26 Features That Made a House 'Expensive' in 1975

Read all the way to the end – we reveal one little-known buying trick that could save you thousands if you ever buy or sell a home with any of these vintage features still intact.

Most people picture 1975 houses as a punchline – shag carpet, avocado appliances, wood paneling everywhere. But here’s what gets lost in the jokes: in January 1975, the median American home cost just $37,200, and the features that separated a “luxury” house from an ordinary one back then would shock today’s buyers.

Things we now consider basic – air conditioning, a second bathroom, a two-car garage – were genuine status symbols that fewer than half of American homes could claim. Here’s what the data actually says about what made a house “expensive” in 1975 – and the #1 feature on this list is something you couldn’t even see.

#26 – Wall-to-Wall Shag Carpeting

Forget hardwood – in 1975, covering your floors was the flex.

Builders and buyers treated thick, plush carpet as a premium upgrade, and the deeper the pile, the more expensive the house felt. Thick, colorful shag added warmth and texture, creating the cozy, inviting atmosphere the whole decade chased.

The colors told you the price tier too – burnt orange, harvest gold, and deep avocado in a high-end home, builder beige in a starter house.

Hardwood floors were often deliberately covered up by proud homeowners – the exact opposite of today, where buyers rip out carpet hoping to find oak underneath. Carpet meant comfort, modernity, and money in 1975.

That mindset extended into the kitchen, where #25 turned appliances into a fashion statement…

#25 – Color-Coordinated Appliances

A white refrigerator in 1975 said one thing: you couldn’t afford the colored one.

Harvest gold, avocado green, and coppertone appliances were the premium option, and a fully matched kitchen – fridge, range, dishwasher, all in the same designer shade – signaled a serious budget. The 1970s brought a wave of earth tones into every room, with avocado green and mustard yellow in perfect harmony.

A coordinated colored appliance suite was the 1975 equivalent of today’s panel-ready Sub-Zero kitchen. Mismatched or plain white appliances marked a house as builder-grade.

The irony? Those colors became the single most mocked design choice of the 20th century within fifteen years. But the appliance hiding inside #24 was even more of a status play…

#24 – The Trash Compactor

Nothing said “we have money to spend on problems that don’t exist” quite like a trash compactor.

This was the gadget kitchen of the mid-’70s at its peak – a motorized drawer that crushed your garbage into dense bricks. It was expensive, it was loud, and it was almost completely unnecessary. That was exactly the point.

Trash compactors appeared almost exclusively in upper-tier custom homes and high-end builder packages – they were a line-item upgrade most families skipped. Real estate listings called them out by name, right alongside the dishwasher.

Most compactors ended up unplugged within a decade, making them one of the shortest-lived luxury features in American housing history. But #23 was a luxury that actually earned its keep…

#23 – The Double Wall Oven

One oven was for cooking. Two ovens were for entertaining – and entertaining was the whole game in 1975.

A built-in double wall oven, separate from the cooktop, was a custom-kitchen signature that instantly elevated a listing. Real estate agents flagged double ovens right alongside sunken living rooms and wet bars when selling upscale homes of this era – they sat in the same luxury tier.

The double oven told visitors you hosted dinner parties large enough to need one. It was hospitality hardware, and in the decade when home entertaining peaked culturally, that mattered enormously.

Turns out the humble appliance at #22 was an even bigger dividing line between ordinary and expensive…

#22 – The Dishwasher

Here’s what most people don’t realize: in 1975, a dishwasher was still far from standard equipment.

Dishwashers, washers, and dryers only became standard items in homes built decades later. In the mid-’70s, a built-in dishwasher was an upgrade that builders charged real money for, and plenty of new homes shipped without one.

Millions of American families were still washing every dish by hand in 1975, and the dishwasher was prominently featured in ads for upscale developments as a selling point, not a given.

A house with a dishwasher, disposal, and matching colored appliances was making an unmistakable statement about household income. And speaking of the disposal – that’s #21…

#21 – The Garbage Disposal

The in-sink garbage disposal was the quiet luxury of the 1975 kitchen.

It didn’t show off like a colored fridge, but it separated modern, well-equipped homes from older housing stock. In some regions it was becoming common in new construction; in older homes and budget builds, it simply didn’t exist. Retrofitting one meant a plumber, an electrician, and money.

Some municipalities actually mandated disposals in new construction while others banned them outright – which made having one a matter of geography as much as wealth, and a genuine point of pride where they were optional.

