetic or use (as set).
(PAUL, creator-star of PEE-WEE died on July 30, I’m sure you are aware.)
Here’s an indicative image of the PLAYHOUSE, for the great unwashed:
And critical to note that Stuff are People, i.e. Chairry, the animate chair, giver of hugs:
Playhousian interiors are very kooky-madness-dreamscape in energy (experts call this “SURREALISM”) and very “MEMPHIS” (if you care about identifying design movements – which we’re neither for nor against) ergo quite a definitively 1980s moment (often resurrected in moderation today).
Few of us live with truly surrealist/Memphis-y décor, and yet upon the death of Dear Paul Reubens, hymns to Pee-wee and his Playhouse interiors were sung from such diverse reaches of the Intern*t as graphic design daddy MICHAEL BEIRUT (here) and artist-pornographer BRUCE LABRUCE (here, but he posted several).
THAT SAID, there are two things that this FOR SCALE ode is not:
We shall not make a case for or against HIS PERSONAL STYLE, because it’s precisely that it is personal to Pee-wee that we admire it. Though, we can learn some lessons about how Pee-wee (and team) devised one of television’s most notable homes
Similarly, We shall not be making the case that “MORE IS MORE”, this is not why PEE-WEE intrigues us. In fact, we ban the phrase “More is more” generally. We’re simple, we’re not simplistic.
Instead, our analysis:
Pee-wee’s Playhouse treats interiors the way any interior should be treated: a joke.
(We’ll explain later. But, can we not create interiors that feel, in our own ways, kind of hilarious? Aesthetic Minimalism, e.g., is hilarious for its very rejection of Things, meanwhile, the things within the space are Hyper Valuable both practically and money-wise. IRONY! HILARITY! You cannot escape the Value of Things.)
WHAT WE WILL INCLUDE TODAY:
THE “OUTSIDER OBJECT” and why it is a décor MUST
THE HOUSE THAT TALKS BACK, with PEE-WEE CORRESPONDENT #1 JORDAN HRUSKA
PLAYHOUSIAN LESSONS VIA THE DAUGHTER OF DIANE ARBUS, AMY ARBUS
THE KITCHEN THAT DOES SO MUCH AND SO LITTE, with PEE-WEE CORRESPONDENT #2 SARAH ARCHER
Finally, INTERIORS RULES WE EXTRAPOLATE FROM PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE
1. THE “OUTSIDER OBJECT”
Despite the horrific proliferation of oversized grey floor tiles and inscrutable furniture flipping (i.e. grey stain, hairpin legs, brass knobs), we believe that we are in an era of exceptional interiors (or at least exceptional interiors potential).
What is shared by many of the thrilling avant-garde today, as is expounded by the Playhouse, is a commitment to the OUTSIDER OBJECT: i.e. the something that doesn’t “MAKE SENSE”, that clashes with what might be an otherwise harmonious interior. Harmony is for the Interiors Lemming, the Suburban TikTokker, and the Design Showroom.The OUTSIDER OBJECT is a gesture towards individual agency.
Ironically, those that try to ‘perfect’ their interiors (often because they have the financial means to do so) end up doing so for an external audience - it is décor as status, and status-seeking breeds STATUS ANXIETY. (Just ask Alain de Botton ← BOOK REC)
Do you think Pee-wee gave a f*ck about status?
What status-seekers end up missing, in not wanting to misstep, is exactly what they hope to achieve: something interesting.
SIDE NOTE: ON “SWAGGER”
The ability to integrate OUTSIDER OBJECTS into your home is within us all. Some do it with EXCEPTIONAL FLARE, producing what we might consider INTERIORS SWAGGER, a very complex subject. FOR SCALE is currently in the midst of producing “FOR SCALE’s REPORT ON SWAGGER” which will be available to our paid-tier FOR SCALE XL subscribers in Probably September.
RULE OF THUMB: somewhere in your home should be a thing that, after a guest scans the room, makes them go “Huh!” (Or even “Huh?”)
In Playhouse, objects were wacky, sometimes non-compliant, and always used for great narrative effect. They were not just “set”.
→ Example:
An anthropomorphic fetish: Chairry, the hugging chair; Picture Phone with lip-doors; Zig-zagged, unlockable, vinyl-tufted diner-style front door; Mr. Window, the talking window; etc.
→ Effect:
The house that talks back. And for that, we turn to PEE-WEE CORRESPONDENT #1 JORDAN HRUSKA.
WHAT ALEXA HAS F*CKED UP, WITH PEE-WEE CORRESPONDENT #1, JORDAN HRUSKA
In 1986, I was promised a future where I could talk to my house. I don’t mean conversing with Alexa, the deferential Amazon-invented digital butler who glibly lurks inside blue-lit Bluetooth speakers. I’m imagining a home where every inanimate object talks back to you. This is the fantastical, campy domicile that Paul Reubens created as the centerpiece of his Saturday morning show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, on CBS from 1986 to 1990. Here, Chairry, an over-tufted puppet-chair with flirty lashed eyes, and red lips pleads for guests to, ahem, sit on her. Not unlike Alexa, Mr. Kite, gives the weather report, and Mr. Window, a talking window pane with googly eyes, announces guests as they approach the front door. Pee-wee’s globe, clock, and hardwood floor all have personalities and proactively append Pee-wee’s bratty claims and comments with facts, corrections, and quips. This reciprocal exchange is so much more fun than the threat of Alexa omnisciently listening to your conversations to better sell you more stuff from Amazon, right? The talking house was always meant to be one of good company, not one where a company harvests your information.
