The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I always like to look at how fellow collectors arrange their collections. However, no offense intended to anyone, in most pictures I see dedicated rooms cram up to the ceiling with objects of all kind, often with gramophones or phonographs laid even directly on the floor. This is not an arrangement that would be advisable in a parlour or a living room.

I think that it is surprisingly difficult to include a gramophone, "external-horners" especially, among today furniture and lifestyle. An external horn won't fit a standard bookshelf, just to mention the first difficulty that comes to mind. And it would completely block a corridor or any other narrow room.

Is there anyone who thinks he/she had a brilliant idea to introduce gramophones in his/her houses, perhaps devising uncommon solutions? Please don't be shy, this is not an elegance contest, we're just sharing ideas!

I don't know how hard it is. You just have to create a livable room first, then figure out how to put a phonograph in it. If you take a whole bunch of phonographs and try to create a room around them, you'll end up with something that looks like a warehouse or renovated garage.

I decided to build a home theater in my house with surround sound, projection and a ten foot screen. That is a similar problem. I was lucky to have a room to work with that had knotty pine panelling and a lot of charm. Most people who do this end up with something that looks like a cross between a bad Star Trek set and a cheesy mall theater. I focused primarily on livability and acoustics. I wanted a room that sounded good because I listen to a lot of music too. And I wanted it to be a comfortable room to hang out in and entertain even if we weren't watching a movie. So I kept the center of the room open and put in a horseshoe shaped ring of couches. I hid the drop down screen behind a rafter. Then I filled in with bookcases to prevent sound from reflecting. When I had that worked out I brought in two phonographs... my Brunswick Cortez in one corner and a VV-X in the opposite corner. I can roll the Brunswick out to the front of the room in the acoustic sweet spot so it sounds great. Two phonographs is enough. If I had to store more, I would probably have a storage room and I would rotate the collection one by one into my living area.

In the dawn of my collecting activities eons ago I managed to fit some good-looking horn phonographs on top of the wide cupboard at the end of the dining room, and a relatively small Edson Hepplewhite cabinet made a nice set with the sofa and armchairs, all dark wood. These times are long gone, though, starting when I bought a Columbia 810, a huge cabinet that was quite conspicuous in the living room. Now in a larger house, my wife decreed that all my machines shall be confined to my gramophone salon, which is not much different from most of the spaces shown by the other collectors in this forum: Like a small warehouse, all machines side-by-side, some on custom-made deep shelves and some others on disc cabinets. And quite frankly, there are some machines, like the one EMG and one Expert I have that do not fit in any decor, not in the 30s and much less now. Their elephantine horns would only mix well amongst stuffed rhino heads and the like.

Your concept of inserting a gramophone as decorative item in our living quarters only works if you want to display only one or two at most (and have a place to hide the rest of the collection), otherwise there is no aesthetically pleasing solution that I have ever seen. The good side of having all in the same room is that I can listen to all of them with little effort, but agree that does not look like a house, but more like a museum. Gramophones unfortunately are not like butterflies that you can pin on a nice glass display...

If you have a lot of stuff, plus a lot of room in your abode, one way to do it is have a room where most of it is displayed ("phono room" or museum, etc) plus strategic/decorative placement of one (or a bit more if it fits appropriately) in other rooms. Think of the main room as the hobby center, and of the others as accent pieces.

So in our own case we are lucky enough to have separate living, dining, and family rooms. The living and dining rooms are the ones most often seen by visitors, and the family room is adjacent and behind them.

The living room has only a little Edison A-60 on a table (plus a player piano) to fit our home's Craftsman decor. The dining room has a C-19 in one corner plus open-horned G&T Monarch Senior and Columbia BO phonos on the ends of the countertop on the built-in cabinetry along one wall. The two horns have a visually pleasing bookend effect.

Then the family room, well that's another story. It's sort of the "entertainment center" in that it has the family's flat screen teevee and 7.1 surround system and couch and chairs, but also 18 displayed and playable phonos, a roller organ, a 15.5" Regina, plus A-K breadboard and Grebe radios from the 1920s.

(The A-K is set up to play thru the big 10-50 orthophonic horn, which is geeky as hell and pleases me to no end.)

The family room can be isolated by closing doors, so phono overload for guests is avoidable. Generally folks will glance at the stuff and seldom make remarks, either because they're old pals who have seen it all accumulate over the years, or newer friends who either don't care (or are wise enough not) to bring it up!

It has so far been a decent compromise of accessibility without overly offending anyone's sensibility. Without the luxury of a BlaiseBasement, PaulAttic, BaerGarage or FabrizioShed to get the stuff further out of the way, it's the best solution for us. There is a loose rule that says "if one comes in, one leaves." This is more from an operational and aesthetic standpoint than anything else, but a good practice nonetheless.

You have to compromise with your décor and your wife on your displays. We all have a lot of money in our machines and are proud of the work we have done on them and want to tell the world about them. My wife calls them my " violas" and I have no idea why. I keep two horn Edison's in my living room, along with a wine refrig., and couple of Victrola's in my family room. I do not want to overload the rooms I also keep one in my bedroom to listen to cylinders there. I, like other people, rotate the smaller ones about every three to six months. I store most in my garage on shelves and in boxes. Most are easy to get to but a lot are harder to access. Each home and family is different with different parameters. It depends on how much room can be dedicated to your machines for display and how you want to display them . Tom B

Coming back to the original question of how to integrate a horn machine into an elegant room without being "in the way": I think the way to do that is to place the machine in a corner, that way it does not stick out as much and provides a nice accent to any room design. I have a VV-XVI L-door in my living room and a large Zon-o-phone horn machine in my family room placed that way and they do not intrude negatively on the design and usability of the rooms.

Andreas

We didn't devise this solution but it sure works well. In our kitchen the previous owners "vaulted" the ceiling and then used the top of the cabinets to create a relatively deep shelf. My lovely wife changes the other objects with the seasons here in New England. The one thing that is constant is the Victor O. I beleive the notion of a high ceiling ( or short cabinet) allowing for the placement of a machine on top of cabinetry is a pretty good idea if that is what you are looking for. John

Doesn't it get all gunked-up with the airborne byproducts of cooking, there in the kitchen?

Not at all. It might have in 1910 or so, but not in this kitchen.

I'm an incurable collector of collections, but I have one hard and fast rule... I have to be able to easily play with my toys. A phonograph that doesn't get played because it's on a high shelf or has other phonographs stacked on top of it might as well be a crapophone. I have phonographs to listen to music, not for purely decorative purposes. I feel the same about toys- to me "mint in box" means I can't take it out and look at it. And books and records need to be clearly accessible on shelves, or I shouldn't have them at all. I went through a period where I had boxes of stuff in storage. I don't want to ever do that again. I paid a lot of money to not be able to get to my stuff.