At a Glance: The Full 1975 “Status Kitchen”

• Matching colored appliances in harvest gold, avocado, or coppertone
• Built-in dishwasher – still a paid upgrade, not a given
• In-sink garbage disposal, where local rules allowed it
• Trash compactor – the ultimate “because we can” gadget
• Double wall oven for serious entertaining

Listings loved to advertise that whole package by name. But #20 moved the luxury fight out of the kitchen entirely…

#20 – A Dedicated Laundry Room

In 1975, where you washed your clothes said a lot about what your house cost.

Budget homes put the washer hookups in the basement or the garage – if they had hookups at all. Expensive homes had a dedicated main-floor laundry room, often with built-in cabinets, a folding counter, and a utility sink. Washers and dryers were far from standard inclusions in this era, so a purpose-built room for them was a clear upgrade.

Plenty of American households in 1975 still relied on laundromats or shared machines, which made an in-home laundry suite a genuine lifestyle divider.

It’s one of the few 1975 luxury features that’s still climbing in value today. The same can’t be said for #19, one of the most charming dead features in housing history…

#19 – The Built-In Ironing Board

A fold-out ironing board hidden in the wall was the kind of detail that separated custom homes from tract houses.

Once a marvel of convenience, the built-in ironing board was a space-saving wonder – hidden in kitchen walls, folding out when needed. It cost the builder real carpentry time, which is exactly why it showed up in higher-end homes and not starter boxes.

In an era when most clothing required ironing, this was a daily-use luxury – the 1975 equivalent of a built-in coffee station.

Small, clever, and dead within a generation. But #18 was anything but small – it changed the entire shape of the American house…

#18 – The Family Room

A second living space was one of the biggest cost dividers in 1975 housing.

Cheap homes had one living room, full stop. Expensive homes had a formal living room for guests plus a separate family room for actual daily life. The family room was the hub of home life – dark paneled walls and a warm brick fireplace wall created the inviting backdrop in upscale model homes of the period.

The two-living-room floor plan added serious square footage at a time when the average new home was under 1,700 square feet – making it a structural luxury, not a decorative one.

And the fanciest family rooms shared a wall with #17, the feature that defined formal living…

#17 – The Formal Dining Room

In 1975, eating dinner in a dedicated room with a chandelier was a marker of arrival.

Budget homes had an eat-in kitchen and nothing else. Mid-tier homes had a dining “L.” Expensive homes had a fully separate formal dining room, wallpapered to the teeth – overscaled patterns and matching fabric chosen to complement the wood tones of the table and the rustic ceramic tile floor.

The matching wallpaper-and-fabric treatment was itself a luxury signature – coordinated patterns meant a decorator had been involved, and decorators meant money.

Most of those dining rooms sat empty 360 days a year, and buyers paid for them anyway. The wall covering trend at #16 took that logic to every room in the house…

#16 – Designer Wallpaper in Every Room

Paint was cheap. Wallpaper was a statement – and in 1975, statement walls were everywhere in expensive homes.

Bold, oversized prints, metallic foils, and flocked velvet papers covered entries, bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens in upscale houses. Bold wallpaper created accent walls in many rooms of high-end custom homes, and the more rooms it covered, the higher the budget.

Professional installation of premium papers could cost multiples of what painting the same room cost – and busy patterns made flaws in cheap drywall invisible, which builders loved.

The legacy: a generation of homeowners in the 1990s steaming it all off, one cursed square foot at a time. But #15 is a 1975 luxury everyone still wants today…

#15 – The Second Fireplace

One fireplace made a house a home. Two fireplaces made it expensive.

The upscale 1975 floor plan put a formal fireplace in the living room and a second one – usually brick, floor-to-ceiling – in the family room. Some added a third in the master bedroom, the ultimate ’70s romance flex.

Each additional masonry chimney added significant construction cost, which is exactly why multiple fireplaces reliably signaled a premium build – you can’t fake a chimney.

To this day, fireplace count remains a standard luxury metric in real estate. The ceiling treatment at #14, though, was pure 1975 theater…

#14 – Cathedral Ceilings and Exposed Beams

Flat eight-foot ceilings were standard. Soaring ones cost money – and 1975 luxury homes spent it.

Vaulted and cathedral ceilings, often with dark exposed wood beams, were the signature move of upscale contemporary builds. A high-end 1975 contemporary featured an airy foyer with stone columns, vaulted living and dining areas, and a family room with floor-to-ceiling windows.

Vaulting a ceiling sacrifices an entire potential second floor of living space – it’s literally paying for air, which is why it has always been a wealth signal.

