We can’t all stare at our beloved project car, dream car, life-altering first XYZ car all day. It might make you feel that warm, gooey, bottom-of-your-guts feeling that you love, but most of us don’t have the requisite net worth to Ferris Bueller it and park the cool car inside the house.
Cars are, ultimately, an expression of the kind of person you are. They are an outfit, and to bring that feeling into your home can be a tough, deeply personal thing. You might hate all of this stuff, but these ideas might hopefully get you moving in the right direction. Speeed has an excellent primer on this sort of stuff you should watch, but our guide will focus more on things that feel like stuff cars should be around, hopefully without making your house feel like a garage.
Note: a lot of this stuff is expensive, but you can find good used examples or knock-offs without destroying your project car parts budget.
Good Lights
Those yellow lights have a cool historic reason behind them, but they also look good for some very normal, non-car-person reasons. We tend to like light that feels close to the temperature (measured in Kelvin, though not actually a literal temperature) the sun emits. Those early halogen lights, the yellow lights on cars at Le Mans – they’re all close to that. I covered my fog lights with yellow film on my first car to get that effect, and it’s similarly easy to get it at home. Aim for lights under 4,000K. It’s a cheap, easy way to make your house feel a little nicer, a little more grown-up, and a little bit like those cool cars we all like.
Cool Lamps
The next step is to find a lamp with a design that speaks to you. Lots of automotive design is very industrial, so pull up a photo or two of your favorite cars and start looking through lists of cool, influential lamps from interior design catalogs. Find something similar that speaks to you, but make sure it doesn’t stick out against the rest of your stuff. Car stuff tends to go great with Bauhaus design (think: Audi TT).
Find one that throws a lot of light around off Marketplace, stick one of those bulbs in there, and then get another cool one that’s usually intended for reading or other tasks to put by the couch. Then, don’t turn on the big light. Big light bad. Big light makes your house feel like the office we all hate going to.
Read, Don’t Just Buy, Old Car Mags
The above is a very old example. But the premise stands: keep some old car magazines on the coffee table, or get some arty new ones like the printed Road & Track magazine. It’s fun to go back and read old road tests of the cars you cared about when you were a kid. These also help give you something to talk about with people when they’re in your home, in addition to making for just a little bit of car-focused decoration.
Cool Chairs Make Your House
As a car person, you should appreciate a good piece of industrial design. Giorgetto Giugiaro didn’t just design cars, but also famous everyday items like the Nikon F3 camera. Eames’ (yes, the chair guy) Moulded Plastic Chairs offer some of the same car-adjacent flavor. They’re everywhere because they look cool, are cheap, and can be found just about anywhere. They go well with lots of stuff, and their form is loosely evocative of those early bucket seats. Cesca chairs feel like the insides of old pre-war British luxury cars, with their woven back and seats. The list goes on, but anything here should give you that gooey feeling your favorite car does. If it doesn’t, keep looking.
About the author
Chase Bierenkoven
Senior Editor, Autoblog