Most kids go through a phase of personifying inanimate objects – it’s considered by certain psychologists to be a healthy sign of simulating social exchange. I mean, hell, I’m a big kid and verbally encourage my Richard Sapper-designed Alessi espresso percolator1 every morning to brew a little faster. But Reubens, as a generous and slyly parodic comedian understood the grander project of always questioning the “normal” world around you. Even if the thing can’t answer back, ask it a question. Be curious. Why is it the way it is? These queries stimulate critical thinking and motivate kids and adults alike to never take for granted social norms and the designed environment. Perhaps Alexa is catching up to Reuebens’ impact. Invented in 2014, Alexa’s most recent software update now features over 50 programmed jokes. If you ask her to make you a sandwich, for example, she snidely responds: “Ok. You’re a sandwich!” What would Pee-wee say in return? “I know you are, but what am I?”
The Playhousian work of PHOTOGRAPHER AMY ARBUS: the democratizing effect of Lunacy
Yes, related to Diane Arbus (her mother).
The work in question is the photobook “NO PLACE LIKE HOME”, 1986 (ISBN: 0-385-19855-8). The Los Angeles Public Library has this signed copy.
Shot mainly over a year, NO PLACE LIKE HOME is a series home interiors that do what Playhouse does: they are their owners’ quirk. They are all, in specific ways, total lunatics.
What Arbus does is show us how the same thought process - i.e. living your own way - OBVIOUSLY has a huge range of outcomes. And, she democratizes this, because the book puts lots of different types on the same level – whether Ann Jepson, who lived on the roof of a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to now-mega-architect Frank Gehry, and MTV Movie Award winner for “BEST VILLAIN” Dennis Hopper.
Not all places in this book are “WACKY”. As with Pee-wee, all that is expected is that the home serves (as Arbus puts it) as a “symbol of the human psyche”. TRANSLATION: if look at someone’s home and you can’t really tell anything about them other than their economic status, they are f*cked up.
Some examples:
We also recommend the book FREESTYLE: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN FROM LOS ANGELES, by Tim Street-Porter, also 1986 (ISBN: 0-941434-91-5). Very high quality, and we’re sure we’ll dive into this at some point.
PEE-WEE’S PLACE IS IN THE KITCHEN, by PEE-WEE CORRESPONDENT #2 SARAH ARCHER
The best send-up of a mid-20th-century American kitchen I’ve ever seen is the one featured in the breakfast scene at the opening of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” Pee-wee lives alone in a house that looks as though it was decorated by a genteel older gay couple with an eBay alert set for “Cath Kidston cowboy wallpaper,” and he has an elaborate Rube Goldberg-style breakfast contraption that produces eggs, toast, and pancakes for him each morning.
Presumably, every element—which is set in motion when Pee-Wee lights a candle that burns through a piece of string—must be painstakingly reset each night. An anvil falls, gears turn, and an egg rolls through a sequence of plastic tubes. Perhaps in a nod to Ettore Sottsass, a bobbing duck toy is the tool that breaks the egg over a frying pan. What’s perfect about this sequence is how totally unnecessary every piece of the action is. As though Jane Jetson’s kitchen had been turned inside out, all the convenience and automation is hijacked by absurdity to transform simple tasks into maximally complicated maneuvers yielding no advantage. The objects are symbolic rather than truly functional: Pee-Wee butters his toast with a giant, bendable butter knife that’s more rubber chicken than utensil. He pours Mr. T cereal over his pancakes, eats perhaps two bites with a giant, bendable fork, then daintily wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, bids adieu to his tiny dog, and goes about his day.
The uneaten breakfast is left to cool, and invites us to wonder what its purpose was, other than as a signifier. Is there a better illustration of postmodernism, anywhere?
FOR SCALE WILL ANSWER: “NO!”
FINALLY: LESSONS FROM THE PLAYHOUSE
THE OUTSIDER OBJECT
Décor that is too cohesive makes you look tasteless. Plus, consider unusual combinations: i.e. a door for playful effect that is in the style of a 3rd-tier cocktail loungeNARRATIVE EFFECT OF FURNITURE
Consider your Things as Characters. Learn to converse with them (literally, like PEE WEE CORRESPONDENT #1 JORDAN HRUSKA does), and do not consider Alexa a part of thisMAKE WORK FOR YOURSELF
Even with his exceptional gizmos, Pee-wee chooses hard labor: the buttering of bread with a wobbly knife, for example. We see a very prescient resistance to the ultra-frictionless home of Silicon Valley dreamsTHE UNARRANGED ARRANGEMENT
As functional as much Playhouse décor may be, Pee-wee nonetheless establishes no suitable seating area for guests. Force your guests to scan the entire room to find a place to settle into“NEAT” BY A CHILD’S STANDARD
If you can find it, it’s in its place. Allow chaos, if you’d like
SO, REMEMBER “INTERIORS SHOULD BE TREATED AS A JOKE”?
The joke is: as your décor becomes more about a home’s inhabitant(s) the more it becomes interesting to others. To Décor (verb) for an audience is to completely ruin your chances of doing a good job.
BEFORE WE GO:
ALEXANDER KAYE, FOR SCALE pal who is also a charming and fun maker of things here in Los Angeles, has some stuff he’s made that has teeny bits of wear, and ergo at slashed prices - EXCLUSIVELY (for now) for FOR SCALE readers:
These yellow sides: $1,200 for the pair, or $650 each.
Has a little bump on the corner, don’t we all?, and its $850.
BUT, YOU KNOW WHAT FOLKS, offer him something, and maybe he’s up for it. DM him on INSTAGR*M.
Until next time.
LOVE AND GOOD LUCK,
ASIDE: this is the same percolator used at FOR SCALE House. We adore Sapper.
I don’t like that he’s dead
I am delighted to take another peek at the Playhouse. As a young adult my Saturday mornings were not complete without a visit to Peewee's place. The cast of characters and the environment sent my head spinning!