Gallery: All hail the Poconos, birthplace of heart-shaped honeymoon kitsch

[Yahoo Homes editor's note: For admirers of American kitsch, this has been a week of mourning: Morris Wilkins, the creator of the world's first heart-shaped hot tub in the 1960s, just died of heart failure at age 89. (Click here to read more about it on Yahoo Homes.) To honor his contributions to and influence on the nation's cultural landscape — which included not just the heart-shaped tub but the 7-foot-tall two-person Champagne glass, also for, uh, bathing — Yahoo Homes is publishing Katherine Wisniewski's slideshow ode to the lusty design genre that the Poconos pioneered.]

By Katherine Wisniewski, Curbed

Consider, for a moment, the heart-shaped bed. Ostensibly a clunky relic of the growing pains that accompanied America's sexual revolution, the heart-shaped bed and its brethren shouldn't be dismissed as mere kitsch. Like it or not, so-called love furniture is part of America's design legacy — the very essence of guilty-pleasure design. Most of the early purveyors were average mom-and-pop hotel owners across America: Morris Wilkins invented the first romantic jacuzzi by setting concrete in a heart shape and adding mirrors, while the first vibrating bed was made in a basement in Glenrock, New Jersey.

Whether the artifacts are heart-shaped, vibrating, circular and/or silken, our slideshow synthesizes the genre. All hail the Poconos, birthplace of America's ongoing tryst with "love furniture."

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