March 20, 2006 issue - One night in the '70s, I found a really big wine crate on the sidewalk outside a liquor store and dragged it home. It was stenciled with little black umbrellas to show which side was up, and when I screwed on big black techy wheels to the bottom and rolled it into the center of my living room, it became an instant coffee table, its sturdy blond planks capacious enough to hold a tray of those French jelly glasses we used for wine. But the real function of that coffee table was to irritate my mother. Every time she came to my apartment she uttered the expected: "Darling, that table drags the whole room down." That would put another couple of years on that crate's life.

That was the way we were. In the '60s-a cocky, full-of-ourselves decade that was in its prime from the mid-'60s to well into the '70s-we rolled out of dorm rooms into our first homes in record numbers, a generation rabid to leave our marks on our space, stripping away stuffy architectural ornament, painting over history with the optimistic primary colors of our own high expectations. In the name of self-expression and cheap rent, we became urban pioneers, pushing the boundaries of conventional housing, moving into chopped-up Victorians and storefronts, bowling alleys, even former gas stations. We papered our walls with our passions; posters shouted FREE BOBBY and VIVA CHAVEZ. Everything we possessed was a political statement, loaded with meaning, an extension of our personalities. "I love my shirt," Donovan repeated 24 times in his 1969 song. Hard to imagine? Just try to picture the emotional surround of every single sofa you've owned since you were 20.

Leading-edge boomers, those born between 1946 and 1954-some 32,217,944 of them-were against many more things than they were for: the establishment, the Vietnam War and, when it came to style, the utterly boring, materialistic values of their parents. But the look of their homes and the fern bars they frequented was far more than decoration; it was an act of defiance: We are not you! The look was something else, too. Like distinctive tribal patterns, our style was a new way to recognize each other: Oh! You're hip, like me. Through more than two decades, where the only constant was ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, these easy-riding, early-adapting boomers used style as an ideology. But it was not to last.

"Just you wait," the renowned social researcher Florence Skelly, of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, predicted in the '70s: "These apples will not fall very far from the tree. You think genuine drop-outs wear leather Frye boots, pure wool L.L. Bean lumberjack's shirts and 100% cotton Levi's like these 'rebels' do?" Indeed, the very twentysomethings who sympathized with their French counterparts as they took to the streets in May 1968 to protest a bourgeois society of frigidaires are the very same folks who were to find themselves fretting over the placement of side-by-side Sub-Zeros 20 years later. Who would have guessed, in those travelin'-light, laid-back years, that by the turn of this century, baby boomers would be sitting on more than $3.5 trillion in home equity?

RELATED ARTICLE Boomer-Era Fashions

In the year of Woodstock, 1969, the folks who published Better Homes and Gardens, the largest-circulation home and family magazine and a living hymn to idyllic '50s values, looked out of their windows in Des Moines, Iowa, and saw a world where the almost-grown kids of their readers were behaving in a, well, very un-BH&G way. They decided to publish the first magazine for boomers just out of college and called it Apartment Life. Around the time I lugged that wine crate from the sidewalk, I became the magazine's editor. That was my vantage point when, in 1981, the magazine grew up along with its readers and became Metropolitan Home.

Two impulses converged to make '60s home style. One was the triumph of wit-the loaded gesture, the home as crafts project-and the other was pure modernism. It took chutzpah to make a lamp out of anything: turn a spaghetti colander or a fruit basket upside down, drill a hole in the center, add a bulb, a socket and a wire, and voila, a hanging lamp. Hardware stores were our playgrounds (long before everything was bubble-wrapped). You could fool around illuminating crisp white PVC pipe as a floor lamp, or uplight a terra-cotta chimney flue, for peanuts. That was wit; that was style. Doing it showed you had both.

RELATED ARTICLE Boomers' Art Revolt

Like relationships, like conventions, if it wasn't broke, we'd break it-just for the chance to remake it in our own image. Nothing was worse than a fake mahogany dining table, the result of too many board feet of lumber being run through too many furniture factories in North Carolina, then slapped with wood veneer and carving, and labeled with the meaningless marketing term "Mediterranean." If you were unlucky enough to wind up with such a piece, there was only one remedy: paint it white. Quick. The '60s alternative was far cooler: get two sawhorses from the lumberyard, throw a hollow-core door on top. The '60s armchair meant wrapping a couple of painter's clean white dropcloths over an old thrift-shop hulk and calling it upholstery. What decorating magazines like to call "flea-market finds" actually existed then. You showed your cleverness by scoring bright Fiestaware plates, golden-oak ball-and-claw-foot tables, and original bark-cloth curtains with outsize palm fronds like those in the halls of the Beverly Hills Hotel-even cookie jars before Andy Warhol's collection went up for auction at Sotheby's and you needed a mortgage.

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