Heating all that vertical air during the 1970s energy crisis made it doubly extravagant, and owners didn’t care. Neither did the owners of #13, which turned entire walls into glass…

#13 – Walls of Glass

Floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors were the 1975 shorthand for architectural ambition.

The expensive contemporary homes of the era deliberately dissolved the line between inside and outside – floor-to-ceiling windows and glass breezeways connecting wings of the house. Even in bedrooms, sliding glass doors opening to a patio provided a sunny daytime view in upscale designs.

Massive glass walls in 1975 were single-pane energy disasters – owners paid a fortune to heat and cool them, and paid it gladly for the look.

The light-obsession went vertical too, which brings us to #12…

#12 – Skylights and Atriums

Cutting a hole in your roof on purpose was a luxury move in 1975 – and high-end builders did it everywhere.

Skylights over kitchens and bathrooms, interior atriums with living trees, and glassed-in garden courts were hallmarks of expensive contemporary and California-style homes. Top-tier properties included enclosed front courtyards with patios, blurring the house-garden boundary.

An interior atrium sacrificed conditioned square footage for plants – the most conspicuous possible consumption in a decade obsessed with houseplants. Large, leafy ferns weren’t decoration; they were furniture.

All of this was visible to guests. The feature at #11, though, was a hidden luxury – literally built into the walls…

#11 – The Built-In Central Vacuum

The central vacuum system was 1975’s smart-home tech – and it still impresses people today.

Wall inlets in every room connected to a powerful motor in the garage or basement; you carried only a hose, never a vacuum. No lugging a machine up the stairs – just plug in and go, room by room.

Central vac systems had to be installed during construction, threading pipes through the framing – which made them nearly impossible to fake later and a permanent badge of an expensive original build.

But the wall-mounted gadget at #10 was the one neighbors actually envied…

#10 – The Whole-House Intercom

Pressing a button and talking to the kitchen from your bedroom felt like living in the future – and in 1975, you paid handsomely for it.

The wall-mounted intercom system was a staple of upscale suburban communication, letting families talk across sprawling homes. The deluxe versions did more: the master station included a tape deck, so you could pop in a cassette and play music throughout the entire house.

A master-station intercom with AM/FM radio and room speakers was effectively the first whole-home audio system – Sonos, fifty years early.

It was tech luxury. The feature at #9 was social luxury – and it defined the decade’s nightlife at home…

#9 – The Basement Bar

In 1975, the well-off didn’t go to the bar. The bar came to them.

By the 1970s, formal bars were being constructed in basements and rec rooms, and in communities where bars weren’t prevalent, having friends with different home bars offered variety in entertainment. Padded vinyl bar rails, swivel stools, mirrored shelving, neon – the full commercial treatment, underground.

The home bar trend peaked in the 1970s, when entertaining at home was at its cultural zenith. A finished basement with a built-in bar could be the single most expensive room in the house.

But the truly expensive homes didn’t make you walk downstairs for a drink. That’s #8…

#8 – The Living Room Wet Bar

A wet bar – with running water and plumbing – right in the living room was a top-tier 1975 luxury.

This wasn’t a cart in the corner. It was a plumbed, cabineted, often mirrored station built into the main entertaining space. High-end homes of the era put the wet bar directly off the sunken living room, and some hid genuine surprises: cabinet-concealed wet bars came complete with original built-in mini fridges.

Adding plumbing to a living room wall existed for exactly one purpose: cocktails without leaving the conversation. That’s as pure as luxury gets.

And the conversation it served happened in the era’s most legendary architectural feature – hold that thought until #2. First, #7: the backyard status bomb…

#7 – The In-Ground Swimming Pool

Nothing in 1975 suburbia announced wealth like a backyard pool.

Pools were standard equipment on luxury estates and nearly nonexistent on ordinary streets. The era’s premium properties paired professionally landscaped grounds with patio, pool, and spa – the full resort treatment, at home.

Fast Facts

• The median new home sold for roughly $38,000 to $42,000 across 1975
• An in-ground pool could swallow a quarter or more of that figure
• The diving board – now an insurance nightmare – was non-negotiable
• Professionally landscaped grounds with a patio completed the package

The pool-plus-spa combination was the signature of the fully loaded 1975 backyard – the suburban version of a country club you never had to share.

Yet the feature at #6 might surprise you more, because today we’d consider it a bare-minimum expectation…

#6 – A Second Bathroom

Here’s a stat that stops people cold: a meaningful share of new American homes in the mid-’70s had exactly one bathroom.

