Step back into childhood at Grandma's house on Memory Lane
When people stay at Melanie Patterson’s house, they don’t just get a quaint place to spend the night in suburban Pittsburgh —they get a trip back in time.
Walking into Patterson’s Good Ol' Days House, guests are greeted with candy cigarettes, flying saucers, freshly baked delicacies and other remnants of their childhood.
"It’s like a museum that you’re sleeping in, but you can touch and play with everything," Patterson says. "Close the door and you literally are back at Grandma’s house for the weekend."
The kitchen has vintage appliances and old-fashioned foods in tin canisters. The living room is decked out in midcentury furniture surrounding a vintage console television (though it doesn't hum when you snap it to life; inside is a flat-screen TV for higher-quality viewing). The bedrooms are plastered with posters of past heartthrobs and full of vintage colognes and retro toys. The basement is a rumpus room with old pinball games and memorabilia. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)
One couple took their 10-year-old grandson there, revisiting old memories and making new ones while teaching him a thing or two about how they grew up. "Our grandson learned about the patience it takes to dial a rotary phone, open a metal ice tray, percolate a pot of coffee on the stove, wash dishes and survive a warm summer night with a floor fan humming at the foot of the bed," Linda W. wrote in an online guestbook. "He also took a spin with the push mower and had a blast running up and down the back lawn with it. We watched old movies, played records and games downstairs, and just had some simple fun."
Another family stayed there to heal and be together after their mother passed away, one relative wrote:
"We siblings came here because our dad grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, having moved to Michigan, married our mother and raised six children born from 1941-1956! Dad died in 1983 and Mom in 2012, and so we looked for a place we could all be together just as we were growing up. Somehow my daughter Molly found this remarkable place where we could all, once again, sit around the dining room table and reminisce. This house was nothing less than perfect."
Patterson, a kindergarten teacher by trade, decided to venture full time into the vacation home rental industry when she inherited part of the house from her aunt and bought the rest from her cousins in 2008.
Initially, she thought she’d remodel the 1928 house into a traditional, updated vacation rental for people who came to visit the area.
"Many people had moved out of the area in the ‘80s when the steel industry went down, so when they come back they don’t necessarily have a family home anymore; just hotel rooms with no real privacy," Patterson says. "So finding that niche, a home for a family to rent, is what got me started."
When she brought contractors into the house to update it, they told her the house reminded them of their own grandmothers’ homes, and "a light bulb went off." Patterson thought, "Why make it modern?"
While many items in the home once belonged to members of Patterson’s family, she also shops garage sales. And plenty of pieces have just been left on the front porch for her.
The random assemblage helps achieve what Patterson is going for with this home: She wants it to look as though it could belong to anyone’s grandmother. She says it's "America's first nostalgic guesthouse."
"I’m providing an experience of a culture and a time and an era that’s gone ... and now young adults can find this stuff to be so amusing because it’s mostly stuff they’ve only heard about," Patterson says. "But in this house you can actually see, touch and feel it."
Still, Patterson says she doesn’t live in the past (in fact, she lives in a house down the street). She just likes to offer a place where people can go to visit it.
"It gives me pleasure to know many people are enjoying pieces of their past in my home," Patterson says. "Everyone is smiling when they leave."
Click here or on an image for a slideshow of the Good Ol' Days House.
