In my teens I cleaned for some of the Saint Louis near-rich and near-famous. Not well-off enough to have both a staff and backup staff, but well off enough to hire our team of maids (who arrived in a Cadillac) when the housekeeper took vacation.
For the most part they weren’t big names, more like people who had siblings who married into big names. Big enough names that I’m not naming them, for fear of some Saint Louis-style retribution.
All these tangentially influential people had two features in their homes I’d never seen in my middle-class world.
First, they all had carpeting so plush it was exhausting to vacuum. (An added vacuuming indignity: we were required to leave post-vacuum nap marks that were exactly parallel.)
Second, the rooms were large enough to require something I’d never seen elsewhere: electrical outlets engineered into the plush shag carpeting.
It made sense. Say you have a room with a huge bed positioned dramatically dead center, and the room is so large the bed is six feet from any wall. Where do you plug in your reading lamp? If you have one of these houses, the electric outlet is built in to the floor by your bed:
(I take it they never rearrange the furniture, given they’d have to rewire the house.)
Now, no doubt the fancy in-laws of the people I cleaned for had these brass outlets like the one above, with the protective doors. My clients had exposed metal outlets that were embedded 2 inches into the plush carpet, with the electrical fixture exposed to the carpet fibers and any potential bathroom floods.
You would think that you could trip on the tangle of lamp cords that made a nest around the embedded outlet. We were always instructed to take up any slack by wrapping the cord around the base of the lamp, or humidifier, or whatever.
Since then, even though it was forty years ago, I feel deep middle-class shame when I see my lamp cords swing from tabletop to floor, touch the floor, then (the horror) arc up again to the wall outlet. I have an unreasonable connection between class and cords.
No contact with the floor and the cord! It’s tacky, and it’s dangerous.
Does that seem rational? No. Still, it is why my tables look like this from above:
and this from below:
It makes me feel that if I can’t have a lamp that plugs into the floor, I can at least have a table that plugs directly into the wall.
12 responses to “Electrical Outlets of the Semi-Rich and Almost Famous”
Just be glad I don’t have technical know how to post a photo of the tangled abomination under my husband’s bed. Stuff of nightmares.
Big Dot – How many power strips attached to power strips are there? Gary likes to daisy chain them. However, at least it’s under the bed; you have to give him credit for that.
They actually photoshop out outlets and cords from magazine/online house tours. I think this is kind of horrible, giving all these houses complexes about unavoidable natural conditions stemming from the modern world… (but really: let’s maybe *not* make aspirational material literally impossible to attain? The combination of photo styling and lenses and camera angles and tons of professionals involved and the selection of only the very-most-photogenic-ones [whether it’s gingerbread houses or regular houses] is bad enough without using photoshop on integral components.)
That said, I do prefer my cords to be tidy and, preferably, out of sight. and ideally not on the floor, because otherwise they become a tangle of cords *with* a tangle of hair and dust bunnies, and nobody wants that… but that’s what we get, anyway, much of the time. I am impressed by your tables that plug into the wall. 🙂
KC – THEY PHOTOSHOP OUT THE CORDS? That is evil. In my youth they gave me an unrealistic, unattainable body image, now they’re messing with an unrealistic, unattainable house image?
Yep. Every once in a while they’ll photoshop out something at close range but then not bother when it’s in the blurry back of another photo, so in addition to people saying “yep, I work in that field, we photoshop out distractions like outlets and cords” – there’s also physical proof.
(I mean, there *is* also the hidden-outlet solution, which is not generally attainable for people outside of a certain income bracket – so maybe some of the photoshopped house tours *could* look that way with additional custom wiring. But probably not all, and also: how obnoxious, right?)
(and then there are the much-derided Peloton ads; for some of them, I’m not sure if they simply didn’t plug them in. But in the ad cases: look, no cords! or outlets! or anything for that bike and screen to get power! https://twitter.com/ClueHeywood/status/1089699762331217920 )
KC -All those flat screen hung on the wall – I always assumed they were hard-wired in. My eyes are opened.
Many flatscreens above a certain income bracket are indeed hard-wired in one way or another, but not all. It’s an interesting world. Also a very weird world.
KC – I wonder if they might be wireless or battery-operated, even.
I’m pretty sure they are not wireless or battery operated (with the possible exceptions of Really Weird Really Really Rich Cases like “I have part of a stone cliff [or Heritage Building I Can’t Alter The Walls Of] in my living room and I want to hang a TV on it and I can afford to have someone swap the battery in it every day”)(I cannot imagine someone being so cord-averse that they’d have a battery-operated screen *but* not so cord-averse that they’d be okay with having it hooked up to probably-uglier cords for charging regularly – but having someone who subs in a fully-charged battery for the depleted one every day, along with washing the bananas, maybe…).
Getting the wires through the wall would, in almost all cases, be a far tidier and cheaper and less glitch-prone option than wireless power or battery power. Which doesn’t mean no one does it… just, probably not many.
KC – Many people hang TVs over brick fireplaces. How does that work, I wonder?
My bet is that the cords are run discreetly in a crack between the bricks (the place where the mortar goes) and colored to match it, but I don’t know. Maybe next time you see one, you can super-zoom the photo and see if you can see what’s going on? (which, having googled “flatscreen on brick”: https://designingvibes.com/mount-tv-brick-fireplace-hide-wires/ seems to suggest this is indeed a way to do it, if not The way to do it; there are also a stack of youtube videos, but no, I am not adequately curious as to watch multiple videos)
KC -Same here.