In 1973, only 60% of new homes were built with two or more bathrooms – meaning four in ten brand-new houses made the whole family share one toilet. The existing housing stock was even worse off.

A master bedroom with its own private en suite bath was a genuine luxury layout in 1975, not the default it is today. It was fairly common for new homes to be built with a single bathroom a generation ago.

If a second bathroom was a luxury, wait until you see what the garage situation looked like at #5…

#5 – The Two-Car Garage

The two-car garage – the most ordinary feature in America today – was a coin flip in the mid-1970s.

In 1973, slightly more than half of all new homes lacked a two-car garage entirely – and the breakdown surprises almost everyone who sees it.

Quick Compare: New-Home Garages, Then vs. Now

• 1973: 48% two-car or larger, 17% single garage, 13% carport, 22% no garage at all
• Recent decades: 80% or more of new homes have a two-car-plus garage
• The takeaway: today’s bare-minimum feature was a genuine coin flip in 1973

More than one in five brand-new 1973 homes had no garage whatsoever. A double garage meant a two-car family – itself a marker of prosperity in 1975.

But even a three-car garage couldn’t compete with #4, the room that made teenagers worship you…

#4 – The Finished Rec Room

The finished recreation room was where expensive 1975 houses earned their neighborhood reputation.

Wood paneling, carpet over the concrete, a pool table, built-in seating, that basement bar from #9 – the full package turned dead storage space into the most-used room in the house. One time-capsule luxury home tells the story: it was the coolest house in the neighborhood, party central, and it’s where all the kids hung out.

Finishing a basement could add a third more living space to a home’s footprint – a massive cost in materials and labor that only comfortable families took on.

The next feature, #3, was smaller – but it turned the master bedroom into something the neighbors had never seen…

#3 – The Master Suite Retreat

The expensive 1975 master bedroom wasn’t just bigger – it was engineered as a private retreat, decades before “primary suite” became a buzzword.

In upscale model homes, the spacious master bedroom was a fully designed environment: dedicated seating areas, desks, and furniture for two tucked into corners, plus sliding glass doors to a private patio and woven wood shades framed by polished-cotton draperies.

The “parents’ retreat” concept – sitting area, private bath, private patio – was invented as a luxury package in exactly this era. Ordinary homes gave parents a bedroom; expensive homes gave them an apartment.

Now for the big two. #2 is the feature that became the icon of 1970s luxury architecture itself…

#2 – The Sunken Living Room

If one architectural feature screams “expensive 1975 house,” it’s this one.

The sunken living room – often called a conversation pit – was a recessed area in the floor, typically a few steps down, and became hugely popular in the ’70s as part of the era’s love for open-plan layouts. The trend hit its peak as architects used sunken rooms to create visual interest and define spaces without walls.

Sinking a living room required custom foundation and framing work that tract builders simply wouldn’t pay for – which is why the conversation pit became a near-perfect proxy for a custom, architect-touched home. It was the most architecturally ambitious thing the 1970s living room attempted.

And yet the #1 luxury of 1975 wasn’t visible at all. You felt it the second you walked in the door…

#1 – Central Air Conditioning

The single biggest luxury in a 1975 house was cold air – and the numbers are staggering.

By 1975, only 46% of homes in the US had air conditioning of any kind, and fewer than half of new homes in 1973 were built with central air-conditioning. The regional gap was brutal – and the map looked nothing like you’d expect.

Worth Knowing: Who Had Cold Air in 1975

• Nationwide: just 46% of homes had any air conditioning at all
• Northeast: only 13% – the lowest share in the country
• West: 29% / Midwest: 35%
• Today: 96% of new homes come with air-conditioning

A majority of American families spent the summer of 1975 sweating – central air was the invisible dividing line between ordinary and expensive. The years between 1950 and 1980 saw air conditioning transform from a rare luxury to a common feature of American life – and 1975 sat right in the middle of that transformation.

The ultimate 1975 luxury became the modern baseline.

The Bottom Line

The most shocking part of 1975 luxury isn’t the shag carpet or the conversation pits – it’s how low the bar was. Barely 48% of new homes had a two-car garage, and only 60% had a second bathroom. Less than half the country had air conditioning at all.

Features we now consider non-negotiable were genuine wealth markers, while the era’s proudest splurges – trash compactors, intercoms, sunken floors – vanished almost completely. And the price of entry for all of it? A median home cost $37,200.

Did you grow up in a house with any of these? Tell us which one in the comments – bonus points if your intercom still works.

Bonus: The Insider Trick for Buying or Selling a Home With These Vintage Features