Sit down. Let’s talk.
Popular in the mid-20th century, conversation pits make a comeback
Betcha Dela Cruz-Atabug didn’t want a normal living room. She wanted a place that could spark deep conversations between friends, somewhere that could serve as the ideal listening den for her husband’s vinyl collection, somewhere free of screens and the ails of modern life. So when she saw the sunken living room of her current home while she was house hunting in 2019, she knew it was just right.
Inspired in part by the 1960s-era interiors of the show “Mad Men,”
Dela Cruz-Atabug turned her living room into a conversation pit. With the help of her husband and son, she took out the fencing that encircled the space (“It looked like a crib,” she said), stained the wood a darker color and added burnt orange cushions. It cost her around $500.
“This is where we come together and bond. We read, listen to music and drink coffee and wine. There’s no TV to talk over. We feel like we’re connecting more here,” said Dela Cruz-Atabug, 46, who manages a law firm in Diamond Bar, California.
A conversation pit is an architectural feature that typically has cushioned, built-in seating and is constructed below floor level. They were popular in the United States throughout the mid-20th century, in part because architects and designers saw them as a way to avoid the clutter of furniture. The pit could be found carved into a New York City airport, or in a home in Indiana.
They often functioned as indoor playgrounds for adults, sometimes the place for drunken antics. And yet, they evoked chicness, and elegance. Below ground, they were elevated.
Today, conversation pits are making a resurgence. With feelings of isolation exacerbated by a yearslong pandemic and the omnipresent digital screens of working from home, many people view conversation pits as the ultimate symbol of intimacy and a step back toward a simpler time.
While some homeowners are going all out and constructing conversation pits, for renters or people who simply don’t have the resources to transform their living rooms, social media has become a place to moon over them, allowing people to vicariously sit in them by way of Instagram and Twitter feeds.
A fantasy of togetherness
For many people, conversation pits are unattainable. A New Yorker cannot carve a pit into a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up. Some people can only experience the design wonders virtually, such as by constructing them on video games like The Sims or posting about them on social media.
Rock Herzog, an interior designer in Los Angeles who runs the Twitter account @CocaineDecor, said that the conversation pit is the perfect metaphor for the milieu of the times.
“Not only are we physically separated from one another, we are culturally, socially and politically separated from each other, and the end to that separateness is not in sight,” Herzog, 38, said. “So the conversation pit is this fantasy of ‘what would it be like if we were together again and having a good time?’ ”
Reeves Connelly, a 25-year-old in Brooklyn, New York, who has a popular interior design TikTok account, said that the posts he’s made about conversation pits always get the most engagement.
“Every single video I would do about conversation pits would always start a discussion. A lot of people have very strong opinions on both sides, whether they want them to come back or not,” Connelly said. “I think the pandemic made people more interested in how homes look. With Zoom meetings and everyone making social media posts from their bedrooms or living rooms, something that was private before is now totally public.”
The peak of the pit
One of the most well-known conversation pits of the 20th century is in the Miller House, a private residence for architecture patrons J. Irwin Miller and Xenia Miller in Columbus, Indiana, completed in 1957.
The pit is glorious — it features five steps down into a sea of carpeting and pillows, and the slipcovers were swapped out depending on the season. The interior of the home was designed by Alexander Girard, “the perfecter of the conversation pit form,” said Deborah Lubera Kawsky, an art historian and author of “Alexander Girard, Architect: Creating Midcentury Modern Masterpieces.”
Because Girard was director of design for Herman Miller’s textile division, but also trained as an architect, he had an “expansive conception of interior design, one that was inextricably linked with the architecture,” said Kawsky.
Many early sketches of conversation pits also featured images of lit cigarettes and martinis, Kawsky noted. “Entertaining was very important at the time. Designers were trying to show how these architectural forms could enhance that,” she said.
But eventually, the pit lost its sleek and sexy image.
“The pendulum swings on these architectural styles, and people eventually want to follow the new styles. As the conversation pit started being associated with a bygone era, people let it go,” Kawsky said.
‘Like a huge playpen’
For those who aren’t fans of 1900s decor, today’s conversation pits have been modernized — they’re often without shag carpets, have minimalist color schemes and can even be found outdoors.
Kristin Korven and Jeff Kaplon of Part Office, a design studio, created an all-white conversation pit in 2019 for the Los Angeles home of Geraldine Chung, who owns a fashion boutique. The initial design decision, Korven said, came about because the space itself was small, and they wanted to make it feel like it had more volume.
Chung had been “obsessed” with conversation pits for years, she said, and when she learned it would be too difficult to raise the ceiling in her living room to make it more spacious, it was the ideal excuse to install a conversation pit.
“I thought, ‘If we can’t go up, let’s go down,’ ” said Chung, 45.
The cushions upholstered in Belgian linen, wool carpeting and exotic marble of the built-in side table were all carefully chosen to make the space a textural, sensory experience, and so as not to appear kitschy, Korven said.
“It’s just so nice having a living room where you’re not praying to the altar of a giant LCD screen,” Chung said.