Coveting a Polar Bear chair. (Sigh.)

I'm a big fan of midcentury modern. 

I'm always psyched when there's a MCM house being considered on HGTV's House Hunters. And always disappointed when the MCM turns out to be a boring one story ranch like the one I grew up in.

My late friend Nanni had an authentic MCM house in Lexington, Massachusetts. Nanni and her husband bought the house around 1960, and raised their family there. Nanni was still living there when she died in late 2019. 

A lot of their furniture was MCM, too, and I always felt really cool sitting in their living room, and always thought I should have been sitting there wearing Capezio flats and smoking a cigarette. 

I particularly loved and admired their Eames Chair.

I live in an old building and my furniture style is eclectic - mostly traditional-ish. But I do have a fairly MCM dining table and chair. And the comfy reclining chair I invested in the week after Trump was elected is Eames-like.

I don't imagine I'll be buying a ton of furniture any time soon, but if I do, midcentury modern will definitely be in contention.

And apparently, thanks to all the tech companies that have downsized or gone completely work-from-home, there's a lot of it on the market.

Nowhere is the furniture glut stronger than in San Francisco. Tech workers have been slowest to return to the office in the city, where commercial vacancy rates jumped to 28 percent last year, up from 4 percent in 2019, according to the real estate firm CBRE. Occupancy in San Francisco in late January was 4 percent below the average of the top 10 U.S. cities, according to the building security firm Kastle. And companies of all sizes, including PayPal, Block and Yelp, are giving uptheir expensive downtown headquarters or downsizing their office space. (Source: NY Times) 

Oh, a lot of what's on offer are whiteboards and flatscreens. But a lot of it is midcentury modern furniture that would be right at home in a home and not just the office. MCM, it seems, was wildly popular with the young hipster tech startup types. So you can get a very good deal on, say, an Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair:

Or the equally cool Jean Royère' Polar Bear Chair:

Blue and orange are my go-to colors. I think I'm in love!

Needless to say, all this excess furniture is spawning new businesses, 

...an increasing number of behind-the-scenes specialists in the Bay Area who are carving out a piece of the great office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist flippers and start-ups spouting buzzwords like “circular economy.” And a few guys with warehouses full of really nice chairs.

One furniture flipper mentioned in the article is Nate Morgan, who "started trading furniture in the fall after he was laid off from a business development job at Meta." 

Brandi Susewitz has been in the office furniture business for 25 years. She used to sell Steelcase, Herman Miller, et al - the names anyone who's ever worked in a cubicle is well familiar with.

When the pandemic hit, Ms. Susewitz’s livelihood of new office furniture screeched to a halt. She watched with disgust as companies tossed out barely used desks and chairs.

“Perfectly good, brand-new furniture is just being carted off to landfills,” she said.

Horrified at seeing all that perfectly good furniture end up in landfills, she founded Reseat, a company that helps businesses get rid of the furniture they don't need. Companies selling their furniture off can expect 20 cents on the dollar. Which means that, even with the reseller's markup, one of the those cool Polar Bear chairs is definitely within reach. 

Reselling cubicles must be more of a challenge than finding a new home for the reception area couch and chairs, or the comfy cool furniture in the lounge areas that cool tech companies all seem to have had. Nobody wants to work in a cubicle, let alone have one in their home. 

But I wouldn't mind one of those Polar Bear chairs.