I know someone who built one by raising the floor to create a pit.
Instant storage for a small space and what lies beneath, undisturbed.
7 Likes
Go big or go home - conversation oubliettes
13 Likes
I’d be very amused when our cats got the zoomies. I’m sure they’d love it too!
6 Likes
All the talk of indoor ramps makes me worry about headroom; you’d need a really high ceiling.
10 Likes
clears throat
12 Likes
Oh yes, very Alan Watts.
Indeed I have argued that conversation pits/sunken living areas are a case of life imitating art. Traditional stage design often has raised areas in the rear so that characters there are not blocked by characters downstage. This carried over into multi-camera TV sets. Eg. Mary’s apartment
'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' Apartment Remains Iconic | Apartment Therapy
Even Archie Bunker’s house had the exposed stairway in the back for people to stand on. People saw so many multi-level rooms on TV that they wanted them in their own homes, despite the impracticality.
18 Likes
Now that it has been pointed out 
3 Likes
@mr_raccoon
I used to hang out in those pits in the 80s while my wife and her mom would shop. We also hung out in those pits and drank excessively before midnight movies at the mall when we were in high school.
8 Likes
Back in the 1950s friend’s father was a newly-married, struggling freelance artist in NYC. They could only afford a tiny apartment. He suspended his drawing board from the ceiling on pulleys so that when he wasn’t working he could raise it up and give them more living space.
8 Likes
I thought the Brady house was supposed to be a split-level?
Personally I like a good inglenook better than a conversation pit.
3 Likes
I totally read that in a Hitchcock voiceover.
ETA:
That, too.
13 Likes
I’d make mine into a plunge pool.
10 Likes
12 Likes
“If a man falls into his conversation pit, and no one sees it, is it entertainment?”
9 Likes
I don’t know… But I do know that seeing it is hilarious
14 Likes
By the way, this conversation is the pits, daddy-o!
6 Likes
When I was very little my parents lived in an apartment that had a sunken living room/very large conversation pit. You had to go down two or three steps from the entrance, and climb back up to get to the kitchen. I don’t remember much else about that place, though. When they finally moved into a house it seemed weird to me that the living room was at the same level as the entry, though that entrance did have a little linoleum mud-space to take your shoes off so you didn’t track dirt throughout the house (a big concern in snowy, slushy MN).
5 Likes
[Westley]: Where am I?
[The Albino]: [raspy voice] The Pit of Despair! Don’t even think…
[clears throat]
[The Albino]: … don’t even think about trying to escape.
8 Likes
I always thought these were kind of cool.
3 Likes
